Tell Me Now About Entanglement

Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)

My mom died last October and ever since—and despite being a pretty skeptical agnostic most of my life—I haven’t been able to help imagining some sort of afterlife. The possibility of it. Coupled with Valentine’s Day and my tenth wedding anniversary, I’ve been thinking a lot about love, romance, and relationships that can endure a lifetime—or longer.

The first couple of days, all I wanted was for people to stop reminding me she was dead.

Like maybe if I smoked enough weed and remained ensconced inside the safe, small bubble of my living room—movies running endlessly while I stared at the television, numb, my husband posted up next to me on the couch like a sentry—then it might sink in slowly, osmosis-like.

That seemed preferable.

But I kept getting texts. And messages. Condolences. People telling me, so infuriatingly-fucking-kindly, how very sorry they were that my mom was dead.

*ding* I’m so sorry. *ding* I just heard. *ding* Your mom’s dead. *ding* Hey, did you forget for a second—dead mom alert! *ding* *ding**ding*

I’d never lost anyone who meant so much to me, not even close. Suddenly, there was a hole torn in the universe. Just an awful, empty space.

A couple of days later I was poring over flights to Philadelphia, my tongue worrying at the hollow in the back of my mouth where, up until recently, a tooth implant used to be.

The fucking rotten tooth.

A dentist had convinced me to get the cursed object installed almost seven years earlier, after he botched two root canals and left my jaw permanently aching, the root of the tooth sore despite not having any actual roots left inside it. He referred me to a specialist who yanked that tooth out of my head in pieces and screwed a shiny new fake one deep into my jawbone. It never felt right, and it still ached.

The day before my mom died, like some kind of portent, the implant failed. That’s what the dentist called it, like my mouth had taken a test and been found lacking.

“It just happens sometimes,” the dentist said, examining the bloody screw she’d pulled from my skull only moments earlier. “Though not usually after so many years. Have you been clenching your jaw?”

Honey, I’ve been clenching my jaw since kindergarten.

It was another costly misfortune in a string of unfortunate, health-related incidents that plagued me throughout 2024. By October, I was already referring to 2024 as “the worst year of my life.”

You know what they say: The universe has a great sense of humor, you just need to learn how to take a joke.

And so I was heading home, from west coast to east, with a new hole in my head and a gaping hole in my world.

The only person I felt sorrier for than myself was my dad.

*

From the moment we see Adam (Tom Hiddleston embodying the raven-haired, marble-skinned rocker) and Eve (Tilda Swinton, as androgynously, gloriously alien as she’s ever been in a palette of whites) onscreen together, their depth of feeling for one another is palpable. Although they’re only speaking on the phone and are half a world apart, their yearning for one another is a near-tangible entity, encircling the two of them like some spell spanning the cosmos.

“Adam,” Eve says over the phone, her voice resonant.

“Eve,” he sighs, as if the very sound of her name is shelter.

That they are both vampires and hundreds, even thousands of years old changes little. Not with a love as profound as theirs.

The two have been together for centuries, though not always physically (I suppose living in different countries for a while probably feels more like taking to your own bedrooms when you have all of eternity sprawled out in front of you). Eve has been staying in a sumptuous home in Tangier where books line every room, stairwell, and hallway like bricks. Reclining cat-like in her canopy bed, plush with luxurious fabrics threaded in pale blues, pinks, and golds, she is more than content to spend her time listening to music and speed-reading every book under the sun, wonder and delight dancing across her face as her bone-pale fingers skim the pages.

Adam, who is implied to be the younger of the pair by maybe a few thousand years, is not so content. He makes brilliant music that he rarely releases—and even then, he does so anonymously—from a crumbling house in Detroit that he almost never leaves. He’s become depressed and suicidal, unmoored from time and a world full of mindless “zombies” (i.e., humans).

“It’s the zombies I hate. And their fear of their own fucking imaginations.”

Eve understands that Adam needs her, and agrees to make the trip to Detroit—even if the traveling is “such a drag” (red eye flights only, of course).

“Eve,” Adam says when he knows she’s on her way to him. “I love you so much.”

“I’ll take that,” Eve replies, kissing the phone screen, “for the journey.”

When Eve arrives at Adam’s doorstep and he sees her, finally, the night stills as if joining them in drawing a breath. He strides toward her, stops at the top of the steps. For a moment they simply stare at each other, her face open and full of tenderness, his dark and hungry but no less adoring.

He takes a couple steps down and invites her onto the stairs, arm elegantly extended, a gentleman asking his love to dance. She obliges, placing her hand in his upturned palm. Their gaze never wavers as he steps backward up the stairs and she follows, their movements pantherine. You can almost see some magnetic force or string betwixt them, drawing their bodies closer.

Joining together in the light of the doorway, limbs entwining, breath intermingling, they’re like disciples of some ancient religion, drunk on opium and Nirvana. Adam inhales Eve before finally kissing her, hands clasping, lock and key. Inside the house, he removes her white leather gloves, taking each precious finger and lifting it to his lips, his face, like she is the rarest, most fragrant flower. He is intoxicated by her, and she him.

This is Jim Jarmusch’s vision of vampirism and everlasting romance in Only Lovers Left Alive: all black velvet and perfumed sighs, alabaster skin on skin, hands held like vows. Blood is a drug enjoyed sparingly but necessarily, and both Adam and Eve procure human blood from middlemen; a doctor, in Adam’s case, and in Eve’s, the vampire Christopher Marlowe who faked his own death back in 1593. Due to disease and other typical end-of-the-worldish problems, “clean” blood is hard to come by. It’s treated as only a small trifle, however; Adam and Eve are basically unbothered by the declining state of humanity. And why wouldn’t they be? They’re not a part of it.

From the human perspective in 2025, it’s an awfully appealing vision.

*

Adam and Eve are constantly, consistently presented as two halves of a whole. Light and dark, yin and yang.

After Adam asks Eve to come see him in Detroit, he lies in bed, alone, lost in a sea of black.

Once Eve is there, though, he’s made whole again. As is she.

“That doesn’t work, by the way,” Adam says to Eve as she pulls some bespoke blood popsicles from the freezer.

“Oh, it does,” she replies lightly, “I plugged it in.”

When the two play chess, each knows the other’s every weakness and tell (Eve wins, and Adam blames it on her aptitude for distracting him with “all the bloody talking”). They are always touching, if not entirely intertwined. Two interlocking pieces of the same puzzle.

Eve is the light to Adam’s dark, filling the house with warmth and life—in the figurative sense, anyway. When she discovers Adam is considering killing himself in earnest (via a wooden bullet procured by his protégé, an adorably clueless Anton Yelchin), she divulges a piece of timeless, hard-earned wisdom:

“How can you have lived for so long and still not get it? This self-obsession is a waste of living. It could be spent surviving things, appreciating nature, nurturing kindness and friendship. And dancing. You have been pretty lucky in love, though, if I may say so.”

She puts a record on and the bluesy, soulful beats of Denise LaSalle’s “Trapped by a Thing Called Love” start up as Eve begins to sway and spin on her own around the living room. She offers her hand to Adam as she dances without looking at him—both a mirroring and a sly reversal of their meeting on the steps, that yin and yang thing—and they begin to sway together, a reluctant smile overtaking Adam’s face.

I'm trapped

(Hooked on this thing called love)

I can't help myself

I'm hooked on you baby

(Hooked on this thing called love)

I just can't help it

I can never be happy

(Hooked on this thing called love)

When there's no one else

Oh baby, I love you

We might be trapped on a dying planet, but it’s because we love each other so damn much that we want to stay.

*

All my life, my parents were a unit, two parts of a whole. College sweethearts, they were together for sixty years—not an eternity, technically, but also nothing to sneeze at. What’s more, they were happy.

“If your mom ever leaves me, just take me out back and put me down like Old Yellar,” my dad used to joke. “There’s nothing left for me without her.”

(Remember what I said about the universe having a sense of humor? Yeah. The universe’s jokes are a lot darker than mine.)

It’s a rare gift, to have parents who love and—just as crucially—respect each other. Sure, they bickered sometimes, but like Adam and Eve, my parents’ affection and boundless warmth for one another was always self-evident. You could see it on their faces; they delighted in each other, they enjoyed being around one another. They laughed together, so much. They loved a good wedding, and so yes, they danced.

I grew up believing, easily, that I would find the same thing for myself one day.* That I should expect it. I’ve been with my husband for eighteen years now, ten of them married, and while we’re not always happy—I think only someone with a lobotomy could be these days—we are always, always happy to be together. Not to put too squishy a point on it, but he’s my best friend, and it’s damn-near impossible to imagine my life without him.

When my dad called to tell me she was gone, I remember saying, “Oh my god.” And then, “I’m so sorry.” I had lost my mother—a tragedy I’ve only begun to process months later—but at that moment, all I could think was that my dad had lost the love of his life, and his best friend.

It was unimaginable.

*

In a case of twinning films, Only Lovers Left Alive came out in 2013, about one year after a strikingly similar movie called Kiss of the Damned (2012).

In many ways, the two films follow the same trajectory. Both are about vampire couples living peacefully, obsessed and enmeshed with one another. In Damned, the protagonists, Djuna (Joséphine de La Baume, looking radiant) and Paolo (Milo Ventimiglia, rather rakish), drink animal blood to sustain themselves, a reserved approach to feeding similar to Eve’s blood popsicles. And like Adam and Eve, who largely sequester themselves from the world, Djuna and Paolo live in a “vampire community” removed from society and humanity.

In both films, a younger sister (Eve’s in Only Lovers, Djuna’s in Damned) appears suddenly to muck up the couple’s peaceful existence, if only briefly. Even 5,000-year-old immortals have that one family member, it seems.

The two films differ entirely, however, in storytelling approach and in where they aim focus. In Only Lovers, Jarmusch is entirely absorbed in illuminating the powerful intimacy Adam and Eve have developed over centuries of loving, and welcoming, one another in every way possible. Only Lovers is all softness and sensuality, hours spent tangled on the couch deep in conversation, blood wine and languid kisses.

Kiss of the Damned is all about lust.

“Will we live forever?”

“Chances are, we will. But there are ways to die. Sunlight. Decapitation. Fire. But we won’t get older, and we won’t get sick. And if get hurt, we heal almost right away. It’s a different reality. But I know we can have a normal life. You and me. Forever.”

Djuna says these words to Paolo not long after meeting him, sleeping with him, and, with his consent, turning him. It was love at first sight in the video store, but the foundation is… shaky, to say the least. (Both of them are exceedingly attractive, so it’s not exactly hard to understand. Who amongst us, after all.)

It’s all neon nights and feral sex, creamy skin, starving-black eyes and fangs gleaming. But when Djuna’s sister Mimi shows up and throws the couple’s insular world into chaos, it’s an embarrassingly short stretch before Paolo allows himself to be seduced by the interloper.

Poor Djuna. It’s such a human problem. But Paolo is young, I guess… in vampire years.

It’s possible that Adam was similarly conflicted in the early days of his turning and experienced missteps of his own. It’s difficult to imagine, though, given the way he looks at Eve; personally, I would bet good money his loyalty runs deep. In any case, the intense intimacy we see between them during the film is not merely the result of attraction—it couldn’t only be that, not after hundreds of years—but of a meaningful and lasting friendship.

It's worth noting that we never see Adam and Eve have sex, though you could argue it’s implied by their occasional nudity and shared penchant for wearing robes around the house (not to mention their names). But while they indulge in earthly pleasures like drinking blood from time to time, they’re clearly sensualists, savorers, and not horndogs. Nudity and sensuality don’t automatically translate to sex, and it’s just as easy to imagine they’ve moved beyond a need for it altogether. Either way, Jarmusch makes it clear by focusing on more domestic, “hangout-y” scenes that the core of their relationship isn’t sex, but companionship.

If my parents taught me anything, it’s that the most enduring loves are built upon the greatest friendships. Adam and Eve are a shining example of that.

But it’s hard not the empathize with Djuna and Paolo, too, whose only sin was wanting to be together, longer.

When it comes down to it, there’s never enough time.

*

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us got a taste of what eternity as a vampire might actually feel like.

My husband and I spent almost all of our time inside, confined to a two-bedroom apartment except for the brief walks we took with our dog every day. Before leaving the house, we’d suit up with face masks and arm ourselves with portable hand sanitizer and an invisible, antisocial bubble intended to ward off others because suddenly we were all dangerous.

It was an extraordinarily scary and stressful time, and there should be no mincing of words: the response to COVID-19 was, and continues to be, a disastrous failure of the United States government. On a personal level, I was skinnier than I’d been in high school, drinking way too much, and having panic attacks all the time.

But one thing was always easy and good and true throughout those many months in quarantine, and that was being with my husband. Because we live across the country from our families, our world essentially narrowed down to just the two of us. It was the only thing I didn’t hate about the apocalypse—the fact that, in the end, it was him by my side.

I got used to never being more than a room away from him. We spent hours getting high and talking, and we laughed a hell of a lot in spite of it all. We made meals and watched movies and had lots and lots of sex because we’re young and alive and we can.

I can’t pretend I hated every part of it, because I got to love him so much during that time.

The world didn’t end, as it turned out. When the quarantine was lifted and we were able to fly home to our families and friends again… it felt like catching my breath.

I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding it.

*

Time is the dream, especially when you’re in love. To hold it in your palm. Even better, to be beautiful and well together, forever.

If I could, would I? Sometimes I think I might.

But there is no choice. I know it will never be enough.

We smoke. My husband muses about the repeating patterns in nature, how they’re in our bodies, too. The way the eyeball looks like a galaxy inside. Veins, the branches of trees.

When I die, I want to be buried, unembalmed, part of nature again. It’s important to consider these things, I think.

Cut me open. The spiral of a shell.

Things have been difficult since my mom died. I’ve been stressed to hell and my body keeps on letting me know about it. But in the last few weeks I’ve started to eat better, and to exercise again. I’ve been spending a lot of time outside, and more time writing. With summer coming on (this is California), I can feel myself starting to come alive again. I can’t help it. The world may be on fire, but every time I go outside, it’s still there. And so am I.

We fuck to feel alive, don’t we, to feel a part of everything. All the mysterious, interlocking machinations of the universe. Death is a piece of that, too.

Without death, without completing the natural cycle, there can never be peace. Maybe that’s what Adam senses, and what keeps him conflicted, deep down. Yes, there is so much to love about the world, and to learn from it. But eventually, maybe, it feels right to be finished. Even alongside your love, your best friend, endless existence sounds wearying. The idea of eternal rest is comforting, I think. Just… not yet.

I need a little more time.

Not yet.

Not yet…

*To be clear, by “the same thing” I mean a mutually-respectful, loving relationship. I don’t think there is any single form or definition for a “good” relationship; if it works for you and the other people involved, I’m for it. I also know this essay leans a bit hetero and tradish, but I promise there are gayer things to come down the line.