“No one, of course, would occupy himself with such studies if there were not a creature called Odradek.”
—Franz Kafka, The Cares of a Family Man
All my worries, my fear and my rage, are contained in the hermetism of seven letters. What are you, Odradek?
Today a guy with moles around his nose and mouth pointed at a tiny calendar and informed me of the date I am to pick up my ticket to go home.
Oh, how gladly will I walk down the street under the blazing sun that day!
Clothes hanging on a terrace in Toledo. Clouds of pink and powder blue, ethereal Monet fading in a horizon where the future’s being built out of haze and white lines. My mind dives into the warm shades of the bricks and tiles and painted walls, escaping from the ever-so-green summergreen slithering green flying green melting underneath this rain of liquid steel. The apostles in the cathedral are debating tomorrow’s news, but nobody in town could talk about what’s going on with me today. And nothing moves around me, as if the world made of stone were this and not that, not that corner amid the thorny tower that reaches for the sky.
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.