It’s been a rough couple of months. I feel like I’m just now starting to feel normal again after the dog died on March 13th. The dread is still there, but it’s more of a whisper than a shout. Every once in a while it pokes its head back out but generally it’s just… like an app you left running in the background a couple weeks ago and forgot about until you get a stupid push alert.
What it’s really reminding me of is one of my favorite TNG episodes, “The Inner Light.” The one where the Enterprise finds this probe floating in space and it hits Picard with some beam that knocks him unconscious. In the 90 minutes he’s out, he “lives” an entire lifetime on the home world of the probe’s creators, who it turns out all died long ago because their sun went nova, or whatever. When he first “arrives” on the planet, he spends a lot of time trying to “get back” to the Enterprise. As time passes, he falls in love, gets married, has kids, learns to play the flute, and eventually dies. All the while, his memories of the Enterprise get fuzzier and fuzzier, though he never really stops thinking about it. Once he “dies,” the people in his new life all come back to explain that this was essentially a time capsule from their dying world, and he is now the only one who knows about their people. The simulation ends and he wakes up on the Enterprise’s bride, with only 90 minutes of real time having elapsed. Sort of like Inception, I guess.
That was sort of a long-winded way of explaining what I’m feeling now. Just like Picard never really stopped thinking about the Enterprise, I suppose I’ll never stop thinking about these things, but hopefully they’ll stay in the background as much as possible.
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