Leila, R’s best friend, and Hooman leave their little Pennsylvania home where the Hershey chocolate factory runs, and drive to Virginia for the weekend. Leila talks of their little town that is made up of farms and cornfields and streets named Cocoa and Peanut that smell of chocolate. They share with us what they know about good wines, how much they hate going to work, and that they came to America tens years late. We show them Old town and Georgetown and they fall in love, suddenly speaking of houses they’d wish to have. We sit by the dark water, watching its vastness, stretching without end. Night has fallen and Leila and R speak of their 20s, when they were young, juvenile college students, carelessly letting time pass, doing things they now wish they could do again. Leila tells me I’m the luckiest girl, that I came here at the right age, that I can have so much, that I can be happy. She loves New York City as much as I do and tells me one day she’ll live there. She doesn’t realize that we both live the American dream, that we are both lucky, that despite age, we both can have New York.
Night ends. And we let time pass, unaware that we are a day older. Leila has the world at her fingertips. But in the midst of cornfields, farms, empty bars and cattle, she refuses to wake up and think that one day, she will have the possibility of picking a different path. She will have a million possibilities, and nothing, not even a cornfield, will get in her way.