About three years I ago I stumbled across a gif on Tumblr that had a boy and a girl on a beach being adorable and it seemed so romantic. In the caption, it said it was from a movie called "Like Crazy." Now, this wasn't the first time I had seen a gif including these two people, but it was the first one that actually named the movie.
I immediately searched the internet and started watching. Soon after I finished, it became my favorite movie. But little did I know a few years later it would become a movie I could no longer watch.
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Now to give you some background, this movie is about a boy and girl who meet in college. One is originally from Los Angeles and the other is from England. They meet and essentially fall in love, spending the remainder of school together trying not to think about what will happen when graduation comes.
This part is romantic and beautiful and makes you feel forever alone, hoping for a love like this one. But after graduation, the summer comes and the girl must go back home so she can get a new Visa to come back to America to work and be with him.
The day comes for her to leave and they feel distant and sad from each other, unsure what will happen next. And she essentially makes a choice she will regret later on to stay in America for the summer then go back and figure out the Visa. During this part, you think everything will be OK but unfortunately, this movie is real life.
So she comes back to America, gets to immigration and is denied entry because she overstayed before. She is put back on a plane and doesn't get to see him before she leaves. As this is happening he is running through the airport trying to find her. The rest of the movie shows how they deal with the distance and process, but I won't spoil any more. I highly recommend watching the film as it is incredible.
I still love this film and used to watch it every few months but haven't in a while because it is no longer just a movie for me a but a reality. A painfully heart-wrenching reality that I never imagined. I went to college, met a boy from another country and like in the movie fell in love. We had a plan after graduation to visit his home together then come back and start our lives together. We set up the Visa through the school and they told us it was OK to travel during the "grace period" so we did.
We stayed for a month and I enjoyed seeing his home and meeting his family and preparing to spend our lives together as adults working jobs and living together. We went to leave and he got nervous to go through immigration as everyone does, it can be scary and intimidating. I wasn't worried because I trusted the school and felt confident everything would be OK.
Boy, was I wrong, after waiting for 20 minutes he didn't come around the corner and called me crying. He couldn't come through because some laws changed that we weren't informed about (I still blame the school for all of this... but anyway) and he would have to go back home. They took me to the room he was in and we sat together sad and tired and unsure what was going to happen.
After waiting for a while there was absolutely nothing that could be done, I would have to go back to the U.S. and he would have to go back to his home. We left each other with tears in our eyes, after a being back home we tried to make it work with the distance, but eventually he decided he couldn't handle it and needed space. Now the movie plays out a few different ways, and I am not sure how accurate it will be after this, but it is still a hard film for me to watch.
When I fell in love with the film I never expected I would live some of it later on. Now that I have, I have a deeper understanding of the characters and story. I found out the director wrote it about his own experience, so it's nice to know I'm not the only one this has happened too. It's such a shame that you can be torn apart by distance, knowing that if that wouldn't have happened you would be together.
