The Line
It all starts with a line. The meaning of life found in a Parisian pond. A solo backpacking trip at its beginning. A travel romance, love found and lost. Looking beyond what you see, following the line. The end must also be the beginning.
Written, filmed, edited and narrated by Nicola Walkerden, 2012.
Dedicated to: Blue Shoes, Camden and 2011.
Note from author: The Line represents the beginning of a culmination of clips and experiences gathered from 4 ½ months of travel in 2011. It aims to engage an audience of all ages in a story of discovery, romance and travel. It references some childhood film favourites such as Alice in Wonderland and The Secret Garden and asks you to look beyond what you see in the everyday.
This is a first attempt in combining clips that abstract different locations to create a narrative that reflects a love of the written word as much as visuals.
Hope you enjoy seeing where the line will take you, on screen and in your own life.
Thanks for watching,
Nicola Walkerden
Text:
It all starts with a line. I thought I’d found the meaning of life staring into a Parisian pond. Perhaps it was the jet-lag or the sun setting in the Tuileries gardens on the evening marking the start of a solo backpacking trip- I was mesmerised. It was meditative, this line… and potentially summed up everything I’d ever known life to be and that which I hadn’t known yet either, I imagined.
You’re either on one side or the other. You can sit on the line but it’s shaky, constantly moving. Drawing you upwards and downwards at the same time depending on which way you look at it. It pulsates like a heartbeat. It’s a reflection of the time. It’s dark and light all at once, not black and white but shades of grey. It’s transient, you can only see it at certain times of the day. From a particular viewpoint it exists and disappears simultaneously. It can be black as the night, or reflecting strong light in the day.
You can’t control it. Nothing is ever straight down the line. You can only control how you see it. You can try and capture it but all you’ll have is a snippet from your perspective. You can try and follow the line but it’ll either lead you to a dead end or back around in a circle. The end must also be the beginning.
The clock strikes twelve. A new year over there. Opposite ends of the line, eleven hours behind in the meantime. When we parted on Christmas Eve he was softly singing along to the song in the background… “see you on the other side”.
One side or the other.
We’d both been chasing that feeling, following the rabbit, waiting for the fall. Curious of a connection so strong. Dancing to the beat of a glittery drum, our mouths moved but no sense came out “It’s like we’re speaking different languages”, he said.
One can only imagine the colourful goings on of the other side of the line at this moment. A complete contrast to the warmth, greenery and peacefulness of this side. If this were anything but reality, here in the daytime would be the dreamscape of a serene night’s sleep and there in the dark, near where we met outside Black Heart you would feel the lively, vibrant and vibrating all-encompassing sting of a fluorescent light-filled day. Opposing all logical conclusions of time.
“I’m the weirdest person I know” he said the next morning over breakfast. Looking him dead in the eyes searching for the humour in the irony about to slip out of my mouth, I told him- “That’s what I say to people”.
We took a trip to where the line began. Earlier on our way in the green and orange-leafed forest we trekked through, he’d found a face in the bottom of a tree trunk. Grinning like a cheshire cat from ear to ear, he stood staring at it. I’d been studying layers of rotting fallen leaves, gathered in an enlongated open stone casket embedded in the grass. I looked for clues of which way to go. Moistly glistening with the sunlight and decomposing all at once they crowded the space.
Calling me over, I found him and was jointly transfixed without hesitation. “It’s all about what side of the line you’re on”, the folded face explained matter-of-factly. With drooping eyelids and a seeping mouth it tucked itself back into the crevices of the roots founding it’s revelation, leaving us to find the start of it. Wandering away, a floatingly faded voice echoed from a way “If you don’t know where the line is how can you know if you’re one side or the other?”.
All the more reason to find it, I thought, and my mind continued abstracting surroundings in search of it. We stumbled across keys and froze in time watching 17 on a door, waiting for it to open on the screen. A mirage almost shattered with a hierarchy seen.
It was as if the universe had laid out clues everywhere, we went for a treasure hunt we didn’t even know we were on. A reindeer leading to a rainbow along the riverside, bubbles floating down from overhead and feathers erupting from a jacket that flew high. A sign from Einstein saying love is the answer and a monk –come- salesman commenting on us as a couple.
He was so patient, watching me deconstruct the world in my own way, searching for directions. “Be careful you don’t get stuck in that world…” he said. Little did he know, there were parts of me that already had.
Whilst sitting on the side of my bed in the afternoon, nauseatingly gasping for air from a throat closed up, a stomach in knots and heart beating out of my ribs, he was lying in a pile of dirt in the middle of the chilling morning air in an incredible amount of pain.
We lost each other along the way like the three beanies that had escaped out of the mouth of my bag over the last five weeks. After sending him a kiss from underneath the mistletoe I imagined on Christmas Day halfway home, I wrote that I left my heart over there. It’s another world, one I almost fell for as much as I did for him. Towards the end I’d found him in a cave, shaking… I held his hands to warm him up. We lay together for the last time.
Now I’m living the day he’ll live out eleven hours later. I couldn’t decide whether travelling back to this side felt like coming up for air or sinking underneath the watery surface of the pond, submerged, with the world divided in half above me. A friend confided when he went to the other side he never knew when he was going to get back or how long he’d been there for. I remembered that I’d given him a drawing with a question on the back… and that ultimately we’re still connected by a line… in the meantime.
-NW
Plenty more to come.
