I’m actually obsessed with the way this episode functioned on, like, a literary level. Belly is dragging this literal and emotional baggage with her to the study abroad program. She’s attempting to pursue something new, and she took off the ring, but she has the baggage with the ring AND the dress, and she’s wrapped herself in comfortable familiarity (the hoodie). When things go south, she calls her mom, who pushes her to find a quiet place to sit. The place she finds? A red cafe. Food and peace, and an opportunity to pursue a specific future (returning home, maybe even to Conrad).
At the cafe, she takes off her hoodie and ties it around her waist. She knows she needs to change, is willing to want to change, but isn’t yet ready to fully let go of that comfortable familiarity and actually pursue that change.
In the blink of an eye, her bag is stolen. Her bag, with her last few items that represent her relationship with Jere. Items that she wasn’t ready to let go of yet, because even now she’s not in a place to let go of Jere yet. So she uses the AirTag, gifted to her literally so she doesn’t lose Jeremiah, to hunt the bag down. And she throws everything into hunting it down, finally hitting her breaking point and kicking the thief’s ass to get it back. She is reunited with her baggage, with her last pieces of her love for Jere, in a room flooded with blue.
She puts the ring back on. She’s decided, then, to return to him in some capacity, to claw back part of the life she left behind. After her brief interlude with her new friends, where she learns she’s not the only messy person in the world, she boards a bus to the airport to go home. Wearing the ring, sitting in the dim blue light, she calls Jere to talk about what happened. The way Jere handles that conversation makes her realize how fundamentally she’s changed already, and how all this fighting for the remnants of their relationship is doing herself a disservice. She can’t grow the way she needs to if she goes back. She decides in that moment to stay.
The next time we see her, she’s not wearing the ring, and the hoodie is nowhere to be seen. She’s ascending stairs from a shadowed path into the bright sunlight. She still has the baggage, but she isn’t clinging to those symbols of Jeremiah anymore, to the safety and comfort she had been shrouding herself in. She’s realized she is willing and ready to change. It’s only now that she’s truly come to the place of choosing herself, wholeheartedly, for her own sake.
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