#al ibrahim

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It wasn’t so much what she said that got to him, but how she said it. The words themselves were neutral, perhaps even warm, but her tone -- and the way her eyes looked at him while she said them -- tinted their interaction with a different kind of hue.

“Why don’t you have a card?” she asked.

“I do have a card,” he replied, ”I just left it upstairs”

“Why did you leave it upstairs?”

“It’s in my wallet, and I forgot my wallet.”

“Why did you forget your wallet?”

Because tone rarely comes through in the written word, the exact transcript of the real-life conversation doesn’t read very unusual. Just two strangers having small talk in the elevator.

But when we apply the filter and run the exact same interaction back again, a different version appears.

“You don’t belong here,” she said to him.

“But I do,” he replied.

“You’re a liar!” 

“I’m a person.”

“No,” she replied, “you’re less than.”

This new version of the interaction is of course neither exact nor accurate, but it’s no less true. 

Sometimes filters obscure and distort, but other times -- as with infrared -- they reveal what’s always been there but is invisible because it lies just outside the limits of our perception.

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If they ever make a movie about us, it'll be a comedy.

There'll be a scene earlier on with the two of us -- or the actors playing the two of us -- in an apartment. Your first apartment. The one that looks like a Scandinavian hotel room. White and pretty and perfectly put together. But underneath all that veneer is a coldness.

You don't quite know how you know this, but looking at the scene, you know that all this will be temporary. Except of course at the time, we didn't know that. It was still the beginning. Still early. Things were still developing. Tragedy hadn't hit yet.

The actor playing you will ask the actor playing me if they would like some tea. And we'll see you -- from the living room -- opening a cupboard in the kitchen, and taking out a pack of tea. But because it's a wide shot, we wouldn't be able to tell what brand it is.

"This is nice," the actor playing me will say after taking a sip. "What tea is this?"

And because it is that kind of film, we'll cut to a new scene before the actor playing you can answer.

Towards the end of the movie -- after the tragedy, and after some time has passed -- after we've had some laughs, there'll be another scene in an apartment. This time, my new apartment.

It'll be the actor playing me and another actor that is not the actor playing you. A new person who we are only just meeting for the first time. The actor playing me will ask this new person if they would like some tea, and when this new person says yes, there will be a shot of me opening the cupboard and taking out a pack of tea.

It'll be a wide shot, of course, so it's unlikely that we'll be able to tell what brand it is.

But later, after the movie is over -- after we've talked about the writing and the acting and whether or not the apartments are symbolic representations of the internal states of the characters -- we'll go on Youtube and watch a guy tell us that the tea at the beginning is in fact the exact same brand as the tea at the end.