The dinner without a soundtrack

A couple book a table by the water in Alexandria for an anniversary, and they already know how the evening is supposed to go.

The sea will be calm. The food will arrive at a pace that leaves room to talk. At some point, perhaps as the light goes, there will be a moment that feels like the reason they came. Then dessert, a slow walk along the Corniche, and the night will close neatly.

That shape came from somewhere. Years of watching other people's evenings unfold on screens, where every scene is trimmed to its best second, the music rises on cue and nothing happens that does not move the story along.

The real dinner is not cut that way. The wind picks up. The fish takes longer than expected. A phone call from home about the children interrupts the one conversation that mattered. There is no swell of music, no obvious high point, and the walk afterwards is shorter than planned because it is cold.

If the evening is judged against the film, it fails. Something was supposed to happen and did not quite arrive.

Yet looked at without the script, most of what made the night worth having was ordinary. A shared complaint about the wind. A laugh at the waiter's patience. Twenty years of knowing what the other person will order.

A film has to compress a story, because it only has two hours. A life does not have that problem, and it does not offer the solution either. It runs at full length, without a director, mostly in the parts the edit would remove.

The anniversary was never going to be a scene. It was going to be an evening, and then the next morning.