One Day

What do you do when you’re single, unemployed and finished with your Masters. You watch films like “One Day” at 17:10 in the afternoon. In Germany, you get assigned seating in movie theaters but this time I wasn’t asked where I wanted to sit, I was just given a seat. I arrived 25 minutes early to the screening room and then another German girl arrived a few minutes later and sat 2 seats away from me to my left. We did everything to ignore each other and seem extremely busy. I looked at photos on my camera, did calculations on my mobile phone, looked at my bank statement, rummaged through my wallet, searched for loose coins in my bag, contemplated how long I could be unemployed and then finally, pretended I had fallen into a deep sleep. I pretended then to wake up every time a new girl or group of girls walked into the theater. To everyone’s surprise the ticket counter lady had assigned us all in the same row. However, I noticed that they were all getting seats to the left of the German girl and no one had seats to my right. Finally, two Japanese girls came and their seat numbers happened to be right next to mine. At which point, I looked at the German girl and we smiled, all the German girls were to her left and all the Japanese to my right. Two lonely guys came in, embarrassed and unhappy but wasn’t given seats in our row, otherwise the entire screening room was empty. I wondered why no one was moving and had a feeling I was sitting too close to the screen. It was only till after the commercials and the lights briefly came on before the trailers that all the German girls started to move to other seats. I also thought I should move but couldn’t decide if I could tolerate the distance to the screen or not. It was only during the middle of the second trailer that I decided to move to the same seat one row behind which turned out to be the perfect distance.

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