STORY

The Horizon is a Scar, My Love follows the journey of a pair of outcast lovers living out of their vehicle. Set adrift by multi-generational poverty and familial tragedies, “Q” and “Sunday” travel across the U.S., occasionally engaging in opportunistic petty crimes. Capitalizing on a temporary catering job at a home in the Portland suburbs, they burglarize it. The house belongs to “Simone,” the widow of a recently deceased spiritual leader. When Simone catches them in the act, Sunday’s moral reluctance pushes her and Q toward a bumbling standoff that ends with him passing out from a chronic and debilitating migraine. The following morning, Q awakens to a bewildering scene of Sunday and Simone having breakfast and sharing friendly conversation. Further bewildering is Simone’s offer for them to take temporary residence in her home. In the days that follow, as the couple and Simone grow familiar with each other, they are gradually drawn to her hypnotic charisma. When Q goes temporarily blind due to an ocular migraine, a hallucination of Simone causes him to attribute his recovery to her supernatural abilities. Their admiration for her ascends to near-religious veneration.

Spurred on by the emotional catharses hitherto and the promise of mind-expanding experiences to come, the couple embarks on a fasting silent meditation guided by their host where they wander through the wilderness of the id and lose themselves in psycho-spiritual hallucinations. Years of both ingrained and cultivated nomadic countercultural beliefs and practices are answered by the faint echoes of radical spirituality. But as Sunday and Q’s devotion to Simone deepens, her ambivalent ties to “The Faith,” the spiritual organization headed by her late husband, invoke a gathering storm on the horizon. When certain members of The Faith resurface in her life to solemnly fulfill unanswered questions, her tormented knowledge of the husband’s secrets erupts into rage and heartache. In a moment of profound mutual vulnerability, Q is seduced by Simone and what comes after is the unraveling of “Truth.”

One morning, Simone informs Sunday and Q of her intention to vacate the house within the span of several days and advises for them to do the same. Before departing, she makes one final proposal. If they will safeguard a previously mailed and resealed envelope until the year’s end, they will be paid $5000. Sunday and Q agree. The following day, as they are helping to organize some of Simone’s contents in the attic for her eventual departure, she vanishes. Her single adieu is a broken picture frame of her late husband lying on the bedroom floor. Sunday and Q’s opposing interpretations of the meaning and consequence of Simone’s disappearance launches them into a cataclysmic argument. The dark seas of disdain, betrayal, and inequity that churned beneath the surface of their lives come crashing into the light. The heart of Sunday and Q’s friendship with Simone is cast into the quagmire of class conflict and socioeconomic difference. The existential revelations experienced in her home peels away, leaving a residue of cruel psychological games.

Heartbroken, Sunday leaves her lover in a fury. Following a spell of nightmarish introspection, Q gives pursuit to find her hitchhiking on a nearby highway. When a stranger comes driving up to intervene in the quarrel, the enduring bonds Q and Sunday share undergo a violent metamorphosis. The hammer of first light shatters the cocoon and what emerges reshapes all they’ve ever known of the experience called “love.”