Love. Despite Everything, Love.

A review from my letterboxd for the Netflix show Carol & the End of the World.

There is nothing more universal among the human experience than the existential crisis that ensues after the realization that one day, all of this will be gone.

we’ve all had it. That pinnacle moment in grade school when you learned that the sun, one day, will indeed swell up, engulf the planets, and obliterate all that we know of earth and the rest of the solar system. Or the simple fact that your own death and the death of someone you know and love and cherish deeply is promised to happen from the moment you’re told that eventually, all things die. We’ve had it.

It’s in a way a pivotal stamp to your humaneness: it’s the key to the car; it’s the realization that eventually makes you scurry to do and be, to live your life intentionally. To do everything from the heart while it still counts and beats along to the track of your life.

When I was nine, 2012 was the year where I experienced (one, for of course, there was many, many more to come) the peak of my existential crisis (seriously, I was planning to off myself about it, looking back all I can truly do is chuckle) for reasons that’s obvious to many who remember that year.

Hello, 2012; the year proclaimed as the end. the movie, the mayan calendar; the endless amount of references in older movies and shows to that year. it freaked me the hell out, and ever since then I’ve had an aversion to any sort of story about the end of the world.

Carol & the End of the World though, highlighted something so tenderly well that i’ve never seen in stories of such.

It acknowledged how no matter what, no matter the circumstance, humans are always going to revert back to their greatest assets in the end: community and connection. Celebration of life, of another, and knowing people. Forming emotional bonds just may be our greatest invention, even if it can be painful, even if some of those bonds don’t last forever.

There is beauty in knowing a person; their name, their favorite color and food and artist and clothing. It’s a protest to the obscurity that’ll be brung about by the end; no obliteration of any world though could physically touch or harm or alter my love for various people and things in my life, for it isn’t tangible. It can’t be shattered into pieces in one throw. It is worth it always, it is needed always; even in the face of the end.

It’s easy to adopt the sentiment that nothing matters in the long run, but if its a run I have yet to run, why shouldn’t it? If that point in life hasn’t been reached why account for it? why—in paraphrase of something i’ve read before—borrow emotion from the future?

Everything takes its leave at some point, that’s fine. Distance may erode away the love, and that too, is fine; but there’s nothing I’d rather waste my time on. There is nothing else really to waste my time on except for being alive and falling in love with the myriad of other things that happen to be alive with me. Might as well while I’m here.