liii

“Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.”

-Doc Brown

“The road goes ever on and on..."

-Bilbo Baggins

            Skyping people is great, I guess. I love seeing friends that are millions of miles away, in other cities, in other worlds, through the time-and-space-traveling DeLorean of my MacBook. But it’s sad, watch them living new lives, making and replacing friends, moving slowly away from memories of me and times spent together. We're all on the same journey, the same road to a new life.

“Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.”

Prophetically uttered by Christopher Lloyd at the end of the first Back to the Future movie, his time-machine blasting into the blue sky, this classic line has become more than just a quote from a cult eighties sci-fi movie for me. It’s become a sense of purpose, of how to conduct myself in my everyday actions, of how to force myself to be the best person I could be.

But, perhaps, I’m reading too much into it. Thanks Robert Zemeckis.

When I was seven years old, my dad brought home a torn-up VHS copy of the movie from Blockbuster, put it into our grainy old television, and made me and my little brother sit down and watch it. By the end of the movie, I was at a loss for words: I had never seen something so imaginative and fun, a quick joyride that my seven-year-old brain could barely understand. And that last line of the movie stuck with me, inviting me to spread my imagination past the physical familiarities of the world around me. It taught me to pretend wildly and carelessly, letting myself explore new worlds and new adventures.

As I grew older, and with each yearly repeat of the movie, the end quote slowly evolved from this beckoning towards imagination into something else completely. It became a reminder that there will be a time, far from now, when none of these cement pavements, none of these physical realities, physical things will matter because, one day, we will not be here in this world of responsibilities, repressions, and roads.

So now the quote serves, not as an call towards a life of make-believe and joy, but rather as a reminder to focus on the important, existential things in life like relationships, familial and spiritual, because, one day that I cannot and will not be able to predict, Doc Brown is going to show up at my front door in his time-traveling DeLorean and take me away from all that I know, forever.

            I think that’s how this whole “life” thing works, anyway. And, don’t worry, I’ll be just a Skype call away.