[R] Look Back

When I was a child I'd wake up every morning to the call of a songbird's gentle tune. Every morning it would announce itself to me and I'd listen to it's beautiful melody and take in the dim morning lights. Breakfast would begin and the call of the bird would feel less like a dialog and more like a proclamation to the world, and I had a gentle longing for the solitude that made the bird's song feel more conversational than routine. And as I walked through dewstained fields to school my memory of it all would slip away. I'd rest my head at night without a thought of the bird, until it's testament to existence the next morning.

Oftentimes my life progresses in the background of the stories I consume, I change as a person independently of the media I'm experiencing. This is not the case for films, which is why I tend to be more comfortable reviewing them, my subjective personal experiences that happen between chapters or episodes of books or television have no power over the brevity of film. But every once in a while, I'll read a story so short or become so engrossed in experiencing something that I wish I could have experienced it as a slow burning novel or a seven hour season of a TV show. Look Back is something I wish I could have progressed with, I could have grown with, but it feels more like a scattered array of memories woven together loosely than a story. I wish it was longer, I wish I had more time to take it all in. It's messaging is so poignant and beautiful that it couldn't have been any longer and still worked as a story, but I'm desperate for more time with it. 

When I moved into a new house away from the bird I finally noticed it, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Something I barely acknowledged or thought about had become so meaningful to me so quickly through the act of it ending. Something so brief that have hardly any memories of is more important to me than my old room or possessions that were lost in the move. I long for the song of the bird. I yearn to hear it's call. As I desperately search my mind for a memory that might remind me of the melody I've forgotten with age, I wonder if looking back with this anger and intensity is even okay. The song was never for me.