see you in another life
on threads of time, lifelong connection and my fave 2000s series 'lost'
i feel like i’ve been in a liminal space for over a year, so i’ve been thinking about purgatory a lot (i even started writing a play about it).
and with thoughts of purgatory, of stuckedness, of excruciating repeated failed attempts at meaning-making, of course comes thoughts of my favourite 2000s series, lost.
in particular, about the character desmond and his catchphrase, “see you in another life.”
i started watching lost in the basement of my parents house in the mid-2000s with my brother. our parents had recently separated. our once scrappy sibling dynamic had turned somewhat more wholesome. i’d make us nachos in the microwave, using only grated cheese as a topping.
i rewatched lost during the pandemic. i’m only realizing as i literally write this that although the show itself has layered intensity and so much fodder for meaning-making, it’s showed up at crucial points in my life, where i was facing unavoidable change.
thinking about writing this has felt insurmountable because even though i’ve watched the series, in full, twice, i have ADHD and an inability to remember the plot points of most media i consume. i’ve thought about diving deep into other people’s thoughts about desmond’s character, but maybe the actual factually correct interpretation of his plot isn’t important here. maybe all that matters is the genuine recollection of how it made me feel.
as a fourteen-year-old, i didn’t have much experience with loss, but the little experience i had felt deep. i have always been a clinger. i cling to places, to people, to things. the transientness of life never sat well with me.
up until that point, i had lost an uncle i wasn’t very close to, my grandmother’s dog (i cried in my room for hours listening to avril lavigne’s slipped away on repeat), and had a close friend move six hours away (we were penpals for a second but it was 2002 and we were ten, so that was hard to keep up).
i recall the flashback in lost of desmond meeting jack (the main character) for the first time, in a stadium where they were both running up the stairs with increasing intensity. the scene itself foreshadows many things that happen later in the series, but what stuck with me most was desmond’s farewell.
“see you in another life.”
it became a regular sign-off for his character, and as we met desmond for the first time on the island, his “see you in another life” to jack in the flashback proved to be literally true.
without getting too into it, if you haven’t seen lost–a bunch of people get stranded on an island after a plane crash, and throughout the series, there are flashbacks and flash forwards that show how the characters have always been linked.
whether you agree with the explanation of the lost island being purgatory or not (i see it as a metaphorical purgatory at the very least), this first desmond interaction felt so prophetic to me as a fourteen-year-old.
“see you in another life” perfectly captured the magic and like…unprocessable heaviness of the fact that we are all intrinsically linked in ways we may or not realize, in this life, in past lives, in potential future lives.
watching this show at these pivotal times in my life really left a mark. made me want to hold the dichotomy of “everybody leaves” and “no one every really leaves” as tightly as a i could in my fourteen-year-old, and subsequently twenty-eight-year-old hands.
we’re all just coming and going, running into each other, making a mess of things, mending it back together. learning, growing, creating new reflections, showing them to each other. sometimes we may be able to consciously acknowledge it. other times people that leave still live in the back of our heads.
in another life, i’m still friends with my childhood best friends. i still bury my nose into the fur of my grandmother’s husky. i’m still writing letters to my fifth grade penpal.
i am everyone i’ve ever known, and i hold them in different parts of me, and in so many ways i have no way of knowing they’ve taken pieces of me with them too.
We’re all just walking each other home. – Ram Dass
wherever you are, whenever you are, thanks for walking with me.
xoxo
m
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