When I watched this film for the first time, I thought of the time I spent in Australia when I was 24.
In a foreign country, you get lost. Not the way you do at home. You get different sort of information constantly from everywhere. At some point, you just give up and you quickly admit that you are wrong. You don’t do that back home easily. You start to think and behave differently. Like you transform into someone else that you never realized you had that kind of side in you. It is weird at first to see yourself because it is not you that you used to know, but over time you get to know that side of you.
But it is not always sweet.
You get lonely.
Everybody has a different limit. Some can be away for like forever while some can be away just for a week.
Here is Charlotte. A fresh graduate. Two years in marriage.
She doesn’t know what she is supposed to be. She studied philosophy at college. She used to write but she hates what she wrote. She thought of taking photos but they are too mediocre.
She calls her friend back home after visited a temple. She just can’t stand this emptiness on her own. She has to talk to someone about her feeling. Her friend asked ‘What were you saying?’. So she said ‘Nothing. I’ll call you later, OK? Bye’.
I did this a few times myself when I was in Australia. Before I left, I spent 2 years working different sort of jobs after the graduation. I wasn’t sure what I was good at and what I wanted. I thought I would know by the time I finished school but things were still unclear. Everybody was yelling and fighting in that country. I was wondering if I was supposed to be like them too. Life was serious and people were always angry. So I fled without a plan.
Everyday was an adventure in a foreign country. If you are alone without taking your parents’ aid, that is where the reality starts. I never knew that having something to eat, having a place to sleep and being able to understand and be understood by others are such hard things.
Days after days without knowing where to go and what to do in a foreign country, I got completely lost. I wrote like a note was my only method to keep my sanity. I felt awful whenever I was thinking that I avoided the situation that people I knew were still dealing with back home but the truth was I didn’t want to be a part of it but I felt still awful about me being such a coward, not facing the situation but fleeing from it.
I spent a lot of time listening to music, writing useless things, sitting on a tram without having destination, looking outside the window, wondering how people live their life.
Charlotte is having a time she never had before. Before coming to Japan, she was a daughter of her parents, a student at school and a wife to her previous boyfriend. She is quiet but she still needs an attention from her husband who should be there when she needs anything. She stays in a hotel room, looking outside the window, wondering how people live their life. She never thought of that that way.
She tries to listen to the audio book about self-esteem. It doesn’t take too long for her to realize that it is useless. She goes to the hotel bar. Maybe to see people rather than drink.
There is someone who is sitting alone, drinking and talking to himself. She sits next to his next chair. He was the guy who was wearing mascara with a bunch of pins behind his suit. But she doesn’t say anything.
Naturally they strike a conversation without having language issues. Feel home in the moment. And they still can’t get to sleep.
Having a trouble to sleep is not because they are suffering a jetlag. They probably could not sleep well back home either. It is not about where they are geographically. It is about their inner status. This is hard to talk out. Not because you don’t want to share but it is more like you don’t really know how to put them into words to describe. It is hard.
I once met someone who was having a life crisis. He was in early 30s. I was in mid 20s. We had conversations like what Charlotte and Bob had. We didn’t know each other well but we had something in common: we fled to Australia from home because we couldn’t stand something and we had to get out of there. He described how he was feeling before he quit his job and sold his apartment/a car and other stuff before coming to Australia.
It was Jan, 2010. He sounded like a hero to me. Wow. Quit a job that he had been dedicated to for several years and sold his possession in California!
He kept saying that he regrets that he didn’t come earlier. But I thought he did something really cool. I was nothing compared to him. I didn’t have a serious job because I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to be serious about. I had some ideas like Charlotte but I felt the same way as Charlotte did. I always concluded that I don’t know and I am not sure. These two sentences were circling in my head for a long time. I didn’t know how to stop them.
So I asked him if things get easier when you get older. He firmly said to me, ‘No, it does not.’ He was not as old as Bob in the film. He was just only 33 or something. But to me, he was like Bob then. The gap between 20s and 30s was huge to me then. It is like a myth, you know. When you are 30s, you will be like this and that. Well, I know now.
I was disappointed to hear that things are still unclear in 30s. So then, when?Do they ever get easier? But I didn’t ask. Probably he wouldn’t know either. Probably he was as same as me. That was why he fled.
Maybe it is fair for me to say that having met this guy and exchanged some myths that I had then and realized that they are not worth was one of the things that shook inside of me.
Wonder if he is doing OK now.
Aimless Wanderlust 