I Can’t Stop Thinking About This Episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch
There's an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the extremely silly ‘90s teen sitcom, in which Sabrina takes a look inside her heart.
The episode, which for some godforsaken reason was also a musical, is in the last and arguably worst season of an already not great show. But for some reason, I think about it all the time.
In it our hijinks-prone heroine, while having dinner with her future in-laws for the first time, accidentally says that she loves her ex-boyfriend instead of her fiancé. The Freudian slip sends her into a panic and her fiancé’s mother, a therapist, tells her she needs to look inside her heart and see who she really loves.
And because this is a sitcom about a witch, Sabrina takes it literally.
She casts a spell, takes a trip inside herself. What she finds is essentially a museum, complete with a welcome desk and a curator, dedicated to all the things and people she’s loved throughout her life.
As she explores the halls, she finds walls painted in the colors she loves (some cracked - “Every heart gets broken,” the curator says), rooms filled with puppies, and, suddenly, her fiancé sitting on a pedestal. She’s thrilled – this means she loves him! – until the curator says he’s part of the temporary collection.
Those in the permanent collection have their own rooms, he says, and he swings open a door to display Sabrina’s ex in a room full of all the things she associates him with. A lived-in room, occupied by a man who’s always going to occupy her heart.
Sabrina, horrified to learn her fiancé is only a temporary love, immediately gets to work building him a room of his own, determined to add him to the permanent collection, only to realize a few episodes later that, well, love just doesn’t work that way.
I think about it a lot, that lingering question.
What would I find if I visited my own heart?
My family, no doubt, since I’m lucky enough to have a good one. Pets I’ve loved, still love. A massive library. Possibly a room full of cheese. Maybe even someone I loved when I was young.
But the thing that really sticks in my mind, as I sit at my desk at 3am trying to understand how a lousy sitcom episode could have so powerfully shaped my psyche, is not the question of who or what is in the permanent collection, but who or what is in the basement storage unit.
Who might I find in those deep alcoves, those cobwebbed corners? Are first loves there, ready to be dusted off and mounted back on the wall should they ever reappear in my life? Is the locket I wore for 15 years before it disappeared sitting on a shelf beside my childhood dolls? What books are there, which I loved deeply but which faded from my mind as years passed?
I like to imagine there’s a projector, playing memories of days I loved. Scratchy home recordings of times I won’t remember for years until one day a smell on the street brings them back.
And maybe, if I turn a corner, I’ll find myself in a place I loved that no longer exists. That hasn’t existed for years.
Could I wander the rooms of a house I’ve all but forgotten, my fingers remembering how to open a sticky latch, my feet instinctively knowing to skip a creaky step?
How deep does my heart go? How cracked are the walls?
The poet Donald Hall wrote that “Love is like sounds, whose last reverberations/Hang on the leaves of strange trees, on mountains/As distant as the curving of the earth/Where the snow hangs still in the middle of the air.”
When I can hear the echoes of love but can’t quite reach it, it helps to imagine them gathered together, collecting dust in the museum basement, waiting for me.
Lovely finish.