Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy lasts nearly five hours and took 18 years to be released in its entirety, but I’ve always thought its grandest revelation arrives in the first film’s earliest minutes. 1995’s Before Sunrise follows Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy), young travellers sitting separately on a cross-European train. They exchange a glance that, unbeknownst to them, will derail their lives. Jesse looks at Céline then looks away, then Céline steals a look of her own and then Jesse bores his blazing eyes into Céline and strikes up a conversation. Jesse turns that conversation into an invitation for Céline to join him on an impromptu, ill-advised pit stop in Vienna, where the two talk for hours and fall into an epic and ruinous love affair. But the conversation and the fall it precipitates seem to me to pale when compared to that first burning glance they shared, the kind of eye contact that can waylay you for life. The first time I saw Before Sunrise, I thought that look stored some elusive secret to connection—one I was desperate to uncover.

Last spring, while on my own travels, I got a burning look of my own. I was in New York City with my mother, and I felt called one Friday night to go out alone. That evening, in some Hell’s Kitchen gay bar, I laid eyes upon a man I’d never met and he laid his on me. I knew from the first millisecond I saw him that my path had forked from my control. Under his stare I felt lightning course through me; I felt possessed by a powerful feeling I’d never felt before, something beyond attraction. It was the feeling of my fate coming up to meet me.

Both of us were visiting from out of town, so our time together was limited. I felt that all I could do was stare at him, to savour the moment of meeting someone I knew would change me. He grabbed my hand and we ran around the bar like little kids, stupid grins smacked across our faces. We stayed out until 5 a.m. and we kissed goodbye and I took a cab home as an orange sun yawned over the Hudson River. I remember thinking that even if I never met him again, at least I knew that level of connection was out there, and that I had been lucky enough to hold it in my palms for one night.

Fortunately, my luck wasn’t up. I saw him again the next night, and then again the night after. When I remember that weekend, what surfaces most clearly is the first look he gave me. All I can think of are his big, round, brown eyes glistening like I was the best thing they’d ever seen.

The Monday after our weekend together, he was going back to Pennsylvania, where he worked at a hospital. He said he’d have about an hour to spare before he’d need to drive back home—he had a shift early the next morning and needed as much rest as possible, but he offered to get coffee and walk around Central Park with me. “I’ll take any amount of time you’ll give me,” I said. I figured we’d have an hour together.

We met at a café and I bought him a latte. I pulled out my wallet and a Canadian quarter fell out. I picked it off the ground and handed it to him. “Something to remember me by,” I said.

When we arrived in Central Park, we sat on a grassy hill, our feet touching. A jazz band played nearby. A man sitting beside us interrupted our conversation to ask if we’d been there before. He looked about 60, and his shirt was off, exposing leathery and sagging skin on his torso. He told us he used to come to that hill with his wife, who had died a few years ago. He said he went there nearly every day. He said her ashes were scattered nearby. He said this without sadness or grief; this was merely how his life had turned out, and he seemed at peace with it. I glanced over at my date, who was listening intently to the stranger’s monologue, and my mind wandered. Though our connection was new, I began to daydream about our future. I thought that if we ended up being devoted enough to each other, the very best we could hope for is that one of us would outlive the other and serve as a living testament to the life we’d shared.

After talking to the shirtless widower for half an hour, we left him and marched onward through Central Park. We spoke about our childhoods, about our fears, about politics, religion and culture. I found that more than being just a fun person to go out with at night, the man I was on a date with was deep, spiritual, intelligent and in possession of a wicked and dark sense of humour. The great expanse of the park, its trees and gazebos and hidden corners, seemed to melt into the conversation. Every turn we took and person we encountered felt imbued with magic. I thought of the evening stroll Jesse and Céline took through Vienna all those years ago.

All told, we spent five hours exploring the park. Eventually, he said it was time for us to part; he had to get to his car on the Upper West Side so he could start his drive home. I walked him to the subway station, and as we approached, I made a plea: “Can I please just take the subway with you and bring you to your car?” I had to wring as much time out of him as possible. He agreed, and I heaved a sigh of relief.

We arrived at his car, and I prepared to blurt out an emotional goodbye, but he stopped me. “I’m driving you to your hotel,” he said. As we drove, I discovered he was a furious driver; not an unsafe one, but one who likes to slam up against the speed limit and loathes traffic. When he curses other cars for being driven by idiots, his Boston accent needles its way out. “Learn how to drive a cahh, mothafuckah!” It’s adorable.

As we approached my hotel, I begged him for his time again. “I know it’s crazy, but my hotel has a happy hour right now and the drinks are free and would you please consider maybe coming in just for one drink?” As he pulled up to my hotel in midtown Manhattan, at one of the busiest intersections of the world, he spotted a free parking spot out front. “If that’s not a sign,” he said, “I don’t know what is.”

We got to the hotel bar and I poured us each a glass of chardonnay. We walked out to the patio and, to my surprise, my mother was seated in a corner by herself. I pointed her out and my date walked over and sat with her. For two hours. They hit it off famously; I barely spoke. By then the sun was beginning to set and he said, at last, that it was time. I walked him to his car and kissed him against the hood. I took one final look at him and studied his face, his outfit, his body, the sparkle in his eyes. And I walked back to the hotel, sure that I’d been changed irrevocably.

Just as I began to process what had just happened, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned and he had his hand outstretched, a shiny American quarter nestled in his palm. “Something to remember me by,” he said.

The second most profound moment in the Before trilogy is in its second film, 2004’s Before Sunset. Nine years after the events of Before Sunrise, Jesse and Céline reconnect, both unsatisfied with how their lives have unfolded after the glorious high of their night in Vienna. They walk through Paris and find that their old spark still burns. Before Sunrise began with a glare; Before Sunset ends with one. Céline brings Jesse to her apartment and performs a song she wrote for him about the night she met him, the night her life stuck in place. All the while, Jesse looks at her with the stare of a man ready to blow up his life.

After we parted ways, my American lover and I spoke on the phone every day for two months. About a week in, it became clear we’d need to see each other again, so I booked a flight to visit him in his small Pennsylvania town. In the weeks leading up to my flight, I felt suspended in air. Was what we felt just a weekend thing? Would our chemistry fizzle under the pressure of being together for four days? Was my fantasy about to be punctured?

On my first night there, he picked me up from the bus stop in town. I had this idea that I’d see him and my anxieties would dissipate, replaced by a honey-sweet good feeling. That didn’t happen. I was thrilled to be with him, but I had no idea how the weekend would unfold, and my nerves persisted. That first night is a bit of a blur to me. I remember smoking a cigarette on his patio, and I remember him blowing smoke into my mouth, and I remember us touching again, tentatively at first, a finger in a hand, then a foot on a leg, then a torso into another. I remember serotonin rushing through my brain. I remember panic keeping me from sleeping.

On the second day, he took me on a hike in the Poconos. We were to scale a mountain. Something about his energy was off. Although we’d spent hours on FaceTime, I realized at the base of the mountain that he was still a stranger to me. I didn’t know how he handled adversity, or what he was like when he was tired or hungry, or what his eating habits were or how his mood might be affected by strenuous exercise. Our relationship was fantastical in New York, then digital on FaceTime. This mountain, on the other hand, was real.

We began our climb in silence. My mind was racing. Did he like me? Had I messed up somehow? Had I made a horrible mistake? I had to get out of my head, so I asked him how he was. He said he was “good,” which was unsatisfactory, so I sharpened my line of questioning. “How are you feeling about us? About this trip, so far?”

He admitted that he was feeling anxious. I felt relieved that I wasn’t alone, and we spent the hike talking through our feelings. We agreed the pressure was getting to us. I suggested trying to take it easy, to allow the weekend to flow over us, to attempt to be present with each other. I said we could check in any time if it was feeling too cumbersome. The fact that he could tell me about his feelings, thorny as they were, reassured me that I hadn’t made a mistake at all.

As we neared the summit, our path narrowed and steepened. The sun glowed hot and yellow in the sky. We were sweating through our shirts. We crested the last bit of the hike in renewed silence. At the end of the path was the peak of a waterfall, where we sat and ate berries and listened to the trickle of the water. He lay down in the sun, its light revealing flecks of gold and green in his eyes that I hadn’t noticed before. The hike had turned his perfect curls into a messy poof of brown tangles. He stared wistfully out into the distance, apparently reflecting on the heavy conversation we’d had on the hike. I had never seen anything more beautiful in my life.

After a while there, we began our descent. The path forked before us. I thought we should go right, but he insisted we turn left. I followed him. At the right of the path was a large log, and in it was a strange, ribbed twig. I stared at the twig and noticed it move as he approached it. “That’s a rattle!” I exclaimed. The snake’s head peered out from beside the log, and we slowly stepped away and turned back the way I’d initially suggested. He had a petrified look on his face that slowly broke into a smile and then a belly-deep laugh. We didn’t stop laughing until we got back to the car. By the time I slid into his passenger seat, I could tell he was obsessed with me.

Every second of the trip after that felt like a drug-induced high. There would be moments where we’d stare into each other’s eyes and become so overwhelmed by joy that we’d burst into tears. He told me he loved me by the third day. We were boyfriends by the fourth.

A month later, I returned to Pennsylvania and spent a week with him. We had grown comfortable with each other by then, comfortable enough to forego dates and run errands instead. On one particular drive to the grocery store, Lady Gaga’s version of “La Vie en Rose” began to play over the car speakers. To my surprise, he knew every word of the song. “Il est entré dans mon coeur,” he sang, shifting his gaze between me and the road. “Une part de bonheur.” Tears welled in my eyes as I watched him sing. I thought of Ethan Hawke and realized my life was blowing up before me.

I went home and, separated from the man who had brought me a level of happiness I thought I might never touch again, I fell into a depression. We still spoke every day but nothing compared to sharing a home with him. I cherished unbridled access to him when I had it; I missed it desperately when I didn’t. During that time, I went to the Toronto International Film Festival and saw Blue Moon, Linklater’s new film starring Hawke.

In Blue Moon, Hawke plays Lorenz Hart, the former writing partner of Richard Rodgers. The film follows Hart as he drinks and soliloquizes his way through an afterparty celebrating the opening night of Oklahoma!, the first musical Rodgers composed without him. Hart is grief-stricken by the loss of his writing partner and delusionally enamoured with a beautiful young woman who does not reciprocate his feelings. He is a brilliant man whose ego has rendered him unable to genuinely connect with others. He wrote some of the greatest love songs of all time—including “My Funny Valentine” and “Blue Moon”—yet at the end of the film he dies alone, a drunk failure, a footnote in someone else’s legend. For a lovesick motherfucker like me, Blue Moon is a horror movie.

The high I got from being with my man was addictive, but Blue Moon helped me see that I’m seeking something healthy, something that will last. I didn’t want to end up like Hart, obsessed with romance and disinterested in genuine connection or mutual respect. I needed guidance from the man I knew with the most wisdom in matters of the heart—Richard Linklater. So I convinced my boyfriend to watch the Before films with me.

We watched them over FaceTime, he in Pennsylvania and me in Toronto, divided by space but united by a technology that didn’t exist when Jesse and Céline were falling in love. He lapped up Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. They’re terrific movies, and the analogues between our story and the films were immediately evident to him. We cried throughout both films, stealing looks at each other through our phone screens.

But I was scared to show him the trilogy’s final installment, 2013’s Before Midnight. It follows Jesse and Céline, now married with kids, as the web of yarn that held their relationship together unravels over the course of an evening. Unlike the first two Before movies, Midnight is polarizing. It’s a stark and unflinching portrait of a lived-in relationship, one where the fantasies that initially drove two people to each other have failed to materialize. In Before Sunset, Jesse and Céline find each other flawless. By Before Midnight, they are forced to reckon with the fact that flawlessness is a facade. The castle they built around each other is made of sand. What will they do with the ruins?

As the film ended, I turned to my phone and saw my American boy. Once again, he was crying.

“That was my favourite one,” he choked out.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“It’s real,” he replied.