Barbie was important to me. This summer melted her.

(CNN) — If anything particularly remarkable happened between late July and December of last year, I don’t remember it. All I know is pink.

I was too busy spending time with “Barbie.” I’ve seen the movie more than 20 times since its premiere on July 21, 2023. Half of those viewings were to sold-out theaters, with cheering crowds decked out in every shade of pink. It was sublime.

Watching “Barbie” defined so much of the second half of my 2023. It was a reliable escape and a constant good time, a cultural connection I shared with almost everyone in my life and almost something like an identity I could choose for myself.

I haven’t found a movie event of this caliber in 2024. And we could certainly use it: this summer is decidedly dark. The political climate is apocalyptic. It’s too hot to do almost anything but go to the movies.

Watching “Barbie” again a year later, I realized that I loved the phenomenon less than the movie. The summer of “Barbie” was one of my happiest, when I felt truly connected to my fellow human beings. Watching the movie now only reminds me of the time I was in Barbie Land, before it all became real.

I wanted it to be good so badly.

From the moment Barbie was announced, I had high hopes that the movie would deliver, and every development I could find about the mysterious film only made me more impatient: the first photo of Ryan Gosling as Ken, looking like a bleached-blond version of himself made of clay; the seemingly incongruous casting announcements for Will Ferrell, one half of Sex Education’s cast, John Cena; the paparazzi photos of Margot Robbie crying on a sidewalk in a pink cowgirl ensemble. be?

I watched with gusto as jokes on social media about a “Barbie”-“Oppenheimer” (“Barbenheimer”) double feature turned into a full-fledged event that people started buying tickets for. I wrote a guide on the best way to watch both films together while obsessively searching for interviews, promos, behind-the-scenes glimpses — anything that would quench my “Barbie” thirst.

Finally, the day before its theatrical release, I squeezed into a crowded room for employees of Warner Bros. Discovery (parent company of Warner Bros., which released “Barbie,” and CNN).

I loved it so much that I watched it again, twice, that Saturday, ending my only Oppenheimer viewing. (Sorry, Nolan.) Nearly everyone at the screenings of both films wore some shade of pink.

And then I kept watching. I took my partner, my parents, and several friends to see it on different occasions, hoping to hear them laugh when Ken threw “Barbie from the Ice Capades’ cute training suit and dazzling skirt” over the edge of his dream house or cry when Barbie entered her human life for the first time. And I watched it by myself a few times, too, finally feeling comfortable being alone in a movie theater because I didn’t feel alone.

There’s so much to love: an obscure joke about Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus, Issa Rae’s pronunciation of “The God-“FA-ther,” fake little seagulls hovering over the hard sand of Barbie Land’s beach, the heartbreaking recognition on Robbie’s face when his Barbie knows she no longer belongs in her plastic world.

But I liked “Barbie” mostly because watching it over and over again, always in front of packed houses, made me Me to feel like the one who was becoming more human.

“Barbie” is a movie about being a woman, but more so about being a person, about wanting to belong in the world, even when that world is cruel and unsympathetic and brings up confusing and disturbing feelings in you. The real world destroys all the plans you had for your life, takes the candid optimism of your youth and melts it like a plastic doll in a hot car. Sometimes it turns you into a Barbie of depression.

In “Barbie,” rebuilding yourself despite depression seems easy. All it takes is a fiery speech from America Ferrara and her preteen daughter, who begins to reconcile with the doll she had previously called a fascist. But forcing yourself to reclaim your place in this cruel world is perhaps the hardest and most essential step in no longer being the Barbie of depression.

Watching “Barbie” over and over again brought me out of an isolation I didn’t even realize I was in. For the first time since the pandemic began, I was sitting in a crowded movie theater, surrounded by people of all ages waiting to be transported and greeting each other with “Hi, Barbie”—something I would have found awkward in the past, but I embraced.

“Barbie” became a connection point I could share with everyone in my life, from my new friends to my hairdresser to the bartenders. If I had nothing to say, I could always talk about “Barbie.” We could discuss whether we thought Ferrara’s second-act monologue was a reductive distillation of feminism 101. Whether there was too much Ken in a movie called “Barbie.” Whether it was actually any good. Maybe they’d watch it again or maybe they’d forget about it forever, but they always had something to say.

Watching “Barbie” has become a habit.

I got sick in September, luckily, the same day “Barbie” became available for purchase on demand. I watched it over and over throughout my illness, falling asleep to Helen Mirren’s narrator and waking up to “Handler-comma-Barbara” showing up at her gynecologist’s office.

I often put it on in October to prepare for my Halloween costume: I dressed as the little girl with glasses in the film’s Kubrickian prologue who smashes her doll to pieces after first laying eyes on Robbie’s plastic princess. And I watched it twice on Christmas Day, once with director Greta Gerwig’s commentary and later in the theatrical version with my reluctant grandfather. I could sense that everyone around me was starting to feel “Barbie” fatigue. Once Gosling finished his dazzling Oscar performance in “I’m Just Ken,” “Barbie” fever officially ended. I never wanted that to happen.

But when you watch something over and over again, its content eventually ceases to matter or interest you entirely—the storyline, the plot, and the performances melt into a comforting soup that you’ve drunk so many times that you don’t really taste it anymore. So I put “Barbie” aside for a while, which shocked my friends who knew me as the Atlanta area’s preeminent “Barbie” fan. (Of course, I joked, I had contributed to its billion-dollar box office with all my repeat viewings.)

When I saw him again last week for the first time in months, alone, I was struck by how bittersweet it all was.

This year, there is no cinematic equivalent to “Barbie,” no cultural phenomenon to connect with, however artificial. I feel more isolated from my peers this year than I did last year, and no moviegoing has been able to compensate for that — even at this year’s box-office smash, “Inside Out 2,” the audience was muted, resigned.

I miss it. Watching “Barbie” now makes me nostalgic for the first few times I saw it (without the incessant “Gran Turismo” trailers, remember?) and felt like I was part of the audience just by sitting in the audience.

It’s a movie, and I’m an adult. It didn’t teach me anything I already knew about being a woman or a human being. But it was something I could love with all my heart, this silly movie that brought people, lovers and haters alike, together in an air-conditioned movie theater in the middle of summer and gave us a musical interlude à la Matchbox Twenty.

There may not be another event like this for a long time, one that dominates cultural conversations for months, that drives all sorts of viewers to the movies to experience this pink fantasy for themselves, and that erases the darkness of the real world. But we will always have our “Barbie” summer.