is the name of a video game which managed to get itself turned into a TV series. I don't recommend binge watching this one, as is my wont. The plot is that 20 years ago, a mutated fungus infected the world's population and the story centers around a young girl who has an apparent immunity to the fungus and she and her protector have to travel across a post-apocalyptic wasteland to try and find people with the ability to synthesize a potential vaccine.
There's an episode whose soundtrack the Linda Ronstadt classic Long Long Time. The lyrics are as follows:
Love will abide, take things in stride
Sounds like good advice but there’s no one at my side
And time washes clean love’s wounds unseen
That’s what someone told me but I don’t know what it means
‘Cause I’ve done everything I know to try and make you mine
And I think I’m gonna love you for a long long time
Caught in my fears
Blinking back the tears
I can’t say you hurt me when you never let me near
And I never drew one response from you
All the while you fell all over girls you never knew
‘Cause I’ve done everything I know to try and make you mine
And I think it’s gonna hurt me for a long long time
Wait for the day
You’ll go away
Knowing that you warned me of the price I’d have to pay
And life’s full of flaws
Who knows the cause?
Living in the memory of a love that never was
‘Cause I’ve done everything I know to try and change your mind
And I think I’m gonna miss you for a long long time
‘Cause I’ve done everything I know to try and make you mine
And I think I’m gonna love you for a long long time
Simply put, it's a tale of unrequited love - and coming to grips with it.
I recently observed the ten year anniversary of an unusual event which prompted me to take a look back and see how much things have changed since then. I have yet to put a lot of those thoughts into words, but here's one thing I'll put out there. One of my first responses to listening to the song again was to tap into my own grief at being alone at this point in my life. Not so long ago, I would have wallowed in indulgent self pity for an indeterminate length of time. But the me I'm still in the process of becoming began to look at it from the singer's point of view and while it's true that I grieve over potential relationships I never entered into for various reasons, there's grief on the other side of the equation in terms of how my inability to reciprocate those feelings may have been the cause of a lot of hurt. And it's the me that I'm becoming that can also see that while I may hurt people in my past, it's possible for these people to reach a point where the love is stronger than the pain. And that takes a lot of weight off my shoulders.
