I’ve been watching the first season of Felicity for the past few weeks. When I’m doing some mindless task at work—setting up a project’s infrastructure, copying notes, styling a website—the latest episode is playing in its little video box in the corner of my screen. Maybe three or four episodes a week, and I’ve watched Felicity—the character herself—morph from her first stumbles in college to having slept with her first boy, thereby causing her and Noel’s relationship to come to a halt because they can’t navigate the emotional complexities that no teenager has the capacity to deal with at that age.
I’m not entirely sure why I started watching Felicity. The show debuted the fall semester that I wasn’t attending school in 1998, after deciding that I didn’t need a degree to be a True Writer™. What did I need of school? My education would come from living life, having experiences, distilling them down to a few pithy, quirky, insightful words and sentences, expertly crafted with my skill and talent, instantly a success with money rolling in. How wondrous and naive to remember that part of my life. At the point Felicity was settling into her dorm room, I was already a supervisor at UPS (yes, the United Parcel Service with their ubiquitous brown trucks and uniforms, the endless packages which, back when I was there, were Gateway computer boxes instead of the insidious Amazon ones now), having worked my way from package handler to low-level management in the span of that summer, the fact that I was in school, young, and white all working in my favor. Of course, when I told my boss I had dropped out of school, he said that in order to keep my job as a supervisor, attending school was a necessity.
But then the accident happened in early October, before I had applied to Southern Connecticut University, before I had written something worth anything, throwing my entire world into turmoil. I don’t remember much of that year. Looking back at it, there are snippets of memories from the end of 1998 and the first half of 1999. But the two strongest memories are me on a couch sobbing, surrounded by friends, and just feeling so very much alone and afraid. The other one when a friend and I visited the impound lot where I saw my car for the first time since the accident, my friend noticing hair still caught in the windshield, the blood crusted and thick. I’m sure I went to therapy, but I can’t remember who or when or what or how it all happened. I remember my roommate’s girlfriend, Carol, who would later become a de facto roommate that I came to resent, but that time hadn’t come yet and, after the accident, she offered kind embraces and thoughts that weren’t trite or saccharin.
It was during this time that I first encountered Felicity. I wasn’t caught up in it, nor did I have any real strong desire to watch it. I think Carol, the roommate’s girlfriend, liked to watch it and since I was a mindless zombie, going through the motions, I would occasionally catch an episode here or there. Like I said, I wasn’t caught up in it. The realization that dropping out of school was probably a dumb idea, as well as the accident shattering any semblance of plans I had for the next year, roiled around inside my brain, and watching characters only two years younger than me go through the motions of living at school, watching Noel the Resident Advisor (I had just finished a year as an RA, in which I was fired for…reasons…only job ever to be fired from, mind you), watching classes taken, dreams begun, dreams faltering…it was all too close to a life I no longer led for me to watch.
And yet, now, every time the opening credits begin, with the theme song playing over black-and-white images of the cast, scenes from New York, youth and excitement and possibility and the joy of being an unformed human, with the wide wild world in front of them, I start to get teary. This did not happen when I watched the few episodes with Carol. I feel the catch in my throat, the thickness that comes with the onset of crying, the constriction in my chest. I feel it, feel it in my bones, in my muscles, in the viscera of my body. It moves through me, and I wonder why I’m watching a show from twenty-five years ago, about a life I sort of, kinda had, but maybe not really. Felicity has become somewhat of a stand-in for what was, what might have been, what was lost to me when I gave up after two years to be an adult, to subscribe to that life, to make my way in the world.
This, of course, was before I became a full adult. This before I knew the pain at the loss of youth and possibility, before understanding—truly, bone-shakingly understanding—the difficulties that would arise with becoming a full human, with just living life. This before I had tattoos and surgery scars and the self-inflicted cuts on my forearm from a kitchen knife and a codependent relationship, the weathered lines on my face from worry and joy and sadness and rejection and just plain getting older. This before ranches and horses and almost dying in the Sierra Nevada’s. This before wild raves, cocaine and ecstasy dancing together in my blood veins, the feeling of connection and love and sex like electricity, lighting up my insides. I wasn’t a clean slate by any manner of imagination at the age of twenty, but the blank page of what-could-be was as expansive and monstrous and unknown as the western mountains, which I had yet to see, but that would eventually become my home for close to a decade during my twenties and into my thirties.
Watching Felicity brings out the nostalgia. Nostalgia is a form of melancholy, a form of wistful wanting, of sadness and remembrance of things that may or may not have been. The past changes with age; we see things a bit differently, move through memories with a different mind, a different body. The past leaves scars, sometimes physically visible, most often not. Some events are tiny little footnotes, a small entry into life’s appendix. Others, like the accident, have entire sections and chapters and copious notes about them. These are the events that we can point to and know that our lives were pushed onto another track. We can point at the person we were before and the person we became. Cheryl Strayed talks about sister lives, the lives we cannot lead, have not led, the lives lost to one decision or another. We pass them by in our boat, waving to them on the shores, and wonder who we might have become or what that life would have been. Watching Felicity now, feeling those tears come quick and hot on my cheeks, it is because I am mourning for the person that never was, for the person I may have been had the accident not been part of my life, had I stayed in school, had I not made the decisions I made. We can be sad for the things that never came to fruition. We can lament the death of those lives we did not lead.
I say lean into it all. Feel the feels, and then learn to love who you are now, learn to relish the opportunities and possibilities and adventures and this wide wild world that you now inhabit. Truly, it’s the only thing that you can do. The past is the past and longing for some melancholic version of what you thought it was is an exercise in frustration and regret. I look back at the events that set the course of my life and have slowly learned to, maybe not exactly love them, but appreciate them for what they made possible on the other side. So I will continue to watch Felicity, or at least finish the first season, and remember who I was, remember that lost year, remember and embrace that broken part of my life.