The Finale Got Me

September second. I had one plan for tonight: watch the last two episodes of a show I have been taking very seriously and very slowly, because the first season earned it and I did not want to rush the ending. That was the plan. The plan lasted until the second-to-last episode ended on a note that I can only describe as a structural crime against my evening, and then I watched the finale immediately, which I had promised myself I wouldn't do.

I am not going to name the show because I do not want to be responsible for anyone else's Tuesday. What I will say is that I stood in the kitchen for several minutes afterward holding a mug of tea that had gone cold at some earlier point, I don't know when, and replaying specific scenes in my head with the focused intensity of someone trying to catch a discrepancy in a legal document. I was not catching a discrepancy. I was just standing there.

the floor called and I answered

The prints are still against the kitchen wall, which I noticed in the moment because the light was hitting them in a particular way, and the macramé cord was on the windowsill doing its usual thing, and all of that was just continuing to exist while I had my small private moment of being completely undone by fiction. Which, honestly. That's the apartment. It just holds whatever is happening in it without comment.

me explaining the plot to myself. again.

I went to bed at a reasonable hour. I lay there thinking about the finale for forty minutes. I have already looked up whether there is a second season. There is. I will pace myself. I will watch it slowly. This is my commitment to you.