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“‘Lost in Translation’ is about those moments in life that are fleeting but the impression stays with you.” – Sofia Coppola.

In an airport, again. Like Charlotte, again. 

I am flying home from a foreign place that has become more familiar with each narrow-streeted city I visit. Not Charlotte’s Japan, but my Spain. 

I swear this movie—Lost in Translation, that is—didn’t change my life when I watched it. I hoped it would. Instead, it was an addition to my cinematic passport, yet another 7/10, one more solid film.

And yet, still, Charlotte haunts me. As the school year wraps up, I weave back to thinking of her, with her quarter-life aimlessness and rainy-day searches for meaning. The hotel-room restlessness and cotton-candy pink wig. 

This movie, according to Sofia Coppola herself, is about “those moments in life that are fleeting but the impression stays with you.” 

To read this quote is to be reminded of the crying woman in Madrid. 

The one who walked with her family as far as she could in the airport. She embraced them. One man younger than her, I’ve labeled him as her son, in particular. They knew they had to leave. The woman knew, too, but I don’t think she would let herself believe it. The truth that they would fly away from her, across the Atlantic, was the flood against which she buttressed her city walls. 

In her face, I could see that she craved that they would stay with her. An irrational wish, for the plane tickets had already been purchased, and the packed bags were sitting at her feet. Her family’s bittersweet grimaces revealed that they would have to soon walk away. 

The woman stopped the chaos of a worldwide airport with her teary eyes. Amongst the Spanish and suitcases and security, she stopped me. 

To shamelessly watch a stranger in their vulnerability is to be the stranger, I believe. It is to superimpose your own experiences onto the raw emotion that they put out in public. 

It is what happened to me at noon, in the stress of thousands of travelers and a fight not to fall asleep while standing up. 

In the roped-off security line, I fixated on this woman. As my group began to walk away from me, I mentally left them behind.

Because I was suddenly across the world, in a smaller airport, where there were no Europeans or 100-foot ceilings, and I was the one hugging family goodbye. 

I was staring out the window of my second floor, watching the car disappear down the street. 

I was lying on my bed listening to shuffling and shifting in the room next door for the last time. 

For three seconds, maybe four, her eyes are my eyes. Her reluctance is mine, and I am the one who will return to my apartment in Madrid with unmade beds and an empty kitchen table. 

I force myself to move on, to continue in the line, to be in this moment—my moment—not hers. 

As I leave her to the pain of her reality, I know that instances like these are the ones from which Charlotte was created. They are the fleeting moments with people I don’t know and never will. 

They are strangers’ experiences that are stuck with me as if they were my own.