I first saw Wild Strawberries in college. Senior year, spring semester. It must have been spring because I remember it was outdoors on The Green, a carefully curated lawn to imply academic grandeur. My friend, a cinephile, had organized a film series, projecting off actual film reels onto a white sheet that blocked out the university buildings. This was proper cinema, classic European art-house films. Celine and Julie Go Boating. L’Avventura. Films any budding artist should have seen.
I must have brought a blanket, or one of the friends I had gone with had brought one. By now, my friend group had shifted. I had fallen out with my gay and lesbian clique and now leaned into my fellow creative writing students and a handful of graduate students. I was dating a philosophy professor who liked to walk around Baltimore barefoot and also a college administrator at the University of Baltimore who fancied himself a poet.
If it was spring of my senior year, then I was frazzled. I was finishing a double major and a minor. I had to study for the MCATs. I had to write a senior thesis. My future wasn’t unfolding the way I had hoped; instead, it felt as though my way was blocked with rubble.
It must have been warm that evening. Near dark, because my friend would have insisted on nighttime so that the black-and-white images would project properly. I can’t imagine the print was pristine; he would have been working on a student organization budget. I would have eaten by then. I lived off-campus but still had a meal plan at the dorms because what did I know of grocery shopping and food prep? What did I know of being a writer? Of medicine? What did I know of navigating the shoals of an adult relationship? How was I to know how to balance life on a precipice?
But something about Sjöström’s gentle narration must have relaxed me. The way the burned-in subtitles floated on the bottom of the frame like a school of fish. How the world-weary professor retreated into childhood memories after confronting his own mortality in a dream. On my Macintosh SE, I kept a journal of my own dreams, a catalogue of my heartbreaks and anxiety. My first real relationship had ended a year earlier. I would soon decide to ignore biology as a career and focus on writing instead.
I walk around on The Green on that warm spring evening. I see myself dozing off right after the titular wild strawberries have been found for the first time. I must have been exhausted. I want to rouse myself, tell myself to look at the screen, this might be you one day, you’re going to get through things just fine. I stir uneasily; I dream in snippets of hushed conversations around me, fragments of Swedish. But I should let myself rest; I probably need the sleep.