Researchers have often described time as being an illusion. A social construct that we created to inventory passing days in a way that would best make sense to us when time, in and of itself, is more fluid. And while it would take a team of scientists to explain this all properly, any one of us can feel it when happy chapters of life seem to fly by, while darker ones feel like they stretch for an eternity – or when recalling the summers of youth when two months felt twice as long, compared to the seasons of adulthood where calendar pages flip over months that feel as thin as the paper they're printed on.

Rewatching a favorite film is an interesting example of the illusion of time because you could watch it on Sunday, and then again on Monday, and find yourself a completely different person when no real stretch of time had passed at all. And yet still, you're viewing it through new eyes. To mark the 30th anniversary of "Interview with the Vampire," Neil Jordan's film adaptation of Anne Rice's debut novel, I rewatched this movie that I first saw when it hit theaters in 1994 — just a high schooler at the time — and had last watched just months ago as a married woman with a dog living in New Orleans, on the brink of 50. But this time was different, closing the gap on those 30 passing years like two hands clapped together, with a lot of joy and pain trapped inside, like a buzzing fly. Between the last watch and this most recent one, there is no more marriage, just me, the dog and the reminded lesson that hope springs eternal, carrying us from one year to the next. And chasing that hope, as one of the film's main characters, Louis de Pointe du Lac (Brad Pitt) illustrates, relies on finding something to say "yes" to. Something you can follow like a rope in the dark, to give you a reason to get up in the morning or, for him, the night. For Louis, that starts out as being the offer of immortality, and........

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