“To judge a book by it’s cover”
A famously contested aphorism. I’m for it. I believe human beings, even animals, have a pretty extraordinary ability to read one another.
“To make a good first impression”
Another aphorism. Truth and foolishness mixed together. Truth because the first impression is often the only one. If it’s a good one, you’d be lucky for it to be so. Bad ones rarely get second chances.
But the imperative nature of “make a good first impression,” to me, in accordance with my philosophy, is misleading, because impressions tend to happen more fr. Or well, there is. An entire detail can change the entire narrative a stranger writes you into. But who are we to control the details another collects, when they fall through time like raindrops in a storm? So when I say it doesn’t matter, I merely mean that in normal life, we are powerless, so I’m not going to worry about it.
What I have found from my experiences over what I believe has been the last three years, a normal person cannot really change the impression that they make. An extraordinary person can, but I am not certain that it’s worth the cost.
An impression to me is kind of like how, you know how you can save an image of someone as a contact if your phone? It’s almost like the version of that but in the brain version of the contact list. That one moment, like a definition. Sometimes they become blurry with time, but sometimes they are quite clear.
When I think of Hanna, the image that usually forms is an early one. If I close my eyes and flick to that place where her entry exists in my mind, this is what I see:
A woman is walking on a pier at the edge of the Hudson. She walks, slowly, smiling quietly, and she is looking down in thought. Then she stops, looks up at the sky, then at me, walking beside her. Her smile fades, but the potential of laughter dances at the edge of her lips. And she is smiling with her body too, radiating peace like the gentle late afternoon soon setting behind her. She is about to tell me how excited she is to start teaching neurodivergent young kids with the same Chinese background as her. The sun is golden on her cheeks and her chestnut eyes, that subtle glow just before the golden hour, when the other colors have not been totally overcome.
That was the second time we met, but it is distant. Now let me tell you about the last time we met, which was two nights ago. Or well, it was the last time I saw her, but the first and last time she met me.
It is the last night of August. The sun has gone down and left the air pleasantly chilly. I spend the couple of blocks from the park to the bar explaining how I have been on this date before. How I hit my head this morning, and how she has become my event horizon.
Except, because I have found this tactic gets the information across the best, I describe it as the plot for a movie, since this is easier to digest, before the reveal.
“So this guy hits his head and get unstuck from time,” I continue, our steps faintly echoing in a chorus with the wind in the leaves of the trees above us. Their shadows move ominously in the golden relief of the streetlights above them.
“Oh like slaughterhouse five?” Hanna asked. I can see she is pleasant buzz of not quite knowing what someone is about. Although I suppose that if I see her that way in this moment, I am a hypocrite. What happened to the philosophy of the immutable first impression?
“Exactly - or well sort of, he doesn’t hop around though. More like a classic groundhog day loop. Waking up on the same day. The difference here is that there seems to be a set amount of time he spends with a certain person, this woman he is dating. After 16 hours of time with this specific person, that’s when time resets.”
“So how does he even find this out?”
“That’s a great question, because it’s a while, right?” I say.
“Yeah I mean, that’s like, more than two hours a day for week. So I guess things go well with them,” she says.
“That is really solid math actually. It’s not so clear though.”
“Their compatability?”
“Right. That’s sort of what the movie is about,” I say.
“Hmm. Isn’t saying that the whole movie is about the uncertainty of their compatibility just a complicated way to say aren’t really a good fit?”
She had me there. I laugh.
“Maybe.”
“Okay. Next,” she says. “As in, continue.”
“So the first time this happens, it’s about three weeks in. When time resets this first time, they’re really just meeting up to exchange books as a sort of last meeting because she decides after the third date that she’s not really interested.”
“Oh. And then what, he goes to sleep that night and wakes up three weeks earlier…?”
“It’s right as they are exchanging the books. Poof. Waking up on the bathroom floor.”
“Right. Right, because he hit his head.”
“Yeah, yeah. Because he hit his head. So what do you think? Do you like movies like that?” I ask.
Among many things, within the repertoire of creative rhetoric, I have discovered in my unhinged time travel experiments, I have found that the ‘have you seen the movie where’ conversation is surprisingly flexible. Sometimes when I use it, it makes me feel a little bit like Ricky Gervais in The Invention of Lying. Which I have actually never seen, but the premise is clear - he lives in a world of total honesty, and it just occurs to him to lie. Whereas I have discovered I live in a world where it doesn’t occur to people to make up random movies as sounding boards. To be fair though, I don’t think it’s my idea - I think that Vance Joy may have coined the concept, first I’ve heard anyways, in the song Riptide. But I digress.
“I think so,” she says, and really means it, turning towards me for a moment before we enter the bar, called Barnolia. “But honestly it depends more on the characters”. She’s beat me to the door and opens it for me.
Pretty girls first, the memory from the future echoes, and I walk in ahead of her.
She gestures to the back of the bar and I nod, also giving her a thumbs up before stopping at the bar, ordering us a couple of drinks.
“You like sours right?” I say, sitting down, pointing at the sour, meaninglessly called Elk Horn.
She looks up with slight surprise.
“How’d you know?” she asks.
“Because I’m the guy in the movie,” I say coyly. “I’ve done this before.”
She laughs. “I was being difficult. I do like those movies. I really liked, actually, this one episode of Black Mirror - it’s called Hang the DJ. I always like those movies where the time loops back over itself.”
In my head I want to call them groundhog day stories, but I know that she’s seen Russian Doll, Eternal Sunshine and the end of Edge of Tomorrow but not the classic Bill Murray genre definer. And I know she has seen Past lives too. Not quite in the groundhog day tradition, but maybe relevant.
“But the characters,” she inquires. “Who are they?”
“Well…” I think. The truth is that she’d asked me this before, but I’d never really come up with a good answer. “So the characters are played by…Greta Lee,”
“Oh!” Hanna’s eyes widen. “I love her”
“Yeah she’s amazing,” I smile, feeling that warmth in my chest at her excitement. Data point two. That feeling never really goes away. But was that my own fault, for reliving the same conditions of first date excitement over and over again? Like a biased simulation?
“And Elijah Wood,” I say.
“Oh,” she says, disappointed. I am too. Not that I don’t love Elijah Wood. But, he doesn’t seem to have the same gravitas as Greta Lee somehow, they don’t quite fit.
“You don’t ship them?”
“No, not quite.”
“If you could ship any actor with Greta Lee, who would you cast?” I ask.
Hanna thinks for a moment. “David Choe,” she says, content with her answer.
I laugh, “Yeah, that would be fun. That would be really fun - it also makes sense. They are both Korean, right? Is he even an actor?”
“He is! He’s, you know him right?”
I nod, I sort of know of him. I think he is a sculptor, has a cult following, and maybe a sort of TV show of some kind. I read an article about him once. In fact, listing these details, it is not clear that I necessarily know him at all, yet I am totally content to say so. That is just the kind of self-assured asshole I suppose I am.
“He’s a lot of things. So yes, and also no. But anyway, it’s Greta Lee and Elijah Wood and Greta Lee is a famous artist, and Elijah Wood is sort of this weird activist. He’s leading this free housing movement in NYC to fight homelessness. So that’s sort of how they meet - in this moment between his activism and her art.” I wince internally - I’ve totally gone off the script. This is a potential shortfall of the movie rhetoric strategy; the the script takes a life of its own.
“But none of that is very important,” I say. “I think it just shows they each have their own lives. Actually, the movie is strange because it doesn’t really give a concrete vision of their success. In some timelines, they seem to be quite dramatically successful version of themselves, and in others their lives are more everyday. And that part is never really fully explained.”
“So like in some timelines Greta Lee’s character is fully actualized, and others no?”
“Exactly. And it’s interesting to see like, how they are different in their humble and less humble timelines.”
“Now it’s started to sound like Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Hanna replies, thoughtfully.
I nod. “Oh! I forgot our drinks. Be right back,” I stand up, then turn back. “While I’m up, do you need anything? Water?” She nods, “Are you self-actualized?”
I was already turning and I pretend not to hear her because I know I’m not, and it makes me feel ashamed. But I don’t want to be the kind of person who doesn’t hear, so I turn back and say, “Sorry what did you say?”
She opens her mouth but thinks better of it and says “Never mind!”
I’ve just broken my second rule, already, which is to be honest.
I get up and head over to the bar. When I come back, I tell her. That it’s not a movie and it’s not Greta Lee and Elijah Thornberry, that it’s Hanna Chao and Tony Cohen. And she is quiet, and she nods.
“So you wake up every morning with a concussion,” she says.
I nod, wincing a little still. I’ve never really gotten used to it. I wish I was stone cold though. I don’t really want her to pity me, even if a part of me likes the attention.
She winces a bit too.
“And after you spend sixteen hours with anyone…”
“With you.”
“With me. After you spend sixteen hours with me, you wake up with a concussion again.”
“Yes.”
“And you have been doing this.”
I nod.
“How many times?” she asks.
I put my head in one hand, thinking.
“More than a hundred,” I say, “No - yeah more than a hundred. But, some were months. And a handful were just a few days.”
“And most of them?”
“Two weeks. The classic timeline,” I say, grinning despite myself. “The classic timeline is a week.”
“The classic timeline?”
“Well it’s,” I never really had thought about this too intently, it was just natural to think of it this way. Like a work schedule almost. “It’s the way things happened the first time, and it’s sort of the way things happen without heavy intervention on my part.”
“The classic timeline.”
I nod.
“So, what, do we end up together?” she asked, smiling halfway between amusement and concern.
“Mostly, no,” I say.