Sex And The City And Separation Anxiety

september 22, 2007 journal entry:

 

I finished watching Sex and the City around 5:55pm today.

 

And I miss it already.

 

I didn't know I would be this affected, but apparently I was wrong.

 

That's the problem with me—whether I am reading a good book or watching a movie or watching a series, I have a problem letting go.

 

That is specially true in real life. Especially before, I didn't want making friends because I was thinking that if I did I would be hurt when goodbye came. And even though I hardly called anyone a "friend," I still felt that pang of pain biting my heart every time I had to leave or be left by whomever I was spending time with.

 

Ned was the one who pointed this out to me. He said I had separation anxiety.

 

Well, now I no longer feel that with friends. Now, I can no longer wait until I'm home—alone.

 

But the feeling was transferred to my imaginary friends. I remember feeling depressed after finishing One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and most, if not all, of the books that I had finished reading gave me the same feeling of, I don't know, being abandoned?

 

Same feeling I get every time I move out of an apartment. You empty it, take out the lightbulbs, and 99% of the time, it takes you until evening or twilight, and you take one last look at the empty house and you can't help but remember where everything used to be just hours earlier, and then you close the door, lock it, and know that you are putting a period to that chapter in your life and that you will never go back to it, no matter what.

 

Same feeling I got after I finished Will & Grace and Friends. Deep inside I knew that although I might watch them again in the future, picking episodes at random or from the pilot of the first season to the series finale, I wouldn't have the same thrill of anticipating what would happen next.

 

But now, no matter how many million times I watch them again, I know that I would only be looking at old home videos and photographs. I will never be truly with them again. Their stories are finished. They have moved on. While I am stuck in the past that they have already left behind.

 

I loved Sex and the City. Maybe not as much as Friends, which I still think is the best series I have ever seen, although there are very few. The crafting of Sex and the City is very sharp, witty and funny. Yes, sometimes it's difficult to understand their predicament since you know which road they should take but they always choose the opposite lane. But just the same, you can never really abandon them. You wouldn't want to.

 

And I thought I wouldn't miss them all that much. That was why I was so brave to march into the finale. And I was crying the whole time knowing each of the four friends are finally getting what they have always wanted (whether consciously or unconsciously) and needed (whether stated or implied).

 

And then a couple of hours later, it sank in—I miss them.

 

I think I've been avoiding real relationships with real people because I knew suffering from this feeling would be inevitable. I didn't expect it would be ever-present, though. I hardly feel it for other people, but I suffer it endlessly for characters that are nothing more than black ink on off-white paper or light particles in tv and the monitor of my laptop.

 

Is this feeling supposed to make me realize I'm still alive? I'm not sure I like it that much.