“I want everything. I want all the things.”

Tonight’s episode of Girls impressed me with the show’s ability to capture those unreal, fleeting moments where things just happen, one after the other, extraordinary events, moments that seem unreal and make a great (if slightly unbelievable) story a year later. It might be a whirlwind marriage to a near-stranger; a woozy night out that shatters and coalesces into a new relationship; or when an encounter with a doctor complaining about garbage transforms into an intense, intimate fling.

Girls is uniquely effective at portraying the brittle shakiness of these moments, things that are only believable because you don’t take a moment to reflect… because if you’re afraid that if you handle it too roughly the snowglobe will break into pieces and dispel the illusion.

More importantly, it captures that moment when the illusion fades, and reality seeps back in. Hannah’s epiphany about wanting happiness, “just like everyone else” seems profound to her, but it does little more than puzzle her new beau, Josh/Joshua (Patrick Wilson) revealing that this moment of profundity may be more pedestrian than she thinks. By the time she “sexits” his house the following morning, the illusion is broken.