There’s A LOT I wanna say about the incredible casting, the double-standards for women (and women of color) in the romantic genre, THE REPRESENTATION, the story, and much more. But, for right now, I wanna talk about a single part from the show that absolutely wrecked my soul.

For those of you who watched Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall’s One Day on Netflix, like many others, you must’ve been ruminating about the entire series for days afterward.

Same here.

My initial understanding of the show was that love is rarely ever grand. In fact, love is built on those small, consecutive moments of rawness and a solid base of friendship. It reminded all of us to screw up, make mistakes, learn from those mistakes / hold our people close, just say ‘i love you’ to the people who matter to you / it’s never too late to do something, it’s never too early to do something / our words matter / fame is just a source of external validation, chasing after it will create volatile lives / pain looks different for everyone / love is truly beautiful, and we are all worthy of it.

I got all of that from the show, but it’s what my therapist told me afterwards that totally shook my mind. She reminded me of the scene where Emma reads an excerpt from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles to Dexter.

That excerpt essentially says:

We all have a birthday, a day in which we’re born. We tend to celebrate it every year because we know of the date and we may even know of the exact time that we were welcomed into this world.

We all also do have a deathday, a day in which we die. However, we never celebrate it because well….1) that’s morbid and 2) we have no idea when it is.

Thus, every single year, we stumble through our death day, and it remains “sly and unseen” intelligently masked by the rest of the ‘ordinary’ days. And yet, that same day that you spent in 2006 opening Christmas presents, in 2018 getting married, or in 2024 crying in the shower, might very well become your last day in this realm of the world.

That shook me.

This helped to give some sort of meaning to the cliché phrase “live each day to its fullest.” The reason to live each day to the fullest is because we have no idea if this day, today, is our “sly and unseen” death day that’s coming up in 5, 10, 15, 45 years. It’s just a normal day today, but it can become one of the most important days in the future.

Still ruminating about this while the show continues to tug at my heart…..