Tonight, I finished the first season of the Serial podcast. The story held me claustrophobically close, unwilling to let me free, from the very first episode. Many things went through my head while listening to this podcast for the past five days. I was unsure where it would lead me, but having heard of great reviews, I decided to try it out. I wasn't the least bit disappointed.
Narrated by Sarah Koenig, the series focuses on the story of Adnan Syed and his conviction to a first-degree murder he may or may not have committed. From the beginning, Adnan understood that Sarah did not have the responsibility to exonerate him. She was merely to tell his story. As the last episode creeps closer to its denouement, I questioned further where Sarah was leading us. Coming into the second episode, then the third, then the fourth, and so on, I made an assumption that Sarah would give us a concrete, true/false, conviction/non-conviction answer. I allowed myself to move with the story, but only to a limit, having a soft voice reassuring me that there will be an answer to all of this. That the point of resurfacing the files and evidences and reports that have been long buried was to lead us to a definitive answer, unlike the one made fifteen years ago.
But instead, Sarah says "He [Adnan] is probably innocent, but I'm not sure." It upset my stomach knowing after all the work she's done, that even she couldn't lead herself to a definitive conclusion. She had strings in her that pulled the thoughts "Adnan is innocent" constantly; you can grasp this all along and she even surrenders to this belief in her podcast. But you can only pull the strings so much. The case was a messy one, and from a journalist who depended on facts rather than abstract "strings", Sarah needed more than what she had seen over the year to conclude that Adnan, in fact, did not murder Hae. "I nurse doubt," she says, "I don't like that I do, but I do."
What surprised me the most is how okay I was, hearing the closing credits being narrated in the last episode. I questioned if the episode has in fact ended, or if I've accidentally skimmed over. I started the episode ready to take in that definitive answer I wanted from the beginning; I tried my best to elude even the idea of skipping to the very last episode to find learn who really did kill Hae Min Lee. But the ending did not tell me whether or not Adnan did it. Nonetheless, I felt closure.
As Adnan said, you can't truly, in full closure, be 100% sure. But at the time of his conviction, they had to make the decision despite that. The authorities of the law, Adnan's friends and family, the people listening to this podcast: we can only have all of the data and facts that we can gather, and it still would not give us the certainty. The only person that can hold his certainty is Adnan, and perhaps that's just that. Just that. The truth did not belong to us - only our decisions; how we digest the evidence that he hold in our hands.
Serial is more than a 12-series podcast about a messy murder case. It showed me the storm that is trying to weave through an event from which one does not have control over. It was a podcast about making a decision when you do not have enough evidence to make an irrevocable conclusion. In a way, I can come to believe that by the nature of it all, we're all given just enough "evidences" to actually make a decision, albeit a non-conclusive one. We do not always have the control over how much assurance we're graced with our decisions; there will always be that uncertainty that perhaps we're walking towards the wrong path. But after having walked through the supposedly wrong turns in this life, I can safely say that I've grown to believe that there doesn't necessarily have to be a path intrinsically termed as the "wrong" or the "right" one. In the end of the day, the decisions we make, the perspective we wire our brains to have, is of our own, but the paths we walk through are shaped by our curiosity that we set forth, the mistakes we make and the doubts we nurse ever so protectively.
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