I cried at the end of La La Land. Sue me. How could you not in that final scene? But for those of you who haven’t seen it, allow me to explain.

La La Land is, of course, a love story. An aspiring actress and a struggling jazz pianist meet by fate, so it seems, when one flips the other off in traffic. (How romantic!) Later on, they run into each other at a party, and eventually fall in love. We get to see a montage of the summer they shared together, but unfortunately, as you may have guessed, it doesn’t work out. So, they break up, and go their own way: she gets married and has a family, and he achieves his dream of owning a jazz club. It’s easy to imagine how they might never see each other again, but it would seem that fate has yet another role to play, and one night Mia finds herself with her now-husband in the club owned by her ex, Sebastian. They notice each other, and the memories come flooding back, memories of what was and what perhaps could have been.

I’ve found that one of the strangest dimensions to life is how at one time a person can hold such a precious and privileged place in someone’s life only for that time to end. Consider this scene without any context—or from the perspective of Mia’s husband, who seems to have no clue about what those two shared together. While on the surface there is cordiality, beneath that there is so much more. Like an iceberg, so much of it goes unseen, and that something like that should not be expressed is, I think, sad because without a doubt, they changed each other’s lives, leaving a lasting imprint.

We’ve all experienced this in our own lives, I’m sure, when people we once knew have passed by us on the street, moving on without a word said—perhaps not even recognising us. This is potentially a sad thought, but it’s far more complicated than that. After all, while it is the same person we once knew, it also isn’t: they’re a different person now, leading a different life, and so are we. Nobody can pretend that things are as they were. Life just doesn’t work like that.

When one dwells on this, particularly if it was a very strong relationship, it’s easy to lament the fact that this is just how things are now. Still, it’s equally true that because they are not left untouched by the other person, they have the memories, and so, while they might not even say a “hello”, in some sense they carry that person with them wherever they go, whatever they do, and this offers us a choice: to be sad it ended, or to be glad that it happened.

It can be a bittersweet, but this life in La La Land. Amidst the confrontations with the passage of time, life’s challenges, and God’s troublingly mysterious plan, we are confronted by a truth even more unbearably overpowering: that of the joy and enrichment which those experiences brought to our lives; and this is something that shapes us even now. Therefore, although it’s not always an easy memory to digest, as someone once told me, “I will always treasure those memories of scootering along the Tiber,” and so will I.