fleeting connections

Two strangers meet in a railway refreshment room in Brief Encounter. A painter has one summer on an island in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Two childhood friends in Past Lives get a week, twenty years late. The connection is real because it ends, and the clock is running from the first scene.

The connection can be romantic, platonic, or somewhere in between. Two people meet, something real passes between them, and the world pulls them apart. Sometimes they meet again years later, and both of them have to decide what the first time was worth.