#also I’ve found (meaning my brother showed me lol) a way to add more Rick Astley songs to Spotify that are not on the app

[shimmershae]

The more I think about it, the more “Find Me” feels like an echo of “Ghosts.”

Allow me to explain.  In probably the most rambling and incoherent way possible, lol.  My earlier post on Twitter about Season 10 being an exercise in grief and longing really got me to thinking.  Not just thinking.  Ruminating.  

Anywho.  

Posting the rest of this beneath a cut because nobody asked for this (I swear I haven’t imbibed or ingested any illegal substances).  

It doesn’t take long for Carol to be established as an unreliable narrator in “Ghosts.”  At first it isn’t completely obvious because there’s just enough fact in the fiction that Carol’s triggered brain stirs up.  Daryl’s there and he’s concerned about her.  He’s supportive.  Both things he’d been before, especially since Henry’s death, but there are just enough elements in those chemically and grief induced hallucinations of hers that make you go--oh wait a minute.  Like she’s having a break from reality but she’s desperately grasping for that which grounds her and that’s Daryl.  

Am I making any sense here?  I feel like I’m not.  

Let me approach this from another angle.  

Following the airing of “Find Me” various people mentioned that Daryl, similarly to Carol in “Ghosts” wasn’t exactly the most reliable narrator.  That things weren’t necessarily as they seemed.  The word toxic was bandied about but other than Leah giving Daryl an ultimatum to choose her over his family and Daryl dwelling in deep, longstanding depression?  There wasn’t much else overtly deserving of that moniker. 

Argh.  I’m still not explaining myself well.  Let me just jump right in the deep end of probable delusion here.  Sometimes it’s fun to splash around, lol.   

Wouldn’t it be wild—sad AF but still wild—if Leah was already dead when Daryl met her?  

Bear with me here.   

Like Carol in “Ghosts” Daryl is obviously struggling.  He’s grief-stricken.  His brother is lost to him and after he betrayed him no less.  His close friend is mired in her own grief--she’s just lost her mate, probably recently discovered she was carrying RJ, and it wasn’t too long before that they had all lost Carl.  And that’s not even considering Carol, who’s allowed herself to be pulled away, lured by the tantalizing chance of doing things right this time.  Of rearing a child capable of surviving in the harsh world they live in.  Another thing to remember is Daryl is not that far removed from his torture at Negan’s hands.  So he’s more fragile than he’d willingly admit to anyone.  

He’s searching the woods for a man that isn’t there.  Now he’s no more aware that Rick was taken than the rest of Team Family, but he’s unwilling to give up hope and so he searches and because Rick’s not there and hasn’t been since shortly after that bridge blew up, Daryl’s doomed to always come up empty.  To always feel disappointment.  To never have his grief assuaged because as long as there’s no body in the form of a Walker, there’s still hope.  Or plausible denial.  Take your pick.  

He’s tireless in his search.  He’s methodical.  He plots out the places he’s already scoured on a hand-drawn map.  A map that just so happens to get ruined by an awful storm and Daryl seems to reach his breaking point, screaming out into the roar of that storm.  Walking through the barrage, the harsh rain and the violent lightning, unconcerned for his safety.  

Dude has a bit of a mental break.  He’s undeniably emotional.  

It’s not long after that he stumbles upon Dog.  Or, more aptly, Dog stumbles upon him.  

That puppy immediately lightens Daryl’s heavy heart and helping it find its way home gives him purpose.  He’s a tracker after all.  He could have easily traced Dog’s steps back to that cabin.  

Funny that Dog was always coming to him.  That he was roaming free in woods that were full of hidden dangers.  

I don’t know about the rest of ya’ll but that cabin looked abandoned when Daryl first discovered it.  Maybe not long abandoned, but it didn’t look inhabited by the living. And that’s the weird thing.  How did that Walker get into the cabin?  Did Leah just leave the door wide open for it?  Did she also leave the door wide open for Dog to escape?  Why was he always such an unaccompanied furry minor? 

The thoughts swirling around in my brain, lovelies.  They’re going to force me to go back and watch that fucking episode again aren’t they?

My point is that Dog essentially leads Daryl to the cabin. The Walker’s inside and then he stumbles upon Leah, who bursts onto the scene like she wants to be Sarah Connor or something. Daryl ends up in restraints and Leah questions him and ultimately lets him go and WTF, lovelies.  Who does that in the ZA?  As a woman all alone in a cabin miles from anybody else, in the company of a man she doesn’t know from Adam?  If ever there’s a time to have stranger danger...

Right from the start, this chick doesn’t really add up.

So Daryl leaves the cabin.  He resumes his search for Rick and he seems to give very little thought to this Leah or the cabin.  Until Dog finds him again.  

Strange isn’t it that he keeps stumbling back in her path around the times that Carol visits, when she draws further and further from his reach and closer to the fairytale he thinks she’s living at the Kingdom?  

Did Daryl ever go to that cabin without following Dog? I can’t remember.  The episode was beautifully shot but ultimately too painful to rewatch for my Caryl loving heart.  

Anywho.  

When Daryl and Carol come upon that cabin in the woods, Daryl’s flashbacks begin.  They’re hazy around the edges and not as clearly defined as the moments he spends with Carol.  Speaking of the moments he spends with Carol, how coincidinky that so many of them echo his moments with Leah?  Or do we have it all backwards?  Hmm?  

Things are so convoluted sometimes on this fucking show it leads one to question their sanity.  

Let me ramble out a few wild thoughts for you lovelies again and you tell me if I’ve completely lost it, lol.  

What if Dog was simply an orphaned, abandoned Dog that found Daryl in the woods?

What if Daryl followed the trail Dog had traveled in reverse and stumbled upon the cabin?  

What if the cabin was abandoned because Leah was already dead?  What if she’d taken her own life?  What if Daryl saw the cross/grave outside and the picture inside and his grief-stricken brain conjured up a whole tragic story for this woman, this Walker roaming around inside this house, and she became his coping mechanism?  You know.  Kind of like Rick did Lori when he had his own break with reality.  They’ve all suffered so much, lovelies.  They’ve all got PTSD.  It’s just manifesting in different ways.  

I mean, all of this would fit the label of sad that NR and others have given this little tale.  It would even fit toxic because Daryl let grief and loneliness swallow him for a while.  

As Carol pulls farther away from him, Leah just keeps popping up more and more.  

Daryl essentially loses himself in his own fairy tale only it’s a nightmare painted in soft colors and Leah asking him to choose is basically his own psyche saying to him “do you wanna live here in this fantasy land and numb your pain or do you want to relive the awful reality of Rick being lost and Carol slowly fading from your life day by day?”  And at first he’s like, you can’t make me make that choice because Daryl doesn’t want to give up hope, no matter how futile it seems.  But then Carol makes what she tells him might be her final visit for a while and anger leads Daryl right back to that fucking cabin and oblivion.  Back to the solitude of his tortured thoughts.  

That note, lovelies.  It felt like by choosing Leah he was choosing a lifetime of being alone more than it did him choosing the hope of a new love.  That “find me” for all the world felt like he was willing hope to find him again.  Hope in the form of love in the form of Carol.  

Listen.  I never said this would make sense, lol.  

When Daryl gets back to that cabin, Leah is gone.  Her picture is gone. 

Truly it felt like she’d never been there.  

Even more so when you consider how run down the cabin looks in present day when Daryl and Carol seek shelter in it.  

I can’t help it.  Some small part of me?  Well, it thinks that Daryl told Carol about Leah (whether she existed or not) as a way to both make her feel better than he wasn’t out there in those woods completely alone and to maybe move the needle a little bit on the nature of their own relationship.  Both in the past and present day.  

And while he and Carol are struggling through the ever-shifting nature of their feelings for each other, Daryl has climbed out of his own darkness and found hope again in Judith and RJ.  In the family he’s embraced again. In the communities.  And he’s angry and unsettled because he wants the same for Carol but she doesn’t seem to want that for herself.  

He still wants her to find hope.  

He still wants her to find him.  

He still wants her to find love and peace.  

Help me, lovelies.  These two have broken me, lol.  I promise.  I’m stone cold sober.  A little, okay a lot, tired.  

Wouldn’t it be wild, though?  If Leah really wasn’t what she seemed?  If she were a figment of a broken, lonely man’s tortured imagination?  

Undeniably sad AF but wild all the same.