Dear Public Diary,

I didn’t expect to cry this much over a romantic comedy. I didn’t expect to recognize myself this much in one either. Voicemails for Isabelle arrived on Netflix like most rom-coms do — with a charming premise, good-looking leads, and the quiet promise that everything will work out in the end. And it does. But somewhere between the laughing and the crying — and there was a lot of both — I stopped watching Jill and started watching myself.

The setup is this: Jill (Zoey Deutch) is an aspiring pastry chef living a loud, chaotic, deeply felt life in San Francisco — not because she’s particularly at peace, but because she made a promise to her sister Isabelle (Ciara Bravo), who spent years moving between home and hospital battling cystic fibrosis. Jill lived twice as hard so Isabelle could experience the world through her. When Isabelle dies, Jill doesn’t know how to stop. So she keeps leaving her voicemails. About her nightmare boss Chef Bastien (Nick Offerman), who runs his kitchen like a petty dictator. About the coworker who makes her feel invisible every single day. About how impossibly, achingly lonely she is without the one person who always picked up. Jamie Anderson once wrote that grief is just love with no place to go — and Jill’s voicemails are exactly that. All the love she still has for Isabelle, refusing to stop moving, finding the only outlet left: a phone number that shouldn’t still exist.

What she doesn’t know is that Isabelle’s number has been reassigned to Wes (Nick Robinson) — a successful, carefully guarded real estate agent in Austin who begins receiving her most unfiltered, most honest, most humiliating confessions about her life. Leah McKendrick, who wrote and directed the film, said that voicemails are things that “cannot be edited or rewritten” — and that’s exactly what makes them terrifying and intimate at once. You can’t take them back. You can’t smooth the rough edges. What arrives is exactly what left you. Simone Weil once wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Wes listened to every single one. And somewhere in that listening, he fell in love. And somewhere in that love, he flew to San Francisco to find her.

There’s a scene early on that I haven’t stopped thinking about. Jill and Wes are watching MasterChef together after a night that didn’t go the way either of them expected — he had pulled back from a kiss, gently but clearly, and she had said fine, let’s just watch TV. She falls asleep on the couch. He carries her to bed and takes the couch himself. And when she wakes up in the morning alone in the bed, for a second her face does that thing — the familiar collapse of someone bracing for the version where he’s already gone, where she woke up and the warmth had left like it always does. And then she turns, and he’s still there, on the couch, asleep. So she gets up quietly and lies down next to him. Not because she forgot about the night before. But because he stayed, and her body needed to be near that. There was no strategy in it, no overthinking. Just a woman who had been left enough times that a man still being in the room in the morning felt like something worth moving toward. I recognized that. The specific relief of realizing someone didn’t leave.

I recognized Jill at work too — isolated, unseen, doing a job she gave everything to and receiving very little back. The kitchen doesn’t love her. Her boss doesn’t see her. Her coworkers don’t really let her in. There’s a particular kind of loneliness in that — not the dramatic, visible kind, but the quiet one that lives in ordinary Tuesdays when nobody saves you a seat, when your effort goes unacknowledged, when you smile through another shift and wonder if you made the right choices. I know that loneliness.

And then — the wedding scene. Jill finds out the truth: Wes had been receiving her voicemails all along. Every confession, every rambling voice note she sent into what she thought was empty air — he heard all of it. And it didn’t feel romantic in that moment. It felt like a trap. Like something had been constructed around her without her knowing, and she had walked straight into it believing it was real. They fight. Of course they fight. Because how do you trust something that started without your consent? How do you know where the performance ended and the real feeling began? And somewhere in the middle of all of it, she says it — that she’s not that lucky. That things this good don’t happen to her. I had to sit with that line for a moment, because it’s not just something Jill says out of anger. It’s something she genuinely believes. There’s a voice some of us carry around quietly, underneath everything, that says: this isn’t for you. Good things like this don’t happen to people like you. Don’t get used to it. Stephen Chbosky wrote it simply in The Perks of Being a Wallflower: “We accept the love we think we deserve.” That’s the whole wound in one sentence. Not that love isn’t available. Just that we unconsciously decide, long before anyone arrives, whether we’re the kind of person it’s allowed to stay with. And the worst part isn’t the voice. It’s how familiar it sounds. How long it’s been there. How it arrives exactly when something beautiful is within reach and makes you want to flinch away from it before it can disappoint you first.

What I loved most about Wes — the thing that made me believe in this love story when I don’t always believe in love stories — is that he loved Jill’s inside before he ever saw her outside. He fell for her voice, her chaos, her grief, her honesty, her way of rambling through a voicemail about feet pics and existential dread in the same breath. He knew who she was before he knew what she looked like, and by the time he saw her, it was already too late to care about anything else.

But the moment that sealed it for me — the one I keep returning to — is when he tells her that he knows she doesn’t need a man. He’s not standing there asking to complete her. He’s not making himself necessary. He’s not framing his love as something she owes him or something she’s lucky to receive. He just says the quiet, vulnerable truth: that he needs her. That of all the things in his life that are fine, managed, under control — this is the one thing that got through. There’s a specific kind of courage in that. In saying I need you without adding so you have to stay. Without making your love someone else’s obligation. He handed her his own vulnerability without putting it on her shoulders, and that — that is the kind of love I actually believe in. Not love that makes you feel needed. Love that makes you feel chosen, specifically and freely, by someone who could have kept their heart closed and didn’t.

Bianca Sparacino wrote that you deserve the love you keep trying to give everyone else. Jill spent years pouring love into a voicemail, into a sister, into a kitchen that didn’t appreciate her — and somewhere in all of that giving, someone finally turned it around. I have always hated love at first sight, because it is built entirely on surface. But love at first listen? That I believe in. That’s the kind that lasts. Because when someone loves what’s inside you, there’s nothing left for time or gravity or a bad morning to take away.

There’s something I need to say about this film and sisters specifically. If you have one, this movie will break you open in a way that goes beyond typical movie-crying. Because it’s not abstract grief — it’s the specific, unthinkable grief of losing the person you lived your whole life beside. Jill and Isabelle weren’t just sisters; they were each other’s narrator. Jill lived twice as loudly so Isabelle could experience the world through her. And when Isabelle was gone, Jill kept talking into the silence — not because she thought anyone was listening, but because stopping felt like a second loss she couldn’t survive. Watching that, I felt the jealousy of it and the devastation of it at the same time. Jealous of a closeness that pure. Devastated that something so complete could end. If you have a sister, call her after you watch this. Tell her something you’ve been meaning to say. The film will make you want to.

And then there is Wes. Sweet, careful, disarming Wes. The way he moves around Jill — like she is something precious that he doesn’t want to startle. He doesn’t come in loud or urgent. He doesn’t make her feel like a project or a rescue mission. He just shows up, quietly, in the space next to her, and stays there. He carries her to bed without waking her. He’s still on the couch when she turns around in the morning. He trades the one thing he values most — a rare card worth thousands, his most prized possession — not for something that benefits him, but to recover the voicemails she thought she’d lost forever from Isabelle, because somewhere along the way he understood what those messages meant to her, without her ever having to explain it. That’s a specific kind of love. The kind that notices what you’re holding and decides, quietly, to help you hold it. No announcement. No expectation of credit. Just — I see what matters to you, so it matters to me. May this love find us all. I mean it.

And it all started with her voice. Not her face, not a photo, not a first impression carefully managed for someone she was trying to impress. Her voice on a voicemail — rambling and honest and completely off the rails, the way you only sound when you’re talking to someone who already loves you. The way you sound when you’re not performing. When Wes fell for Jill, he fell for the most unedited version of her — the one that exists in the space between the words she’d choose in public and the ones that just come out when she thinks nobody important is listening. There is something almost unbearably romantic about that. Because the version of us that shows up in those unguarded moments — that’s the realest one. The one no filter reaches. And to have someone fall in love with that version first, before the put-together one even had a chance to show up — that’s not just a love story. That’s the best possible kind of being found. The way Jill carries her — in her voice, her laughter, the life she refuses to slow down even when it exhausts her. I watched their scenes and felt something I can only describe as a quiet ache for that specific closeness. The kind of relationship where someone knows all of it, and loves you anyway. Where you don’t have to explain yourself or edit yourself or be fine. Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote that where someone used to be, “there is a hole in the world” — and that’s exactly what the film shows. Not dramatically, not loudly. Just a Jill-shaped absence where Isabelle used to be, in every ordinary moment. I felt jealous, honestly. Not bitterly — just gently, the way you feel jealous of something you haven’t found yet but still believe is possible.

Jill cried easily. She felt everything loudly and without apology. She was lonely in a crowd and honest in a voicemail and brave in the most exhausted, imperfect way. She was me in so many ways it was almost uncomfortable to watch.

But here’s what the film gave me at the end, quietly: the reminder that being seen takes time. That the right person doesn’t fall for the performance — they wait for the voicemail. The one you leave when you think no one important is listening. The one that’s messy and inarticulate and goes completely off the rails. That’s the one that matters. That’s the one that finds its way to the right person anyway.

— Until the next one.

Press enter or click to view image in full size