Fly Me to April

The Three-Eyed Raven site HBO launched in late 2014 as a teaser for Game of Thrones Season 5 was exactly the kind of thing designed to keep desperate fans functional during the hiatus—cryptic imagery, Twitter-gated visions of the season ahead, a slow drip of almost-nothing. It worked on me completely, as Polygon covered at the time.

The first teaser was tight-lipped and gorgeous, revealing nothing useful, which was exactly right. November 2014, and Season 5 was still five months away. I remember thinking: if a witch stepped out of a bush right now and offered to fast-forward my life to April, I’d say yes before she finished the sentence. No questions asked. Just fly me there.

The absence of Game of Thrones from the television calendar was its own specific misery. The show had rewired what TV could do—not just technically, but in the brutality of its logic. It refused to protect the characters you loved. You couldn’t coast through it on autopilot. It demanded your full attention and repaid that with gut punches, and without it, the evenings felt thinner in a way that was embarrassing to admit.

Khaleesi’s dragons were somewhere across the Narrow Sea. Cersei was plotting something. Jon Snow was probably standing in the cold looking conflicted. And I was sitting at my desk in late November, watching a thirty-second clip on repeat, operating at about a third of my usual capacity. So, old witch—whenever you’re ready.