999 TIMES.
The dining table looks like I dumped an entire craft store's inventory onto it: containers of embroidery thread organized by color, sparkly beads spilled into tiny ceramic dishes, scraps of fabric draped across the chair next to me. I thread a bead onto my needle and poke a hole through the canvas in my hands, the Me Before You dialogue sounding from my open laptop. In between stitches I glance up and watch a few seconds, pausing to observe Emilia Clarke's incredibly expressive face and laugh at Sam Claflin's dry wit. A few more beads get sewn onto the fabric before my favorite scene of the entire movie comes on. I set down the needle and canvas on the table and stare at the screen.
Luisa, her family, her boyfriend Patrick, and Will sit in the living room, cheering after she had just blown out her birthday cake candles. Each of them presents her with a gift, and I as a viewer watch each of her reactions to the different items. Her parents and grandpa give her a handcrafted childhood photo album. She flips through the pages and sighs at the memories they put together for her. She hugs them before she starts to cry and thanks them profusely. Her boyfriend hands her a gift bag, and she opens a box holding a tacky silver charm necklace with his name on it. There's a fake smile on her lips and her eyes droop. Patrick gloats about how he had it made specially, oblivious to her reaction. She thanks him slowly, as if searching for the right words. He cuts her off by going in for a kiss, and her gaze falls as she holds out the box for everyone to see.
Will tells Luisa that he has a gift for her as well, and she removes from his bag a small box and a card. She uncovers the box and she yelps with complete unabashed excitement. She keeps squealing and Will laughs along with her, and Patrick asks, annoyed, what the gift is. Luisa jumps up and down and laughs, yelling to Will and asking him where he got them, as she pulls out a pair of black and yellow striped tights. Patrick stares at them with a confused face, and she tells him they're only the best pair of tights ever. She runs across the room to go upstairs and try them on, stopping just before to thank Will and saying she can't tell him how much she loves them. She disappears and the scene cuts to Will glancing at Patrick, and Patrick with a side eye and furrowed brow.
My cheeks ache a bit from the smile that was plastered onto my face. That scene gets the same reaction from me every time. It's not the only one that does.
"You've watched that movie a thousand times! Can't you pick something else?" my mom would say when I'd put on a familiar rom-com that I had, in reality, watched only 999 times.
Cycling through the same bunch of films began when I was a preteen, with The Lizzie McGuire Movie. A young girl Lizzie, filled with self-doubt and navigating her teens, goes on a school field trip to Rome. She meets a famous pop star, Paolo, and she impersonates his singing partner at a music awards show. She builds self-confidence, not only from literally singing in front of a gigantic audience on live TV, but also from trusting in her own ability to do difficult things despite feeling fear. Paolo tries, and fails, to deceive Lizzie by lying to her about his intentions to destroy his partner's career. She ends up with her best friend, Gordo, who's been in love with her since they were kids.
In my late teens to early 20s, my mom would watch PS I Love You back when it was still airing on the ABC Family channel. Holly and Gerry are a young married couple living in New York. Gerry suddenly passes away from a brain tumor, and Holly's life is swallowed up by grief. On her 30th birthday, she discovers that before Gerry passed, he had written several letters for her. Over the course of about a year, letters arrive that lead Holly to try new things, travel to new places, and start to build a life that feels like her own. She becomes a shoe designer. Throughout the film, her new friend Daniel grows to like her, but she only sees him as a friend. In the end, she crosses paths again with someone she met earlier in the movie and really liked, William. Who was actually Gerry's childhood friend. But that's beside the point.
The Idea of You came out two years ago and I didn't even get halfway through before I knew I'd love this story for a long time. Solène, a single mother and an art gallery owner, meets Hayes, the lead singer of a famous boy band, at Coachella. As their romance unfolds, Solène faces the pressure to keep her own and her daughter's lives intact, judgement from her hypocritical ex-husband who cheated on her with a younger woman, and the overall public scrutiny that comes with dating a famous person who's also younger than her. Despite how much she and Hayes love each other, they eventually decide to let each other go. Solène over time finds peace in her life again. The film ends with Hayes returning to her art gallery, five years later.
All three of these films begin with the woman facing a limitation or wound. Love doesn't arrive to rescue her from it. It arrives after — once she's already turned that wound into something she can point to and say, this is mine, I made this. Maybe that's why that birthday scene always stuck with me.
I think what I've been watching for, all these years, is the tights again. Not the necklace — never the necklace. The tights: the quirky, distinct, almost inexplicable thing that was mentioned only once, and remembered anyway. Love isn't about being rescued. It's about being witnessed. But being witnessed, I've learned, usually doesn't happen on your own timeline.
Waiting can make time feel like it's moving either too slowly or not at all. I've felt it halfway across the Pacific Ocean on a 15-hour flight from LA to Manila. Too tired to do anything besides drift in and out of sleep. Yet too cramped in a tiny seat to get a proper night's rest. And when time feels like it's not moving, you start to doubt whether the thing you're waiting for will actually arrive. You start to feel resigned, a bit hopeless even. Then keep carrying on, because is there another option? I don't think so.
It's like in The Last Letter From Your Lover, where Jennifer ends up going decades without Anthony, not knowing if they'd hear from one another again. Or in The Time Traveler's Wife, where Clare grapples with the impossible weight of waiting around for a love that's constant throughout her years but not quite permanent in her days. Both women wait so much longer than Luisa ever had to. And yet, when their waiting ends, they were met with the same kind of love that Luisa received in that birthday present. Jennifer and Anthony were reunited in Postman's Park in their 60s, after a decades-long exchange of handwritten letters. Clare and Henry still get to find their way back into each other's arms, even after she'd lost him five years prior. The men in these stories, whether old loves or new, do the same thing. They remember the small, particular truth of the woman they love, and hand it right back.
Eventually, the credits roll and I glance around at the craft supplies scattered across the table.
The canvas is in my hands again, a needle passing through a bead that will get stitched next to another, and then another. It requires careful attention — noticing the small details that make a piece unique, understanding what it needs to become the best version of itself. Maybe that's what these films have been trying to tell me all along, in six different ways: that love looks like attention. Like a bottle of jasmine perfume showing up on my birthday, months after I mentioned once that I liked it.
I don't know yet how my own story might end. But I know what I'm watching for. I know what the tights would look like, if they ever showed up in a gift bag with my name on it.