Well, Benjamin Light certainly said it best:

But let’s start earlier…

So, I had this friend, okay? A female friend. And she was leaving town. This was a week and a half ago, because she’s gone now, but a week and a half ago, we decided to go hang out one night, do a little drinking, socializing, etc. “Things that young people do,” my fellow young people tell me ad nauseam in chorus.

And, you see, this is at a point right after we had realized, my lady friend and I, that we’d like to hang out like this, maybe as more than just friends, and somewhat exclusively. But then there was the little thing of her leaving town, but that night, that night we decided to hang out, it didn’t matter.

So we went out, did a little drinking, talking, gazing longingly into each other’s eyes and souls and other stuff.

That’s all you need to know about that.

But then I went home, still a little intoxicated, both drunk  on all that alcohol and the night itself. A collection of a thousand or more little moments, all precious and special and dazzling, and they’ll be with me forever. Regardless, there I was. At home. Drunk. Not sleepy drunk, but what was I to do with myself?

About four years ago I remember hanging out with Benjie Light and Peanut St. Cosmo and we did some drinking one night. When it eventually Peanut’s bedtime, we called it a night. And after she went to sleep, Benjie and I were still up and he said something to me like, “We missed Lost.”

Still a little cloudy, I said, “Wha huh hurrh?”

“Tonight was Lost,” he said. “It was a Sayid episode. Don’t worry, I downloaded it. Let’s watch it.”

And so I plopped down in a chair beside him and he clicked play on the keyboard and Lost started. The episode was from season 2, “One Of Them,” the first one with Henry Gale, when Rousseau catches the man we shall come to know as Ben Linus in a net and delivers him to Sayid, informing him that he is one of the Others. But this man, Henry Gale, swears otherwise, and he has a very convincing story about how his balloon, carrying his wife and he, crashed on the Island. His wife eventually grew sick and died.

The story is incredibly convincing, but still, Sayid does not believe it. And though he knows that Jack will not agree, there in the hatch Sayid wants to use his special skill on this mysterious new man with the bug eyes to ascertain the truth. And in the flashbacks within the episode we see Sayid back in the first Gulf War learning how to use that special skill: the art of torture.

You can’t imagine how bizarre it is to watch this episode while your head is slowly clearing, the fog lifting, and your world is sobering up. It just gets darker and more brutal by each passing moment. It just gets all that much more Fuck Yeah Sayid, if you will.

But that was four years ago, and here I was, a week and a half ago, at home, still a little drunk, pondering what to do with myself. I didn’t want to wake anyone else up and what better place for a drunk man with a head full of regrets and way too many thoughts? The internet, of course. But as I get onto the internet, I remembered that night from four years ago and I decided, fuck it, went to Hulu, and clicked on that episode…

And what an episode it is, let me tell you. Still strong, still powerful. Except for the B-storyline about Hurley and Sawyer hunting down the treefrog that keeps Sawyer from getting his beauty sleep. Other than that… it’s all good times: We’re back in the hatch, still pushing the button, Jack is well into his descent into full on craziness, and Locke is still Locke and still looking for a meaning and a purpose in his life, and they’re just inches away from being at each other’s necks. And Shannon hasn’t been dead for too terribly long and though I don’t believe her name is mentioned in the episode, you can almost feel the spectre of her constantly floating over Naveen Andrews’ amazing performance here.

And it’s all wonderfully on display thanks to this strange new arrival, this “Henry Gale” whom they believe to be one of the Others,with Locke and Sayid making plans to go behind Jack’s back and then Sayid excludes even Locke from his plans, locking himself and Ben/”Henry Gale” in the armory and proceeds to question, torture, and then beat him.

Through all the questioning, Ben/”Henry Gale” never breaks character until he starts talking about his supposed wife whom he had to bury on the Island after she fell ill and died. Sayid begins to ask him technical questions about the process of burying a loved one, and that morbid place that’s concerned with and knows death too well, well, that’s a place Sayid’s always had one foot firmly in. But Ben/”Henry Gale” says he doesn’t know how many shovelfuls of earth he dug up to bury the woman he loved and that’s what convinces Sayid that this man is a lair. “You would remember!” Sayid screams as he begins raining a flurry of punches on the spiky haired bug eyed Other.

It’s a powerful moment. Sayid is the man who will always love and will always be doomed to lose that love, usually violently. He will always feel a part of himself is buried in the ground and the part of him that’s still up and walking around is ghoulish and prone to something nasty. If there’s a dark path out there, he feels he deserves to be on it, that he’s fated to be doomed and therefore he wants to start marching towards that oblivion as soon as he possibly can. And in this episode, you feel it. It feels both natural and is terrifying, but you understand it.

We talk a lot about the Jack character on Lost around these parts on Counterforce. A lot, right? He’s a fucked up character, but we praise him. And Kate’s a fucked up character too, but we tend to talk shit about her, which isn’t fair. But the Kate character has a lot of good qualities too. Whereas the other characters, usually the male ones, consider themselves, pardon the pun, lost and accept it, Kate keeps going on, keeps trying for something else, even if that something else is just running away from feeling bad all the time. And despite all the twists and turns, all the sci fi and geek shit about this, what keeps you coming back is the characters, time and again. And those charaters all different points on a spectrum of everyone.

That’s to say that there’s times when I really identify with the Jack character on the show. And sometimes, I see something that feels natural and familiar in the Locke character. Sometimes too much for both of those character. I’m naturally awesome and good looking and always doing well, but I’m still a human being, so sometimes I feel like I can identify with the beta boys on the show, characters like Charlie or Boone (and I’m being there, assigning them as beta boys, because let’s face it, those guys are a lot farther down the ladder). And at times I can identify with Kate too because there’s times when all I have is a bad idea and all I can do is run to it because nothing else will fit. That, or the desire to do copious amounts of tree climbing.

But this point isn’t called “Fuck Yeah Kate” or “Fuck Yeah Nikkie and Paulo.” This is “FUCK YEAH SAYID.” Everyone likes Sayid. He once killed a man with a dishwasher. He once broke a man’s neck with just his legs while tied up. Like we always say here: If he had been in charge on day one of the plane crash, they would’ve probably been rescued on day four. But then again, we also always threaten to do a post on how many times the plot has neccessitated Sayid being knocked out or taken out of the action (well, the plot or the fact that Naveen Andrews knocked up Barbara Hershey). He is all bright spectrum himself, but especially when he goes dark. Then we feel it. Then we understand it. Then we identify with it.

And there I was the other night, in a dark place myself but not really realizing it. And I was watching Sayid lose it, beating a man in a bizarre hatch on a fantastical Island in this magical piece of fiction and still, it resonated. I felt lost or partly lost or that I was about to be lost and the claws wanted to come out. I wanted to scream at someone or grab someone and do something to… to change things. But there was nothing that could be changed. And taking how I felt out on someone else wouldn’t have made me feel any better or accomplished anything useful. It was okay to be angry, but it was better to understand why I was feeling that way and even more importantly, it was better to remember the things that I would be losing, to not let go of that.

And I’ll never forget as the episode ended, as I fully sobered up and there was Sayid sitting on the beach with Charlie. Something else seemed to be gone from Sayid, another very human light turned somewhere in his eyes, and he a man living somewhere in the place after the sundown even then. Sayid told Charlie what had just happened down there in the hatch and Charlie asked him why he was telling him this…

SAYID: “Jack asked me how I knew — knew for sure that this man was lying. How I knew for sure that he was one of them — one of the Others. I know because I feel no guilt for what I did to him. — But there is no way I can ever explain that to Jack, or even Locke, because both of them have forgotten.”

CHARLIE: “Forgotten? What?”

SAYID: “That you were strung up by your neck and left for dead. That Claire was taken and kept for days during which god only know what happened to her. That these people — these Others — are merciless, and can take any one of us whenever they choose. So tell me, Charlie, have you forgotten?”

Events can shape you, because you bring the tools you have to do them and you make choices and act in certain ways or others. You make these choices based on your past experiences and then you keep going, just gaining more memories. And no matter what you do or where you go, all you have are those memories. If your life has been good, bad, full of suffering, or full of joy, or most likely a mix of it all, those memories are you.

Maybe you’re sitting in your room at some point, reflecting on everything that’s lead to now, or maybe you’re out on the street somewhere looking up at the window of someone you care about, watching as their light turns off. Or maybe you’re sitting on the beach, staring out at the ocean, seeing that tiny little window into the past that can only be visible on the horizon…

What’s important is that you always remember. What is it they say about those who forget the past?