Thanks to YouTube, I watched the Gilmore Girls series finale some nights ago. It’s over. The only TV show I seriously followed for a long time is gone forever.
I started watching GG when I was a lazy first-year student who had just returned from Cornfieldland, Iowa. I had hated that town so much, and now that I was back in my city, I started missing it again. Gilmore Girls was a window into an ideal version of the world I never learned to love. The golden/orange/terracotta trees on the introduction background would send me back to a beautiful yet short-lived realm in which leaves fell down like rain on a clear blue sky. Rory was the girl I somehow wished I could be—smart, beautiful, lucky—with the perfect hair and the clothes that always fit, and the good-looking boys around her. And yet, sitting at the other side of the screen with a bowl of cereal was a scruffy first-year student in a school which turned out worse than her previous one, expecting midnight phone calls from a boyfriend far as far could be and longing for a life that could’ve continued had it not been so full of unhealthy food and dissatisfaction.
Now that Rory has had her wish of becoming a reporter come true, I, too, find myself exactly at the place where I wanted to be long ago. Love and distance are still synonyms, but the lingering yearning is no longer there. Everything I want is contained in some part of my life, and everything I wanted to be is sitting right here writing about yet another fun TV show that’s just been cancelled.