"Wicked" is about the lifespan of love
I was musing on some things, and I am obsessed with both Wicked and Frankenstein lately - and to paraphrase the story - to be lost and to be found; that's the lifespan of love.
I can't help but think that that's what Wicked is about. Both the play and the movie.
(Love, in this context, will not always be inherently romantic. read this as you find fitting, though; be my guest).
For Elphaba, Love's a fragile thing that doesn't apply to her in any possible way. Love, for her, is loss; love, for her, is never to be found. Not because she doesn't believe in it, but because she trusts Love to be to those who are inherently good and, little by little, she is turned from an ordinary (if applicable) green girl into a wicked thing. Love is for the good, and none of the good she meant ever came to be good deeds.
And still, she found love. She found love, and love found her when she was lost and at loss on what to do. Love was a real thing, a tangible one that kissed her too fiercely and held her too tight, and it was hers; Love had not only found her, but taken form - as if It always knew that It needed to be tangible for her to believe It.
And she lost Love. She lost Love, and what a short lifespan both Love and Grace had. To be lost and to be found - and then to be lost again.
For Fiyero, Love is a real thing, sure; but he is lost. Finding Love was never a problem - but how can love find something that is lost? How can something that, too, has a lifespan, find him in his own lifespan when he is not sure what he does with that himself?
He finds himself, then, and he finds himself in Love. To be lost, to be found - to have lost her, to have found her. Then, to lose himself. Because of her.
And, for him, that is not loss - he grieves the loss of the life in Love that they could have had, but there is no loss of Love, no; because she lives. His Love lives, as does his love, and It found her, after all. To be lost and to be found. His was the only lifespan to cease. Not his love's (he hoped, he prayed, he begged). Not Love's.
Now, for Galinda, Love is not found nor lost; It simply is there, because she believes It to be freely given, easily taken - she has had It all her life. It makes no sense, whatsoever, that Love ever has a lifespan. To be lost and to be found? For her, Love was never lost; she always had It. It never needed to be found, because It always reached her.
And It finds her, again and again and again; and she barely realizes just how much loss to be so found costs. She can't, because Love found is so much louder than Love lost - that one only echoes in the in between of grieving silence and bustling crowds.
The lifespan of love begins, for her, at the end - because she lost the love she gave to a lost man that found himself in a love she didn't see before (granted, she couldn't have, so surrounded by love of her own, to her ownself), and she lost the love that was given by two other people finding each other because, well; she never believed Love could be lost.
At the end, she is Loss.
In the end, at the end, Fiyero and Elphaba are Found. At the end, the lifespan of love is to be lost and to be found. At the end, Love begins in Oz - in grief, in solitude, in everything that had never been before - to be nevermore found in those lands.
