TNG: The Inner Light

For a while, when I was little, my mom and I lived in an apartment over a hair salon in the mountains of North Carolina. Every friday it smelled like perm. It was there that I learned to make french toast, wrote and illustrated my first book, and watched The Inner Light when it first aired. I had my own room but I tended to fall asleep in front of the TV on my mom's bed in the living room. It was there, under an afghan, which my great-grandmother crocheted, that we watched this famous episode together.

The memory is vivid and precious to me. The blanket was strangely comforting in its scratchiness. My mom's arms wrapped around me as I crawled half-way into her lap like a too-big dog that longs for his puppy days. As the episode progressed we both began to cry. It escalated little by little until Picard awoke on the bridge of his ship after a lifetime spent on a world, with a people, that no longer existed. By the end, I was sobbing into my mother's chest, my tears running down her neck, hers soaking my hair.

I've seen this episode a number of times and I'm not sure I've ever made it through without crying. I thought today that I might finally do it. I was apparently more than a little naïve. The moment Picard blipped into his alternate life my memory of that first viewing started playing inside my head.  Here's how things went down: