It feels…loved
I had to take a few days to recover before rewatching. I LOVED it and it broke my heart and it gave me hope and it unleashed a torrent of emotions that I had to really sit with and allow for before I could rewatch. It’s hard to hold and allow for those emotions, I think because of how vulnerable it feels to love something so deeply that makes possible such grief. The same thing happened to me at the end of Our Flag Means Death. I wept for days without really being able to articulate the enormity of feeling.
So I feel a little more prepared this time, for this mourning of this ending: it’s partly for the actual content of the story (look at it, it’s gorgeous); much of it is for the exquisite grief accompanying this ending; but mostly I think it’s for the deep, overwhelming sense of love and gratitude I have that this story and these characters have been in my life. And that I get to revisit them, and keep imagining them, and watch others love them hard and keep loving them. This story and characters and fandom show me an expansiveness, an abundance, a joy that I feel so lucky to be able to take ahold of, to have in my grasp. What a brilliant, lucky thing to be able to get a glimpse of in this world. What a gift, to love deeply.