INT: Midnight Express Snack Bar. Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Cop 663 (Tony Leung) sit beside each other at the countertop drinking black coffee and sharing a cigarette. Both men are fatigued and pensive, staring into their coffee and then out into the distance. By chance, they begin talking.

You know, at our closest point, we were just 0.01 cm apart from each other . . . I tell myself the same thing . . . Funny how distance is formulaic . . . It retreats me to my past . . . The endless list of the ones that got away . . . The American tourist who was waiting for me to give her a reason to abscond from America . . . The Tamil optometrist I danced salsa with . . . The Taiwanese journalist who understood my loss of country over a smoky mezcal . . . Who is the one that did it though? . . . Where you found yourself walking in slurred motions, unsure if you possessed yourself? . . . May . . . Feh . . . What were they all trying to tell me about the running I made in my sleep, waking up to my hands clutching my throat? . . . A type of metaphor for my perpetual longing and hopelessness . . . How each of them soothed the anguish of my nightmares . . . Or me theirs . . . Was it the tenderness of their fingers crawling on my back? . . . No, it was the feather sliding down my spine . . . Or the toy airplane taking off from the nape of my neck to haphazardly land on my head . . . The sweetness of hot tea tree oil massaged onto her back . . . The scent of Dr. Bronner’s castille soap as she ran her bath and invited me . . . The head tilted to the right as she kissed me . . . I remember when she made engine noises in my ear, a signal to place my lips on her mouth where I vibrated . . . First sign of turbulence . . . There is a blueness to love I cannot escape . . . Maybe we are always speaking about the same woman who we have loved differently in each act of our relationship . . . Then it all fades . . . And you become your own departure and arrival . . . A miserable destination.^*

^*I admit that, at times, I am embarrassed by my obsessions—which perhaps explains the erasure of the scene from the final cut. Not ashamed at the work, per se, but that the description of their desolation profoundly resonated into an aperture. I learned something then—that the camera is not to reveal, but to expose you. What I tried to capture was that the first love is tragic because it makes you aware you are in love and succeeding lovers become a type of synecdoche for the first. We learn to love cautiously, but lose the carelessness of our yearning and then love becomes a type of taxonomy. On Hanoi Road, after scouring through CD shops for the perfect soundtrack, I sat and spoke with a stranger at a café. He spoke of his exile from a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Chagos, I believe he called it. He taught me the word “sagren,” which I first mistook for “chagrin,” to describe the homesickness he felt. The minutiae of everyday life that reminded him of his exile where he saw each day as bringing him closer to a type of isolated death. I attempted to reply to him by saying “life is brief,” but I misspoke and said “life is breath.” It was then I began the script. I saw shooting as a sight to play with my imagination and memory. An attempt to reconcile with the brutal nostalgia of my life.