Being an ardent fan of the movie Juno, I find myself rewatching it every few months or so with the same untainted love and teary eyes every single time.

The last time I watched it, I became fixated with the song "Sea of Love" by Cat Power, which plays during the final heartbreaking scene of the movie. There is this particular video of the song on YouTube that seems like nothing special on the surface. The video is a series of black and white photographs that change along with the melancholic song, which seems oddly befitting. However, in the description box of said video, lies a somewhat secret message that people, including myself, tend to miss at first glance.

The man who made the video wrote about a tender glimpse into his life a decade ago, where he talks about his fall from grace after a breakup, his views on the world through the eyes of a lonely man in his late twenties, and his yearning to express himself through his photography. He also wrote about how his photography helps him to capture moments that may be considered mundane but deserve observation and acknowledgement. Finally, he had linked his photography page at the end, which I proceeded to pore over once I had digested the quiet immensity of what I had discovered.

I remember feeling so greatly moved by that tiny message tucked away in a corner of the Internet as a solitary myopic slice of life, waiting to be discovered by chance. Here was this man who had offered the world a tiny chip of himself or who he was ten years ago and there I was, a nobody from Bangladesh crying over it in a dark room filled with unfinished assignments. I felt strangely connected to the man. A connection which was like a fraying string, sure, but a connection nonetheless. I wanted to give the man in the text, who existed a decade before and is no longer the same, a hug and tell him everything was going to be okay and to thank him for gently placing such a genuine piece of his life upon the world.

The discovery has certainly made a definite impact on how I perceive other people. We're all just ants in an ant farm, digging deeper and deeper, never fully satisfied with just having enough. We're all just moths, constantly searching for a comfortable source of light or dying in the process. In this vast, cold, ever expanding universe, we desperately crave connections and a sense of belonging that we hunt for them. In reality, life brushes past us swiftly but sometimes it hits us like a battering truck when we least expect it and in places where we may have stumbled upon purely by luck.

The way the world works is beyond me, but I do know that there is surrealism tucked away in the nooks and crannies of our lives, whether that's larger than life coincidences or bona fide magic. We may never understand the mechanism of life but we can hope to be fortunate enough to step on these cracks once in a while, to remind us of our place in our wonderful little planet.

I did and I hope you do, too.