Sometimes, you just know.

Have you ever met someone you've had an instantaneous connection with? No words, no explanation of any kind... just a single look, a lingering of the eyes... a spark, a connection... something new, something that the two of you created in that very moment, something that exists only in the space between you?

I have. Once. It lasted one-hundred-twenty-three minutes. It was with a little movie called Elizabethtown. I know we haven't known each other that long, and you're probably going to tell me it's too soon... but there's something about this one, something real and true. I think this is The One.

Nothing - no other movie, song, book, person - has ever touched my heart the way this movie has. It's full of hope. Through all the sadness, confusion, melancholy, joy, and hilarity, every scene is laced together by the underlying idea of hope. Hope, at first, for a better or different kind of life... then hope, ultimately, for the kind of life that has always existed but you've overlooked for want of something else.

I will tell you... I have not been happy for quite a long time. It's been a bit of a charade around here for the past few months. But right now, at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 11, with the credits rolling in the background... I am happy.

Is it strange that a movie - a silly, insignificant movie - has played such a large role in my life? And that to me, a young woman from a small, Indiana town, it has given me a shred of what I've always been searching for?

"We should have taken this trip years ago."