The Ends Of Things

Last Sunday night six years of my life ended while I sat on my couch, wearing pajamas, completely captivated. Funny, because that’s exactly the same way those six years had begun.

Lost is over.

Six years is a long time to be committed to anything; jobs, relationships, pets, and here I was wrapped up in a completely imaginary world with pretend TV people. Lost had me hooked from the get go. It was a show that didn’t hand you everything on a silver platter. There weren’t little bows tied on top of every episode and, heck, maybe there were never any bows. But that’s what many of us liked about Lost, the thinking, the questioning, the theorizing, the morning after water cooler discussions and the multitudes of WTF moments. Like the island, it pulled so many different people together through one common denominator.

The characters became something more; so varied, so interesting, some mysterious, some sexy. We lived, loved and were lost along with them for six years.

And now they are gone.

It would be an understatement to say I wasn’t moved during the finale. I think I cried a total of five times. “It’s only a TV show,” you say. “Lame,” you say. Yes, I know. But how can you go six years being emotionally invested in the plight of these characters and not find yourself attached to their outcome?

I couldn’t.

These characters had been in my life when I was six years younger. My job was different. My house was different. There were people in my life six years ago that are not here now. There are teenagers now where there were children before. College graduates where there were only highschoolers.

On “Finale Eve” I was excited and sad. Excited because I couldn’t wait to see what the finale had in store, sad because, well, it was the end.

It was the same feeling I had when I got my copy of the final book in Stephen King’s, “The Dark Tower” series.

My journey with the Dark Tower series started in 1982 with the first book, “The Gunslinger.” My journey wouldn’t end until 22 years later; but I didn’t know that then.

Talk about commitment.

Book two, “The Drawing of the Three” didn’t come out until five years later in 1987. I had to take out Gunslinger and read it again to refresh my memory. “Wastelands” came out in 1991; I re-read Drawing and so on, and so forth, so basically, by the end of the TWENTY TWO YEARS I had basically read the series twice over.

I had been with Roland on his journey since I was a teenager, through getting jobs that became careers and relationships and births and deaths and moves and marriages and divorces and and and… Twenty-two years later I sat finishing book seven, “The Dark Tower” with tears rolling down my cheeks.

It was over.

What long-term journeys have you been on? How did you feel when they were over? When they ended had you ever wished they never started?

I need a new journey.

Hold me.