The last episode

I walked from my house to the library this morning. A short stretch lined with Eucalyptus, the tax I felt in my body finally let me accept that I have actually been sick the past few days and not just hiding from Ecuador. Friday night we borrowed a DVD player and thanks to the thriving pirated DVD industry here in Ecuador, began the last season of Six Feet Under. Saturday we finished it. It has been hard for me to place the emotions I have around the end of this series. Saying goodbye to these characters is saying goodbye to this part of me that for the last four years has retreated into this story that is not my own, but yet at moments has shed perspective on my own. Sunday, trying to enjoy hot springs a long bus ride from Zuleta, this flu began to take over my muscles, my throat, my lungs, and after the monumental task of leading a field trip in Spanish Monday morning, I curled up into tea, two wool blankets, and repeat viewings. The beginning of my time with this show was deeply personal, the first two seasons viewed alone, and the discovery of the series in coincidence with the commencement of therapy for depression. So I suppose it shouldn’t have been surprising that watching the last episode again on my own should bring forth a deeper set of emotions. I bawled, and have been incredibly weepy since. For the record, I cry easily, but something about this particular moment has cracked me open and let me be where I am instead of judging it so fiercely. I am ready to go home and start my life, and yet this is an indefinite idea of the future. Home. I am juxtaposed against wanting to be here and take advantage of all it has to offer, and wanting to feel the comfort of my own language, my friends, the culture I know and feel free to push against, judge, criticize, and recreate in my own light. This crack has left me raw with want for community, family, a baby. Is it just that Six Feet Under is so much about death that it makes me want to live? but what better way to live than be here in the present? Maybe that’s not me right now. I want what I don’t have.