Field Notes on Love(74)

It’s not exactly a love letter, but it still makes her cry.

When she’s done reading, she reaches for her computer and pulls up the rough cut of her film, including the part she recorded this morning. And then, before she can think better of it, she sends it off to him, because it seems that the very least she can do is try taking her own advice.

The note she includes is short, just a simple answer to his simple question: You already have.





Hugo is still awake—his head far too crowded for sleep—when the video arrives. He reads her message with a grin, then opens it up, expecting to see Ida and Ludovic and Katherine and everyone else they’d interviewed last week. Expecting the sort of straightforward documentary he thought they’d been shooting all that time.

But instead, it starts with Mae.

He sits up in bed, clutching the glowing screen a bit tighter.

She actually did it, he thinks, shaking his head in wonder.

Then he hears her say it: “Fifty years later, so did I.”

He hits Pause, wondering if he could have imagined this. He rewinds to watch that part again. “Once upon a time, my grandmother fell in love on a train,” she says, her eyes so sad he wishes he could be there with her right now. (Though hasn’t he been wishing that all day?) She looks straight into the camera when she says it: “Fifty years later, so did I.”

Hugo lowers the phone and stares wide-eyed into the darkness of the hotel room, trying to absorb this. He waits for it to happen: that scuttling feeling in his chest that occurred the first time Margaret said a set of similar words, like an animal trying to hide in plain sight.

But it doesn’t.

To his surprise, he finds himself laughing instead. Not because it’s funny. And not because it’s absurd, though it is. It’s completely and utterly absurd. They’ve known each other only a week. But no: he’s laughing—he realizes—because he’s happy.

    And because he loves her too.

It’s a joy that moves through him like helium, filling every corner of his body until it feels as if he could float away. He sits very still for a few seconds, thunderstruck, and then remembers that he needs to watch the rest of the film.

Nothing about it is what he imagined it would be, yet every inch of it feels exactly right. The interviews aren’t shown as a whole; they’re cut into smaller soundbites, and it jumps around so that it feels like all these various people—himself included—are having one big conversation about what it means to be a person in the world. And even more than that, what it means to love.

It’s brilliant. It’s moving. It’s funny and unique and inspiring.

It is, in the end, just like Mae.

When it’s over, there are tears in his eyes. He wipes at them, thinking that if he hadn’t already bought a train ticket, he’d surely be buying one now.

But since he did, he just sits there in the darkness and starts the film again.





Out the window of the plane, the clouds are piled up like bath bubbles, and the middle of the country is spread out below in checkered squares of green and gold.

Mae doesn’t notice any of it, though; her eyes are closed, her mind elsewhere.

She’s thinking about Nana, and how happy she’d be right now to know that Mae is off to college, something that got a bit lost in everything else this week.

She’s thinking about saying goodbye to her dads again (“Take two,” said Pop as he hugged her), and also Priyanka, who had pulled up in the driveway early this morning (“One last time”) before getting on the road.

She’s thinking about the text she sent Garrett (Okay, okay—it’s possible you were right) and the way the film turned out, the quiet pride she felt when she watched the final cut. In her pocket, there’s a flash drive that she’ll give to the dean of admissions after she lands this afternoon, and it feels strange to carry it around like that, like a portable heart.

Mostly, though, she’s thinking about Hugo and the fact that he still hasn’t responded, which must mean he hated the film or was scared off by what she said.

Either way, it can’t be good.

    Maybe they were just never meant to have a happy ending. Maybe it’s not that kind of movie.

She’s determined not to let this stop her. If the meeting with the dean doesn’t go well, she’ll be back again first thing tomorrow. And if that doesn’t work, she’ll try again the next day. And the next.

She’ll keep trying. But she’s also not worried anymore. It used to be that the thought of spending the next two years taking classes in literature and religion and science felt like missing out. She’d be stuck learning about ancient Greece or the geopolitical situation in Tibet or the poetry of W. B. Yeats while, across campus, the film students would be pulling ahead of her.

But now she’s not so sure.

Maybe Hugo has the right idea after all. Maybe it’s not the worst thing to take a few detours along the way. She loves the film she made this week, loves it as much as anything she’s ever done, and it never would’ve existed if she hadn’t gotten on that train.

No matter what happens next, she’ll always be glad she did.





The ocean appears all at once, a blue so bright it looks fake. Hugo has seen so many incredible sights this past week, so many mountains and rivers and fields, that it seems unlikely there’s any room left for him to be this moved. But it turns out there is.