apocalypse

this is one of those films i'll keep in my heart. i watched it alone. i cannot exactly say what it is about the film i love. maybe i loved every single thing about it. while the film didn't make me cry, it was a poignant thing to experience. it felt so real. and the whole film in itself, from the acting chops, cinematography, scoring, everything was on point. the characters can be anyone we know, at various stages of their lives.  you will see a bit of yourself in each of the characters. their scars could easily be yours. the difference is in how you tell people the stories behind these scars. let me ramble about this film..

baler was one of the my great experiences. it's one of the unforgettable ones. the baler i saw in the film was something i want to experience myself. there's more to baler than its museum, the famous balete, the mother falls, etc. and i want to revisit it some time. i know it's a surf town, and i would probably never get on a surfboard. but i still want to go again if only to elevate my previous experience.

this film somehow reminded me that i am 25 and super insecure about the future. it found me in an interesting time in my life when i'm dealing with so much craziness. am i ford? forging through life with reckless abandon and living in the moment? am i serena? with all her heartbreak yet here she is loving a man who has accepted all her baggage? yet betrays this man by easily falling into a passionate embrace with someone else? am i fiona? young and cynical? the jilted lover who gets to experience loss twofold one summer she was 19? am i rich? made vengeful by his daddy issues and a misplaced longing for a more mature person? am i chona? covering up trauma with stories and telling them over and over again until it becomes her truth?

mostly, i feel like i'm still fiona, the 19-year-old girl, who tries to be cynical about life without the actual full life experience, minus the dark angst, then tragically meets the actual cynical life experience. but then i could be serena, survivor of losing someone she loved more than life itself, yet finding herself in a new beginning, a new possibility that could give her what she lost. and in a way, we're all chona, always retelling things the way we want them to appear.

the stories we tell become our myths. sometimes, the myths we make become the truth we live. and as we shift our perspective and gain more life experience, our myths (our truths) can actually change over time.