I am writing this letter on behalf of not only myself but on behalf of X-Files fans everywhere who are currently suffering after Season 10 and don't know why. I specify their lack of understanding because some people know, some people have specific, petty complaints and I'm not here to address those. I also think that those who don't know are likely all suffering for similar reasons. My suffering and it's source is the mystery I solved last night as I drove the hour south to my best friend's home to celebrate her birthday party, and that's what I want to talk about.
I genuinely enjoyed Season 10, for all that it was, and I thought I didn't have many complaints. Much like in previous seasons, the mythology vexed me, monsters made me laugh, family made me cry, and everything else made me think.
So when it was over and I was still aching, still hurting, I had no clue why.
This particular ache isn't one that everyone is going to understand, and it's not going to be easy to explain.
I'm writing this letter though because I'm sure that somewhere else in this world there is someone else, some other boy or some other girl who is feeling that same ache in their chest. Someone else who can't, as stupid and pathetic as this may sound to some, scroll through their tumblr feed anymore, listen to some of their favorite songs, or take solace in their favorite show like they used to without feeling that ache. I'm writing this because you. Guys. Fucked. Up.
I have a very, very good memory of my childhood, and I remember at the age of three both dancing around my living room singing "Once Upon a Dream" while Sleeping Beauty played in the background, and sitting beside my parents on the couch while we watched X-Files: Fight the Future on VHS. I remember particularly clearly the tall man with dark hair walking around an alien spaceship in his big winter coat, tapping on windows made of ice, and finding the lady with red hair, the lady who was really important to him. I remember him breaking her out of the ice and carrying her out of the spaceship. I remember all of that really, really well.
Why my parents where letting me watch the X-Files when I was three, still a mystery, but that's not the point.
The point is it affected me; it primed me. So seventeen years later when I'd finally sit myself down and watch the X-Files, a series that my parents had loved so much, I was ready to love it too, and ready to love these characters.
And I already knew how much they loved each other.
I watched an interview once where Chris Carter, one of the people I hope reads this, said that what the X-Files really boils down to is this: "Mulder loves Scully, and Scully loves Mulder", that that was it, that was what mattered.
I agree wholeheartedly, and even though I've always been a fan of the paranormal, of monsters, of spooky and aliens, the real reason I ended up watching all of the X-Files in less than a month and a half (approx. 153.5 hours of television and movies if you were wondering) was because of Mulder and Scully.
Another thing I did at three? When Prince Phillip kissed Princess Aurora to wake her up with true love's kiss, I cried. Every time, like clockwork. And not the loud tears of a toddler who was upset, but the silent tears of an adult moved.
I've always been a romantic, always, and Mulder and Scully were my kryptonite.
So when in the first few minutes of Season 10 I found out they were separated my heart broke. Maybe shattered is the more appropriate term. It didn't add up. How could two people, who had been through everything together, been everything to one another, started from the healthiest of places, grown as friends, had the highest respect for one another imaginable, and loved each other on such a deep and profound level have separated?!
Then it made sense to me. It all made all too much sense to me.
Mulder was depressed. You saw it a little in I Want to Believe, and it was only a matter of time before it got worse. Then, the depression was specified: a subtype particularly resistant to treatment.
"It killed your relationship."
And suddenly I wasn't mad at Scully for leaving. I couldn't blame her. I understood and everything made sense.
So I finished Season 10 and after Babylon, with the whole walking thing and the handholding and the stuff I figured things were going to be fine between them, I was hopeful.
But it's been weeks now, and the ache in my chest is still there, and it's getting worse.
I'll describe the ache now so you know what I'm talking about.
Imagine your heart, right between beats, clenched tight, that moment suddenly stopped, encased in glass. Then imagine that it's being held by tendons, thousands of tiny little red "heart strings" keeping it in place, hanging in the center of the dark cavity of your chest. Break half of those strings, random ones, all over, snapping, your heart sagging, about to fall. Then to keep it from all falling apart, your body freezes everything over, encasing those strings in ice like glass.
Everything is tight, everything is precariously balanced, and everything feels incredibly fragile.
That is how I've been feeling. All. The. Fucking. Time.
When I was thirteen I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder with specific phobias, including social. After my freshman year of college the word severe was added to the end of my depression diagnosis, and I was made to check in with my psychiatrist once a month and my therapist every week.
Translation: I'm fairly cracked, and I've always been this way.
On a grey and rainy afternoon during a third grade recess, the two girls who were supposed to be my best friends told me that they didn't want to play with me that day, that they wanted to be left alone. I left them alone. I also spent the entirety of the next week crying myself to sleep every night and chewed my fingernails down to nubs. Later someone would tell me that this paired with the early onset of my chronic headaches and my propensity for unnecessarily emotional reactions to rather insignificant things (I was a crybaby, that's me trying to fancily say I was a crybaby), were all signs of childhood depression and anxiety.
Again, I've always been this way.
Well last night, while driving down the most brightly lit stretch of I-15, a road I've driven hundreds of times, singing along with Laura Marling's "Hope In the Air" it hit me, right in the face, going 80 mile and hour, stinging, burning and pulling sobs from my chest.
What if my Scully left me?
It's a common question among X-Files fans, "Are you a Mulder, or a Scully?" The main characters are just so different, and so damn complimentary, it's fairly easy to determine which of the two you have more in common with.
I'm a Mulder, hands down. I'm passionate, to a fault. I have an incredibly inappropriate sense of humor. I wear variations of the same three outfits all the time. I have, as friends have said, "no chill". I'm slightly paranoid. I have an oral fixation, manifested in myself by constantly chewing on straws and drinking soda. I'm bit of a megalomaniac, and I definitely have delusions of grandeur. I love about five people and I would do anything, absolutely fucking anything for them, and I irrationally expect the same kind of devotion from them because I think that love given equals love received. I even have a first name that I resented for the better part of my life, and as boringly straight as I am, I'm definitely in love with Dana Scully.
So, I repeat, what if my Scully left me?
It was my greatest fear, a fear that I had buried deep down in the dark chasms of my heart where no light was allowed to shine. It was a fear that I was constantly throwing back, with the memories of every ex-"something" because I was too afraid to have boyfriends. A fear cultivated while I watched my uncles marriage begin and end, bursting into flames and leaving far too many casualties in its wake. It was a fear born in every "I don't want to be your friend anymore" and "I just… don't like you like that."
A fear that was now being reinforced by something that had once driven it so far away.
Fox Mulder is a mess. A brilliant, beautiful, charismatic mess, but a mess nonetheless, and he has driven his fair share of people away.
Not Scully though, nothing he did could scare Scully away. From the moment they met, (seriously, the Pilot episode, those two are like already so close man, you can feel it) they were tied together. Mulder can be blamed for basically every shitty thing that Scully suffers from that point forward. Her abduction, the death of her sister, her cancer, the birth and death of her daughter Emily, the onset of her infertility, the loss of her son William, when she nearly died like on 8,000 various occasions, how she spent several years living on the run, and of course the complete annihilation of her career and reputation.
Oh and she fell in love with him, which has got to suck balls.
But did she leave?
No. In fact, she "wouldn't change a day".
So what made the loyal, unshakeable, tough as fucking nails Dana Scully leave?
Mulder was depressed.
I would like to say now that I am in no way saying that this reason is invalid. No one knows better than the depressed how hard we are to live with (there's a reason most of us are suicidal) and self-care is important for the mentally ill and the mentally healthy. It's not wrong to leave someone under these circumstances. But there is also a more convoluted method to this madness. Often loved ones can become enabling forces that actually worsen conditions than improve them, and by removing herself perhaps Scully hoped she would keep herself from doing that same such thing. Maybe Scully believed that by leaving Mulder would be shaken awake so to speak, be given more of a reason to seek treatment, to improve.
And I am a firm believer she never stopped checking in on him, because I know as sure as I know anything that she still loves him.
But I still need more.
So this is me asking, begging, and pleading, for that more.
I need to know that Mulder's getting better. I need to know that Scully knows this. I need to know that Scully regrets, or at least apologized or said something about leaving, that she feels badly. I need to know that Mulder forgives her.
But more than anything, more than all of that, I need to know that Scully went home.
It has always been the way with the X-Files to imply rather than to say when it came to the relationship with Mulder and Scully, and there was something beautiful about that, and there still is.
But this time, just this once, I'm asking to know. I need the truth, without any mystery or confusion, without veils of conspiracy or misdirection.
I just need to know that Mulder still loves Scully, that Scully still loves Mulder.
As a girl who was afraid, has always been afraid, and is still afraid that no one will ever love her enough to stay, that one day she is going to be too much I'm asking you for this.
I want to believe.
Help me to believe.
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