If you watch the show- Orange is the new black, and haven't finished season 4, and do not want to know who dies, then read no further. If you don't watch or don't care, then by all means read on. You don't have to watch the show, to understand what I'm saying.
So when I was thinking about blogging again, I kept thinking- Do I have anything new to say? I feel like I've repeated myself multiple times, beaten the "singleness" horse to death. And so I convinced myself not to blog. Does it really even matter? Does anyone read it? Does anyone take anything from it? Well, I don't know about that last question, but I do have friends and others who tell me that they do read. I don't do it for them, but it's nice to know that I'm being heard. But also a little scary. I know I'm putting myself out there for anyone to read this, so it's not like I'm being forced to share secrets or struggles or "embarrassing" little tidbits about my life. I put that in quotations, because I don't like that word, "embarrassing." At least not when it comes to aspects about who you are or how you feel, or anything along the lines of the truths that make you, you. Don't be embarrassed if, like me, you take the death of a TV character really really hard. Like so hard that you bawled over it as if a close loved one had actually died and had to take a walk by the lake to calm yourself and reflect on life. I'm not embarrassed that I reacted that way. I've cried over the death of a beloved character on one of my many favorite shows, but never this hard. I did take some inventory, some stock, as to why maybe I reacted so strongly. And I came up with this: Something she said, last season, really resonated with me. She spoke the words that I feel every single day. Last season she was so lost and alone. She wanted love, she wanted to be loved. She had feelings for her best friend in prison, but unfortunately that girl was never going to be able to love her the way she wanted to be loved. She was straight and it was as simple as that. I don't necessarily have that exact experience, but I was in love with a girl who could never love me like that. But I won't go into that, again, because it's unrealistic and fantasy. So this girl, she was the only character that seemed pure, innocent. We find out after her death that she was in prison for trespassing and possession of less than an ounce of drugs. How she could be in prison for at least several years so far, with several more to go, just for marijuana possession, is beyond me, but this show definitely shines a light on the corruptness and all out, for lack of a better word "problems" with our prison system. But that aside, she most definitely was the kindest character on the show. She was smart and well-educated and not in a "I'm so much better than you," Piper-kind-of-way. She had a bright future. Everything turned around for her this season. She found love. She met her idol, a "Martha Stewart" type chef in jail for tax-evasion, who seemed sincere in helping her find a job in the food industry when she got out. I should've seen it coming... but something like what happened to her, you could never see coming.
Like I said, something she said last season really connected her to me. After being cast out by her group, due to a psycho leader who thankfully met her demise, she was as low as you can get... in prison; getting drunk off her "hooch" aka prison wine, that she made and hid in places like the library ceiling and buried under bushes in the dirt. Luckily that psycho bitch met the end, or rather the front of a prison van and has been erased from the show. But that was 2 seasons ago. Last season she struggled with finding meaning and existence, in this world she was currently living in. She was lost and alone. Unlike me, she found some escape in the "hooch" she made, and was drunk a lot of the time. But like me, she also found escape in "stories." In her case, ones written by Crazy Eyes aka Suzanne Warren, which in her words is about "two people connecting with four other people... and aliens." And that tells you all you need to know right there. So when her bestie finds a drunk and distraught Poussey (that's her name, I don't think I've said it yet, it's French) on the stairwell, Poussey is rattling on about how the main character was supposed to be with someone else. She took it personally, like I often do in shows. She thought if "Gilly couldn't find love and he's the purest soul in the universe," then how could she? Of course her bestie reminds her that it's "just a dirty story" and she's right. This is just a story. It's not real. Poussey isn't real. But her words were real to me. In her depressed, drunken state on those stairs with her sweatshirt only half-way on, she said the words that I feel all the time. She was talking about wanting to have someone to spend her future with and her best friend says "you've got me," but as Poussey's voice breaks, she says the words of my heart: "That's not enough. I'm lonely. I'm always gonna be lonely." Having a best friend I see a couple times a year and maybe one or 2 other friends I see about equivalent to that or maybe add a couple more with one of those friends, isn't enough. And I feel like this is how it's always going to be. I don't say that in a "feel sorry for me" "I'm going to die alone" depressing sort of way, I just mean, it feels like this is my life. This is what I get. Some people get handed a child with a disability, some, poor health themselves, some always struggling to make ends meet never having enough money to get out. And for me it's not having anybody to love completely and fully and physically and to have that returned to me. It's not fair. But neither is going to prison for 4-6 years for something so stupid as less than an ounce of marijuana, and then to die in that prison.
I was going back and watching scenes with her, remembering things she said that resonated with me. She's probably the person I'm most like, in this fictional prison. When one of the Correction Officers asked them to write about their feelings, she had this to say to him: "Did it ever occur to you that we don't wanna get in touch with our feelings? That actually feeling our feelings might make it impossible to survive in here?" I actually can't explain this in words, but I get it.
She says a couple other things about love that are spot on: Love is just "chilling, you know? Kicking it with somebody, talking, making mad stupid jokes, and like, not even wanting to go to sleep, 'cause then you might be without 'em for a minute. And you don't want that."
"Love is not about staring at each other, but staring off in the same direction."
I'm going to miss all the poignant things she had to say. The way she cared about books and her friends and the girl she fell for. She saved her life once and then lost her own. Sigh. I guess I can see why the writers wanted to kill her character and not somebody else on the show. No one else's death would've hurt as hard as hers. No one had a soul like hers and no one had a smile like hers. We have Samira Wiley to thank for that. Luckily she is still here. She's not gone. We can see her smile and her bright soul somewhere else. But it's ok to mourn her character. It's ok to hurt. It makes you more human. It makes you think and reflect and write more deeply... at least in my case. Poussey, you'll be forever missed and never forgotten...and thank you for this last look, right straight to all of us.
No comments:
Post a Comment