SPOILER WARNING (if you havent watched it yet, you should!)

this movie is very dear to me. i first watched this some time around october of 2017 when my art club had a collaboration movie session with the journalism team of my highschool. i remember being absolutely enamoured by this movie because of how soft and genuine it felt. i think this was also the first time i actually cared about cinematography too because my god were the shots so nice.

i remember going back home to do research about this movie on my ipad and finding out that it had a book! i came to school the next day with one thing on my mind: find it in the school library. i still remember the smile of greeting our librarian had exchanged, the cool air of the ac, the slippery ramp leading to the fictional books section, and how i thoroughly scanned the bookshelves trying to find it. its been almost a decade since but i still remember the way my heart pounded with joy upon actually finding the small paperback and how swiftly i walked towards the front desk to borrow it (almost slipping on the vinyl floor too lol).

ok moving on, i really want to talk about the reason why i hold this film/story so close to my heart. i watched this when i was 12 years old— around the same age as the main characters. i was pretty naive and at the age where i deeply craved to find a person that could love me. the fact that i was already an avid fan of romance stories as well as the film being centered on people my age genuinely made me lock in so hard in absorbing every single thing that i could possibly learn from it.

throughout my many rewatches and re-readings of this piece of media, i didnt understand what the whole "greater than the sum of their parts" meant until my later teens. i spent my highschool days feeling giddy over girls and boys and squealing about them to my friends whenever we had any interactions. back then, i didnt know what it fully meant to measure someone as a whole besides what attracted me to them. im a pretty slow person so despite the many rewatches, all the advice that mr. baker and chet gave to juli didnt fully seep into my brain. regardless of how dense i was— those scenes have lived in my head rent free for almost a decade (and counting, probably).

ive never had a significant other. ive always hesitated on opening up my feelings to a person i have a crush on because im scared of showing vulnerability. there has been a lot of "what ifs" in my mind which was enough to stop me from confessing to anyone because i also know i wont be everyone's cup of tea. i also thought about how confessing isnt the end of a love story so my insecurities about myself could also apply to the other person if something were to actually happen. id like to clarify that the people i liked were people i knew, but didnt know enough. i wasnt willing to take the gamble between love and humiliation back then. i also found out a couple years after my first watch that i was in the aromantic spectrum! yay! which opened up more cans of worms that is not as relevant.

in a way, i was already kind of practicing the "greater than the sum of their parts" but not as in depth as i think i should have been. but like honestly, that was ok, i was 12. i think it wasnt until the 12th grade when i started considering the whole picture. i learned a lot of things like being nice is just being nice, not what makes you who you are as a person. since then ive asked myself plenty of questions every time i have a crush on someone.

"sure theyre nice, but how do they treat their friends? their family? their acquaintances? how do they treat your friends?"

"are they progressive? or are they the kind of person that would make you feel bad for not being the norm in terms of your identity?"

things like that you know. the scenes where juli's attraction towards bryce started wavering play out in my head often. like why would i want someone who has no backbone, someone who would let their friend or their family say bigoted things towards people they dont even know? how could you want a future with someone who has no respect towards the people, the things, the environment around them? should the very few qualities you found attractive within them cancel out the ugly parts?

now that i am an adult, ive learned to start choosing the people around me. which is much better than welcoming everybody with open arms and walls down out of desperation to be seen. im not perfect at doing so by any means— but i try. i try as hard as i can. i think that the advice of determining if someone is greater than the sum of their parts shouldnt only apply to romantic relationships but to other ones as well. i dont think that the way i apply it to my own life and personal relationships is the right or only way, there is a lot of nuance that people should keep in mind if they do so to their own lives. this film/book has given me a lesson that i will probably carry with me for my entire life and i will always appreciate that. while the weather changes and i evolve, it will always be something that will stay embedded in my mind.