•Watching One Day ten years down the lane still leaves unrefillable void in my heart•
Some films take away an ounce of your heart not only because you can resonate with the narrative and the characters deeply but then through them, you relive the moments of your life, such films are a blend of cinematic and personal experience and every time you go back to them, you experience a mixtape of emotions, a void lurking beneath the sense of nostalgia. I vividly remember watching One Day in 2014, back in my high school days when the butterflies of love fluttered in my stomach intensely.
It was those times when love songs didn’t seem cringe, rather prompted me to weave pipe dreams. Ten years down the lane, One Day is adapted again into a limited TV series and I couldn’t stop myself from binging it. Even though I know the entire story yet it’s this blatant urge to watch it once again, in order to relocate the story in the present and evaluate the way I feel about it.
Based on David Nicholls’s 2009 novel One Day, alike the narrative of the novel, the plot line of both the film and series revolves around Dexter and Emma whose paths cross for the first time on the night of their graduation party at the University of Edinburgh on 15th July 1988.
While Dexter’s charming personality and looks is a complete antithesis to Emma’s calm and nerdy personality, they both eventually become star crossed lovers who never cleary acknowledged their feelings towards each other until the end, it was friendship that tied both of them together for eighteen years and for eternities to come.
Throughout all these years they meet each other on 15th July, also known as St. Swithin’s Day. A date which witnessed all the highs and lows of their relationship. Two distinctly differently people who wanted different things from life ends up being friends, there’s so much love between them yet it’s always implicit in the way they both fancied each other, looked at each other and smiled whenever they exchanged some intimate moments.
Back in 2014, I was in tears after watching One Day, love is like a sea which tastes salty yet when it washes away your feet, you feel a bliss, you can never be weary of looking at it, no matter how many times you’ve have looked at it before, your passion towards it never bogs down. Emma loved Dexter since University days, though he knew it, he was indifferent enough to not make her his lover yet Emma was always there for him, hiding her feelings mostly through her eyes while Dexter deliberately chose to unsee it.
An emptiness engulfs me whenever I think how we choose to hold onto some people when we know that they are slipping away, it’s this emptiness of a painter who is looking at his blank canvas, yearning to paint his masterpiece, but then he eventually never ends up doing it cause it’s never the right time.
In 2014, when I just started writing, I couldn’t resonate much with Emma’s journey as a writer, ten years later, I now fully realize why it’s always so difficult for writers to reveal their thoughts, emotions, it’s this quest to find the right words which never happens to arrive, and when it does arrive, spring has already abandoned nature, preparing it to endure the piercing cold. The transition from fourteen to twenty four years has been an insane ride like those of opium induced poets who compose only unfinished poetries because reality smirked.
Love has always been a best friend who distantly admires, burning me in my desires, always ripping me apart, and Emma’s dilemma to believe in Dexter when he finally came back to her in the end, ravaged by the storms of life, is exactly like those memories which you engrave in the deepest corners of your heart because when they resurface, they empty your soul, yet you always remain fond of them, as in them resides your untainted self who once hoped.
Though you know that certain people in your life are like time, the more you chase, the more you are haunted by the fact that you are losing them, however as long as you are with them everything works out the way you want. Emma knew that’s it’s only with Dexter she could be herself, she could let go off the burden in order to get back to her senses in doing what she loves the most yet she could never have him forever.
The thin line between predestination and free will is indeed a big blur, the whole world topples down fading into a black whole, what remains are remnants of those days of life when you were the most happiest. Dex and Em made each other, the happiest, it’s like you see two people together and you feel this spark, a warmth when you stand barefoot on the sand of the seashore where you for the first time went skinny dipping with the most special person of your life.
It’s unfurling each other on a Christmas evening by reading lines from the novels of Thomas Hardy which says, “a day which lay sly and unseen…that of her own death…giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it”. Emma always believed that death will come one fine day unannounced without a wake up call, while you are cherishing every moment with the love of your life.
It’s 2024 and the series consisting of fourteen episodes rejuvenated an excruciating pain that I once felt during my first heartbreak. We always try to find an escape in reel world, in a parallel world however when that parallel world reflects the brutal reality of this world, it becomes hard to accept the fact that, not every story has a happy ending, and we have to make peace with everyone leaving at certain point in our lives while making the most of out of it when they are with us.
Watching Emma now makes me believe that if we dream something we also have the courage to make it happen, it’s just that we have to keep on working towards our dreams and coming to love, well can you ever unlove someone you loved so deeply, I think it’s humanly not possible, the intensity of our love fades but it always stays.
Dexter and Emma, deserved better from life however I feel their souls are entwined for ages. Whatever happens they will always have tomorrow because in the remaining tomorrows of Dex’s life, he will always remember Emma and will bask in the happiness she brought in his life. Maybe whole of our life is an act of remembrance, we continously try to find pieces of our past in our present, we strive hard to fill those voids, gaps even after knowing that no matter how hard we try, they can never be filled.