There is a character, Captain Jack, that one of Dr. Who's companions Rose had saved a few seasons back. She apparently did something wrong, because Captain Jack is now immortal. The problem is not that he's invincible, however; it's that he's stuck in one place in time. Time and space, as difficult as they are for me to understand in theoretical terms, have always been fascinating to me. Captain Jack fascinates not because of his uncanny resemblance to a very gay Tom Cruise (the show likes to poke fun at Americans) but because of this idea that he's trapped in time. He can do some amazing things (he can still travel through time, but his personhood is stuck in time so he never ages and never dies, as if that time in which he were alive is always happening).
Still there is something sad about not being able to move forward. I'm sitting at my favorite place in the apartment, at the kitchen table (with food, of course!), thinking about how much I'm going to miss this place when I have to move out. I'll miss my roommates, my professors, my friends who are graduating, my friends who have been sucked in by London. I wish I could keep this moment in time so things never change.
But staying in one point in time means you're trapped. And it's such a novel concept because it's unnatural; it's not how things are supposed to happen. Yeah, it's be nice if I didn't have to move on and become a real adult, if I could keep learning and reading forever, hanging out with these friends and professors. But there's something, I feel, that will grow stale if we all don't move on like we're supposed to.
Life is loss, and loss is life. Flowers grow in the Spring to die in the Fall, if they're not scorched by the sun in the Summer. I'm becoming more comfortable with the idea that we exist in a space of lack, but only because that space has to exist for the proper things to come and go.
No comments:
Post a Comment