062.0: Yes, love.

Dear Linc,

Yesterday was basically a one-day vacation staycation for me. Since February, I’ve had May 15th at 7pm marked on my calendar for Star Trek: Into Darkness. I even told my boss about it on the same day that I got the tickets for me and Clara. But he just grinned at me like I was a fly that he’d just swatted, because the date was still too far away to put me down for a day off.

That’s exactly what I ended up getting. The showtime was actually at 8pm but all this time I had a 7pm time marked in my calendar. I guess I was so nerdishly excited about getting to the movie theatre on time that I scheduled it an hour earlier. I only realized this when Clara and I were leaving the house and when she looked at the ticket I’d just printed from the confirmation page bookmarked months before, she said, “But this says 8pm.”

So, we stayed home and continued doing what we’d been doing all day: watching episodes of Star Trek from all its various TV incarnations.

Except that I’d been up at my usual early bird hour, long before Clara, which is the norm for me now, especially since my internal alarm clock now outpaces my actual alarm clock. This day was not only going to be a day for Star Trek but a fanboy’s day in general: I had General Hospital episodes to catch up on, too!

I sprung into consciousness sometime around 5:45 in the morning but I already knew that my calendar was clear, because I intentionally did that: the day before, I woke up even earlier in the morning to get a head start on what I already needed to do, to allow for extra time to catch up on whatever work I might wish I could be doing on the next day that was supposed to be my day off.

I did it anyway. There were times on my supposed staycation when I couldn’t keep myself away from opening my laptop. I’d be on the sofa with Clara, and then she’d have an important question to ask — “How many people did that thing live inside before Jadzia?” — that I would merrily answer while also intently checking my e-mail, or browsing one of the syllabi of my classes to double-check that I wasn’t falling behind on my assignments.

Even though her question about Jadzia sounded direct like a non-fan’s condescension, Clara is actually a Trekkie, although not as nerdy as I am, obviously. Clara and I didn’t meet until college. We were raised on separate coasts but in terms of our Star Trek fandom we led parallel childhoods. She once confessed to me, “I like the one where Doctor Crusher falls in love with a ghost — that was a ghost, right?”

Because I’m a Trekkie, I answered specifically: yes, and no. The creature that Doctor Crusher fell in love was ghostly, I explained to Clara, but in the Star Trek universe, it was actually an alien identified as an “anaphasic lifeform”. 

“I bet you liked that episode a lot,” Clara had said with a knowing laugh.

Actually, I sort of did not. The episode was indeed soapy, and by the time it had aired, when I was in the vicinity of the sixth grade, I was already watching soap operas for a long time. But I didn’t like soap operatic elements creeping into Star Trek. It just seemed out of place — although I did like that episode’s explanation that a ghost could in fact be an alien. There was something comforting about how Star Trek provided knowledge into those kinds of mysteries, even though it was pretend science fiction knowledge. I still daydream that the reason why I write these letters is because this life is an echo of a life in some alternate universe where you and I are, in fact, together.

I won’t spoil Star Trek Into Darkness, in case you want to see it, which I think you should even if you aren’t remotely a Trekkie. It’s just a damned good action movie. With heart. The Star Trek franchise has never been good at writing love between its characters. Hello, Doctor Crusher falling in love with a ghost? Er, an aniphasic life form. Whatever.

But there were moments when Into Darkness was so good, in all of its action and adventure and, yes, love, that when a shocking moment happened and Clara and I would lock arms, there was a corner of my otherwise grateful heart that was saddened I was not in that movie theatre locking arms with a man I loved.

There are many things about adulthood that I find belatedly shocking. Whereas others have long since experienced these coming of age revelations, I feel as they are only dawning on me at the too-late age of 31. One issue that’s really getting to me is time management. I’ve been trying to be good at it but in the last couple of weeks I have had to confront the glaring problem of being overextended. I have had to make cancellations, and each time I would cancel my stomach felt like it was eating itself up with acid. I don’t like flaking on commitments but, as they say, live and learn. Parallel to the acidity in my stomach these last few weeks, I am living, and learning.

Sometimes I imagine that you and I had lived parallel childhoods, you in Washington and me in Maryland. Maybe we had a lot of similarities — but more than likely we did not. The reality is that you were playing a variety of sports, while I was reading a variety of books. I was watching soap operas, and as I sit here writing this today, the notion of you watching a soap opera seems foreign and baffling. More than likely you and I are entirely different creatures so pronounced in our separation that I imagine it would take just one conversation to reverse four years of letters and dreaming.

One of my best friends from childhood has lately been posting angrily pro-gun comments on his Facebook. I shouldn’t be surprised at this because he is a career Marine man. We are both military brats, and thanks to my upbringing alongside Pop’s career in the Navy, I have special respect for the American military to which I would not otherwise be privy. That being said, I am not someone who takes literally the right to bear arms. I think think that you should have the right to own guns — with restrictions. With necessary government oversight. American democracy was originally envisioned as a way to protect the people from themselves — the Founding Fathers knew that just because the people had the right to be heard didn’t mean that they would always be right. The issue of guns is a good example of where the government needs to protect the people from themselves. Sometimes I get very sad when my friend says he wants to move out of Maryland, where he has lived our whole lives not counting when he was away on duty, not for a change of scenery but because his belief in gun ownership is more than I could ever embrace for myself. It is a startling thing for me to comprehend this difference in adulthood that I could not have imagined in childhood.

Another experience in adulthood that recently/belatedly opens my eyes is something simple like going to the movies. When I took the day off yesterday for the evening showing of Into Darkness, it was so that I could spend the whole day with Clara reliving favorite Star Trek episodes and, of course, watching the 2009 movie again as the last thing we watched before leaving the house. My original vision for that day also included eating very bad foods — the very kinds of very bad foods that I found myself eating as a kid whenever there was a new episode of Star Trek on TV or when I was at the theatre watching a new Star Trek movie: popcorn, pizza, sodas, high-fat and full-flavor ice cream. You name it, I was snacking on it. Also, I am not exaggerating when I say that there was pizza involved: I don’t have to think too long to find myself reminiscing about those Wednesday nights when I would gather in front of UPN with a pie of Tombstone fresh from the oven. Yes, I could eat the entire pie in an hour.

My plan to order a pizza for the day was canceled the night before when I came home from work and Clara and her fiance had already ordered from Domino’s. Until I woke up the next morning, I was still set on reliving my childhood and ordering a pizza anyway, all to myself, but I ended up getting a fish burrito instead. At the movie theatre, instead of a buttery tub of extra large popcorn from the concession stand, I got a box of Crunch N Munch at Target that was half the price and probably half the terrible nutrition as well. I wanted to get soda, too, but at Target the only singles they had for sale all had caffeine: Coke, Diet Coke, and even Coke Zero, to which I have lately taken a liking. I was not in the mood for any of the caffeine-free sodas, and the movie was going to get out at about ten, so I would need to fall asleep fast if I wanted to get up early to resume the unavoidable reality of real life. I got water.

But the chance to relive simpler times wasn’t a total loss: I like Crunch N Munch today because it was always Ma’s favorite snack when we watched General Hospital together.

Joe