“Wonderful Nightmare”

GIANNA CARAVETTA | OPINION EDITOR | THE USD VISTA

I fell in love this past weekend.

Not with a physical person standing before me, but with a captivating story about love lost and found. I fell hopelessly in love again with my future husband, desperately praying for him to take notes from the leading man in this love story.

This past week, my friend and I went to the San Diego Asian Film Festival and watched the dramatic romantic comedy film, “Wonderful Nightmare.” The movie follows a woman’s untimely death, due to a clerical error in heaven, and her opportunity to live another woman’s life for a month. The new life she is given is a life antithetical to her own past. From a successful lawyer to a housewife, the woman finds her most authentic self in this new life with her new family.

I had gone primarily for a class assignment, yet the film mesmerized my very being from opening to closing credits. I laughed uncontrollably, my eyes welled up with tears, but, most importantly, my heart ached for my future husband.

The husband in this film was almost everything I’ve ever searched or prayed for in my future husband. The career woman-turned-wife would chastise the husband, yell and scream and swear at him, yet he loved her fearlessly nonetheless. He defended her honor, stood up for her at all costs, and gave her a sure-fire dose of reality when she needed it. In the simplest of explanations, he never gave up on her.

I think about my future husband always. I pray for him daily. I write little love letters to him in a journal often. I long to see his face, to be in his embrace, to live life with him. I hope that he might be inspired to live courageously, to exceed these beautiful characteristics the husband in the movie embodied.

In my head, I’ve tied up all the loose ends of the film narrative. The man and the woman fell madly and passionately in love. His family became her reason for living, encompassing her whole heart.

Before the switch, she was content with her previous, independent life. She had no need to consider adding a husband and two children into the mix. Yet the husband transformed her world, and the children breathed new meaning into her life.

The woman in the film got a second chance at living. She unearthed her deepest, most authentic self and never looked back at her former life, except to right her wrongs. She lived fearlessly, hoped desperately, and loved fiercely.

We aren’t ever guaranteed tomorrow. Don’t wait to start living, doing, and loving. Live in every moment, big or small, now.