Things to Be Grateful For #10

There is a certain joy, peculiar and difficult to name, in watching a film beside someone who sees it for the first time. A film which I have already seen and can never, by the cruel nature of memory, experience again with that first shock of discovery. And yet, when I sit with this person and observe not only the screen but their face, their small reactions, the sense of wonder, the way they lean forward or catch their breath, I believe that something of that original feeling returns to me. Through their eyes (still innocent of what comes next) I’m able to recover a fragment of my own lost experience, as though their wonder had opened a passage back to sensations I believed were lost forever.