subdivisions (audio) (written August 7, 2020) — partially fiction 💞

a short story from the summer of 2020

I went out for my daily run, a six-mile loop that began and ended at my parents’ house. I left the subdivision. I ran the path by the main roads that made a square in which were interconnected a dozen different subdivisions, a square in which the high school was nestled in the corner.

I passed her house around the two-mile mark, just like I did every day. It was just a few houses deep down the road that was the entrance to her subdivision. I always slowed down a little bit so I could glance over there at the two cars in the driveway and at the toys in the yard. Usually, the garage was closed; no one was outside.

I continued my loop, thinking about my friendship with her and how it ended. A mile later, as always, I passed the high school where we became friends sixteen years ago. It was a short friendship on the scale of life, a burst of passion stretching two years. It spanned the better part of our adolescence; it consumed half of high school. We dated each other’s best friends. We tried new things for the first time together.

I started running at a different time every day. I wanted to figure out their routine – when did they come outside? When could I see them out there? I knew from Facebook that she had a daughter now. I wondered if those toys were for her kid. Surely, she didn’t live here anymore, but maybe her parents still did. Maybe they would come out walking down the path. Maybe I’d run past them; her mom wouldn’t recognize me. I’d wave and say hello to the little girl.

At last, after nine days of trying different times on the clock, I saw a little blonde-haired girl playing in the grass with a woman who looked like my friend’s mom as I remembered her. It was the visit of a daughter to her grandma. It was a little girl I would have known had I only stayed friends with her mother.

I thought about our friendship for the next four miles. As I ran past the high school, I thought about gathering with them at the lockers in the hallways. I ran past the entrance; I remembered pulling up in my car to pick my girlfriend up from musical recitals and band practices. I remembered how we’d drive out beneath these very same trees, beneath the green leaves they had back then that looked just the same as the ones hanging from them now. The scenery stayed the same. The networks of relationships had been replaced.

I passed so many other entrances to so many other subdivisions into which I’d once drive to meet friends that now I’d never speak with again. So many subdivisions with so many houses and so many trampolines, swings, pools, play structures, patios, basements, hoses, flowers, televisions, couches, sleeping bags, firepits, mosquito repellent, grass, trees, barbecues, and people that I’d never see again.

On the twelfth day of running, I saw them walking ahead of me. My friend’s mom and the little girl had left the subdivision and were walking on the concrete path that ran through the grass alongside the main road. The girl was wobbling back and forth a bit; my friend’s mom grabbed her by the hand and pulled her off to the side into the grass.

Although the mom’s back was to me, the little girl was looking right at me. She waved at me and smiled. I waved back and said “hello!” As I ran past them, I finally made eye contact with the mom. Now, so close to her, it was clear that she was in fact the mother of my old friend. A grandma now.

I kept running. I heard the little girl cry out “hello!” in the distance behind me.

I fell deep into the past after showering that afternoon. I pulled out all the boxes from the storage area in my parents’ basement where I kept my things from high school. I knew I’d saved countless hand-written letters, holiday cards, and printed pictures, buried somewhere here deep beneath the ruins of my younger years.

I found old basketball and Pokémon cards that I collected in elementary school. I found Goosebumps books and sports jerseys and stuffed animals. It was only in the bottom of the pile that I found the artefacts of my high school and college years. Pictures of me with friends from then, notebooks that I filled with my fantasies, college acceptance letters, mixed CDs my friends made me, mixed CDs I made for myself, my hoodie from the track team, my varsity jacket from the football team, all the boutonnieres my girlfriend had given me, all the letters she wrote me when she wasn’t paying attention in her classes, all the cards she made me for my birthdays and for different holidays, all the scrunchies she’d left behind after she left me, essays I wrote for classes, blue book exams from college, and a mask I wore for Halloween.

I found a framed collage my old girlfriend had made me. It showed us dressed up before all the different dances we went to our last two years of high school. I remembered all the different dresses like she was still standing in front of me, like I was still holding her.

When I drove around alone that night, I let my right hand just dangle over the cupholder between myself and the empty passenger seat. Looking only at the road, I could sense her there beside me. I knew she was about to grab my hand while I drove us to a dance. As I slowed down to stop at a light, I knew I’d simply have to turn my head so slightly, and then there beside me to my right I’d see her sitting with her pink corsage around her wrist, with her bare shoulders just above the fabric of her hot red dress. I knew because I’d just seen the picture of her sitting like that beside me on a couch in a living room, looking at me and laughing while we held hands in the crease between our thighs. It was saved on my digital camera. Someone took it just twenty minutes ago while we gathered with our friends to take pictures and then leave for Homecoming. Soon we’d pull into the parking lot and see them all getting out of their cars. We’d pull out our tickets, step out into the gym, and I’d slow dance with her so closely.

I dreamt that night that I just woke up in 2006, that I was 18 again, that I could just call them on my flip phone and meet them in a park somewhere. We could swing on the swing sets, race sticks in the water beneath the little bridges, swim in someone’s backyard pool. I would know the future; we would never grow apart, because I’d stop it from happening.

I went for my run at the same time as the prior day. I started just twenty minutes before I’d seen that little girl. But today they weren’t outside. The garage was closed. Yet there were four cars there now, two in the driveway and two on the side of their street. I slowed down, imagining my old friend was in there visiting her parents. I wondered if she was watching me through the window, against which I could only see the reflection of a hundred bright green leaves. But it was clear for her. She could see me running and staring at her, she could recognize my new look from my profile pictures. She wanted to talk to me, but she was afraid. It had been too long. She wondered if I was thinking about her.

I drove around that afternoon. I went to the park near Main Street where we used to eat Wendy’s on the picnic tables. I sat down at the table and I remembered my ex-girlfriend sitting there across from me. I could see her smiling with the play structure and the swings and the trees behind her hair. Little strands, only a few of them and hardly discernable, floated around in front of that background. I remembered how I kissed her there as we stood beside the picnic table and listened to the frogs in the night. I remembered how we sat on a bench by the creek in the dark and touched.

I wondered if I could remember where my ex-girlfriend’s house was. So many of the houses in her subdivision looked exactly the same, but I was sure I had a reflex and a sense for it I couldn’t ever lose. I could see myself thirteen years ago just turning into her subdivision, driving straight up the road, continuing as it curved, continuing further as it curved a second time, passing all the while homes that looked just like hers, but then knowing as I finished the second curve that I had arrived at the one I needed. And so it would be today. I would look at the grass in her backyard and know it was hers; I would see the wood on the deck and know it was where we took so many of those pictures. I’d see her standing there on the steps between the driveway and the deck, smiling at my car in her hot red dress.

I started my car and drove toward her subdivision. I pulled into the right one, I was sure of it. I drove slowly, knowing her house would be to my right. I knew I had a ways to go – straight for a while, then two whole curves, at the end of which she would be to my right immediately. And yet I was afraid, terrified she would be home visiting her parents, scared she’d see me through the window, apprehensive that I might see her child or her husband.

I let the car crawl along at ten miles an hour. I approached the end of the second curve, looking always to my right. I came to a house that I could feel; I came to a house that had her ghost standing there on those steps between the backyard deck and the garage.

There were three cars in the driveway. There was a woman who I sensed so deeply was her mom. She was sitting in a chair watching my car crawl slowly by. I sped up and left her behind, wondering if she could have sensed me like I sensed her.

And yet I was afraid it wasn’t her. I pulled to the side of the road several houses deeper into the subdivision, beside a home that looked exactly like hers, with the same stairs between the backyard deck and the driveway, with the same vast lawn in the backyard, with the same exact colors on all the bricks and all the wood and all the windowpanes.

I pulled out my iPhone so I could try and find her address somewhere on the Internet. I knew her last name wasn’t so common, so I just searched for it alongside the word “Michigan.” I saw the name of her father as I remembered it; he was a dentist. I clicked on one of the links and confirmed it was him, the same face as he had a decade and a half ago.

And now, looking at him there on my screen, I could feel him down the road from me. He was in that house. He had seen me drive past him through the window. He stood there and remembered how awkward all of our conversation were. He thought to himself it would have been so strange to have me as a son in law, knowing in his heart that I was thinking the same about him. But even now he kept standing there so still with his mug of coffee at the window, waiting for me to pass by again, waiting to catch just one last glimpse of the alien I was today. He’d never tell his daughter he saw me. She was in the kitchen with her baby.

I searched for a while, but I couldn’t find his home address listed anywhere on the Internet.

I wondered if at some point, his daughter had messaged me their exact address for whatever reason. So I searched for the street name in my Facebook messages. And I found a result from twelve years ago. I had asked her for an address so I could send her a postcard. She’d given me her address with a heart after it.

I put the address into Google Maps on my iPhone. It was a house I already passed, one that appeared from the map to be the same house where her mother was sitting in the driveway, where her father was standing at the window, where even now he fearfully awaited my return, where even now he hoped his daughter would stay in the kitchen with her baby and her husband.

I turned my car around and drove back toward that house.

I nearly completely stopped right in front of her house. But I felt the woman in that chair in the driveway. I could sense her looking at me, squinting at my face through my car’s window, wondering if it could really be me. She was moving around in her seat, wiggling and waving her arms, gesturing at someone in the garage.

I looked at their mailbox. It was the number from the address she had sent me thirteen years ago.

I looked into the windows at the front of the house. He was gone now. How long he had stood there awaiting me, wondering about me, hoping I would not truly return, thinking with terror about how awkward it would be to have me as his son in law, knowing with certainty that I thought the same of him.

There were toys all over the driveway. I knew she must be here with her child. Maybe it was her to whom her mom was gesturing in the garage.

I accelerated and sped away. I left her subdivision and drove back to my own.

It was a sensation I hadn’t had in sixteen years, but one I sometimes half-replicated in my fantasies. The sensation was the feeling of being inside a specific moment of time. It was eternally linked with all the events, friends, and experiences of those years. And so although it defined me and always haunted me, it could only be awoken partially, because all of those things that sustained it were gone.

But then I stood on the driveway in the summer sun while watering some flowers in the soil by the bright white concrete. And suddenly I managed at last to completely undo the future. I had just returned from driving past her house. And this was the driveway of the house where I’d grown up, but for a moment I was still growing up here. It was the sun from sixteen years ago that shone upon me now. Below me was the ancient ancestor of a flower I would water in my early thirties. Standing there on the driveway, I knew I could just get into my car and drive to back her parents’ house… and it would again be the place she was sleeping every night, the place she did her homework, the place she hosted pre-parties for Homecoming dances. She would be there waiting for me in that driveway.

For days after that moment, I wondered how I might intentionally cause such time travel again, even if just for a couple of seconds. I wanted the intoxication of actually being there sixteen years ago in 2006.

I needed to have it again. What had caused that moment? It was the fact I had just, for the first time in over a decade, driven to her house.

I realized that if I simply repeated a series of routines from that time for a couple of hours, while fantasizing about everything that had been and while listening to music from that time, then I could succeed in summoning its ghost. There would be a few seconds in which everything that was now gone would truly exist once again. It would exist in such a real way that it would feed that feeling again, it would fully revive that dying sensation.

For six weeks now I’d been at my parents’ house visiting for the summer. For the last couple days, I had been home alone, just as I was sometimes back then. Sitting on the patio that morning, I could feel myself back then watering the forefathers of these plants around me, just as I had to do now. Walking inside to get more coffee, there was the same total silence throughout the house as there had been back then. That night, I pretended I could just get in my car and driven to her house; she would be there in the driveway waiting for me.

The next morning, I sat again drinking coffee on the patio. My favorite band back then had been Death Cab for Cutie. I was listening to them now. Each song was tied up forever to so many memories and people, to so many little moments with her and with others.

I had mostly stopped listening to them after their 2011 album, Codes & Keys. I listened to that album a lot when it came out. But it was like reconnecting with someone who had changed irrevocably. It didn’t create the feelings for me that their songs from the previous decade did.

When their 2015 album, Kitsugi, came out, I was afraid to try it. So many of my friends never even listened to Codes & Keys. “Death Cab is dead,” they said. But eventually I did listen to it. It was depressing to hear the gap so clearly between what they once were and what they’d become. I added a couple of the songs to my running playlist, but otherwise I never listened to it again.

After I gave up on Kitsugi, I still listened to Codes & Keys sometimes on airplanes to help me fall asleep. It was easy to fall asleep listening to that one; it didn’t provoke any of the fantasies and nostalgias that their other albums did. It didn’t have the kinds of lyrics that made me dream like their old ones did. I only listened to it on airplanes.

That morning, two years had passed since their newest album, Thank You for Today, came out in 2018. I had never listened to a single song. The name of the album just made me cringe for them. I almost got tickets to see them in concert in 2019, but then I realized they might play songs from albums like Thank You for Today, Kitsugi, and Codes & Keys. It wouldn’t be the same as the Death Cab concerts I went to long ago.

Thinking about all this, I got up to refill my coffee in the kitchen. Then I came back out onto the patio. I decided to give Thank You for Today a chance. I sat rocking beneath the branches of the trees while Spotify streamed Thank You for Today onto my Bluetooth speaker. Was there any way hearing something new by my favorite band could impact me in a fresh way? Was I a fool for refusing to have even given Ben Gibbard another chance, after all he had done for me?

That morning in 2020, I listened to the whole album three times and slipped into memories. I took her to a Death Cab concert in the fall of 2005. We were both 17, seniors in high school. We hadn’t kissed or even held hands before then. The show ended with the song “Transatlanticism.” We were standing as the song came to its familiar haunting finish, with the reverberating echoes of Ben Gibbard’s voice – “I need you so much closer.” It was during those lyrics that she suddenly grabbed my hand. I turned to her and kissed her on the lips. We held hands all the way out the door to my car. And then we dated for two years, the first of them magical and the second turbulent. But we had all of it ahead of us in that moment at the Death Cab concert.

It was while listening to Thank You for Today that I suddenly relived all that. It was as if Ben Gibbard knew exactly what I needed now, as if he himself were as haunted by the past as I was. All the lyrics of the songs I played repeatedly – “I Dreamt We Spoke Again,” “Summer Years,” “When We Drive,” and “You Moved Away” – were deep nostalgic reflections that spoke exactly to my feelings in that moment.

I needed that sensation again. I needed to know in my bones she’d be standing on that driveway.

I opened up my Facebook Messenger to find addresses. There were various threads from many years ago in which I’d asked for them so I could send postcards from my trips. I saved the addresses of six former friends in my Google Maps on my iPhone. Six people I hadn’t spoken with in at least nine years. I didn’t even know if their parents still lived in these houses. Still I would visit them all. I’d stop out in front and fantasize about everything that had happened there.

I went down into the basement where I’d been going through boxes from childhood. I grabbed two CD’s she made for me when we were together. I hadn’t listened to either one of them in thirteen years. I didn’t know what songs they would hold. I took them out with me into the car.

With the first mixed CD, which turned out to be mostly Sufjan Stevens, playing in the car, I drove toward her house first. I would pick her up and we’d drive around to our friends’ houses. I remembered how she had gotten me into Sufjan Stevens with this exact CD. Somehow I had completely forgotten. But now I could feel her handing it to me and telling me, “you’re going to love Sufjan, I know it.” It was on this CD in my car that I first heard the song “Chicago” while we held hands over the cupholders. And now it came on again as I approached her subdivision. It was a memory that had been practically erased; I would never associate “Chicago” with her today. And yet now it was only her, nothing else. Forgetting was in the deep future.

I drove up to her house, slowing to about five miles an hour. This time, the garage was closed. I couldn’t see any cars. After a moment’s hesitation, I turned into her driveway and then stopped my car at the bottom. I lingered there. I lifted my phone to my ear and pretended to hear her voice. I told her I was here. She said she’d be right out. I pictured her come out like always through the side door between the garage and the deck. She had a black purse thrown around her shoulder. She walked down the bright white concrete toward my car. I summoned the smell of her sitting in the passenger seat beside me. I pretended that her fingers were grazing mine over the cupholder. The song “Chicago” was just finishing up in the CD player as I backed the car out into the street.

“I love this song,” I pretended she said. “Let’s restart it!”

She restarted “Chicago.”

I noticed there was a stationary car waiting to get into the driveway just as I left. I saw him there in the window – her dad. I waved at him; I pretended she did, too. Then I accelerated down the street and left her subdivision.

I drove to our friend’s house, the one I often ran past. I stopped the car there. The little girl wasn’t outside today. The garage was closed. There wasn’t a car in the driveway. But I could see us walking up the side yard, meeting her in the backyard, getting into our bathing suits, jumping in the pool, sitting around the fire pit in the evening drying off in our towels.

I drove to four more houses. There was a house where once she got so scared during a horror movie she made us leave. There was a house where we’d made out and cuddled on the trampoline in the dark in the backyard. There a house where we always picked up a friend of ours who we joked was like our daughter. She always sat in the backseat, sometimes saying we were like her parents.

I drove aimlessly through almost all the subdivisions around Rochester Adams High School. I lingered in the ones where I knew other friends had lived. But I couldn’t find their addresses, and so I just drove slowly, trying to find them walking around, hoping I’d sense them. I creeped along on different streets and into different driveways. I slowed down while passing pedestrians so I could try and recognize someone’s mom or dad. I stopped wherever I saw an open garage door, hoping a friend might come walking out.

I drove to three elementary school playgrounds. We used to hang out at them late at night when we were teenagers. I drove to parking spaces where we once made out in the backseat of my car. At the one by Brewster Elementary School, I stopped in the most isolated part of the parking lot and got into the backseat. We used to be so intertwined back here. We’d take off each other’s shirts and not worry about getting caught.

I went to the drive-thru at McDonald’s. We used to come here whenever we’d been making out for a really long time. I ordered what I did back then: a double cheeseburger, fries, and a Coke. I parked in the spot where we always did back then. As I ate, I pretended she was there eating, too.

I pretended to grab her hand when we finished. I drove to the CVS across the intersection and parked there at the top of a hill overlooking the main road. We used to sit there together in my car. We’d just watch other cars drive by. We’d talk and listen to music and kiss.

I drove back home. I parked in the driveway. I used the hose to start watering the plants. I stood in sunlight so similar to the last time I traveled back in time.

But everything I felt today was just a partial version of the real thing. I couldn’t revive the sensation; I couldn’t resurrect the world. I couldn’t call her on my phone. I couldn’t text her. I couldn’t drive to her house and pick her up. I couldn’t smell her in any seat beside me. She was a stranger now. But can she feel me looking for her? Is she herself practicing these rituals and casting these spells? Does she drive around this town and feel me there beside her?

I find her in my cell phone. Is it still her number? I click on her name. I stared at the empty text thread. I saw her name suddenly glow “blue” – she had an iPhone like me.

“I listened to a CD you made me today, haha,” I typed. “We were so funny!”

But then I just deleted it.

At night, I opened our Facebook Messenger history. The last message was from three years ago, in 2017, when I wished her a happy birthday and she thanked me. I scrolled all the way up to the beginning in early 2006, when we both got our college emails. We still had another year and a half left of dating back then.

I read every word of every message. There weren’t very many from high school. But when we were both at different colleges, we constantly said “I love you.” We wrote about how much we missed each other. We coordinated visits between our campuses; we sent quick messages describing funny things that had happened at our schools.

We sent one another apologies after the fights we often had on the phone. They were fights frequently rooted in jealousy and distrust that had emerged with distance. After almost every fight, we explicitly reasserted our love, which sometimes also seemed to have become more passionate with distance. But one day, an apology was implicitly rejected. Instead of forgiveness, there was a long message of condemnation. There was a declaration of how much it had hurt.

And then there were all the messages I sent her pleading with her not to leave me. She responded to some but ignored many.

There was silence for several months.

Then she started writing me about how she wanted to be friends. She said she was sorry for how it ended. She said it hurt her not to have me in my life.

For the next few years, we messaged each other every month or so, maintaining a long-distance friendship. We made plans to hang out whenever we’d both be back in our hometown. She sent me things about her boyfriend and I gave her advice. I told her things about the girls I was into and she commented. I talked her through a breakup with a guy who cheated on her. I encouraged her in a new relationship she started soon afterward with a man who was now her husband.

I dwelled on the messages where she told me how important our friendship was to her. I looked again at the empty text thread on my phone. I thought about how awkward it would be to text her now. I could picture her chastising me back then if I’d suggested this kind of a future.

The last message from that era was one making plans to hang out during spring break. We were both home from school. I remembered how I picked her up from a bar where she and our mutual female friends had been drinking. I remembered the pettiness of my jealousy that they had not invited me there. They were drunk and laughing and giggling in my car, and I sensed at some point they were making fun of me. Excluding me, then making me come pick them up. Using me as a designated driver, then laughing at me in my car while I drove them home.

I slammed the breaks and screamed at them all to get out. I abandoned them on the side of the road and drove off.

I remembered I texted and called them all the next day, pleading with them to forgive me. But none of them would, not even her. She told me on the phone that she thought I was different. She told me what happened made her question if she really even knew me.

And so there were four whole years of silence on our Messenger thread. It was in 2015 when in finally messaged her again. Again I apologized for what happened four years before. I had seen on Facebook she was wedding planning, and I told her I hoped it was going well. I wrote several more paragraphs that made me cringe when I read them now, paragraphs that expressed to her my nostalgia for our friendship and my regret that it had collapsed. To all that she responded with just a few sentences. She told me the wedding planning was going great and that things seemed to be good for me, too.

Then I told her “happy birthday” two years in a row. She always thanked me. But she never wished a happy birthday for me.

I looked at hundreds of her wedding pictures on Facebook, some of them many times.

I looked at her wedding dress, so simple and elegant, and thought about what great taste she had. The veil itself, the way it covered her hair, called upon me to fall in love with her again.

I looked at all the pictures she posted of her and her husband.

I read every status she wrote and every comment she made wherever I found them.

My last happy birthday wish, three years ago in 2017, was our last communication.

For three years since, I’ve continued to follow her. Sometimes I click back through every single picture she’s ever posted on Facebook until I reach the very beginning, when the pictures she posted were the two of us and our friends at high school dances. Sometimes I scroll down her timeline until I get to the very bottom, to the first status update she ever made. I see posts I made on her wall many years ago, long before “reactions” or “comments” were even possible.

I read all the things her friends had ever written on her wall. I read all her friends’ comments on every picture she’d ever been in. I saved some of the older pictures to my computer, the ones of her when she was a teenager and we were together, just in case she ever defriended me.

Most recently, I’d watched her progress through her pregnancy. I looked at all the baby pictures when her child was born. I liked some that she posted on Instagram. I wondered what she felt when she saw my username come up in her notifications. Could she feel me watching her? Could she feel how I strove to be so much closer to her? Could she hear them echoes of Ben Gibbard’s voice as I kissed her in that concert? Is that what she thought when she saw me in her Newsfeed?

From time to time, she liked my posts, too. Every time she did that, I thought about messaging her, but I was too scared. I hoped she now felt the same despair for what was lost as I did.

I stayed up all night doing it all again. I read all of our messages. I clicked back through every picture in which she’d ever been tagged. I read every single comment and looked at every individual “reaction.” I went back to the origins, to the pictures of my holding her hand in my car, to the picture of her in her red Homecoming dress in the fall of 2005.

And then, at nearly five in the morning, I just sat in outside in the dark on the patio listening to another mixed CD she’d given me. It was the first one she ever gave me, probably no later than almost fifteen years ago in October of 2005. I listened to the whole CD for an hour while smoking a joint and watching the sky slowly brighten until the sun began to rise. She’d introduced me on this CD to so much more of the music I still loved than I had even remembered – artists like Regina Spektor, Bloc Party, and Metric. There were even three songs from the soundtrack for The Notebook, which we’d watched together that September in my basement while cuddling on the couch. When the CD finished, I smoked another joint I played it again, I dreamed that she was speaking to me from the distant past, and I went to bed remembering how beautiful her hair was when she curled it a little.

I woke up in the middle of the afternoon feeling more sober. In the bright light of a new day, after ten hours of deep sleep, my recent antics seemed insane and doomed. Why would I park today in her parents’ driveway, at a house where she hadn’t lived in nearly a decade, and pretend to pick her up? Why would I pretend to drive her around our hometown to a bunch of places that could never be what they had been before? It wasn’t working, and even if it did, it could never summon anything more than a phantom. I needed to know exactly where she lived right now.

The yard behind my parents’ yard was overgrown with weeds and massive bushes. The lawn was gone now; it had given way to a suburban jungle. The wooden deck was visibly rotting. Its pillars seemed to decompose a little bit more each day.

Just one man lived in that giant house. His wife and daughters had abandoned him. He left nearly all the lights on throughout each night, so that his massive two-story windows glowed yellow. Dense networks of spider webs were scattered across the corners of those windows, which were like animal markets offering a rich variety of insect flavors.

I sat out on the patio one night and smoked a huge joint. I was enjoying it at first, just sitting so high in the dark while listening to music, crickets, and frogs. Now and then I heard a rustling in the dense bushes of the yard behind me, but it was easy to just keep staring forward, to just keep listening to the songs that were playing.

But then came a moment when I heard a movement that must have been coyotes. I thought I must look small and vulnerable sitting here in this chair with my back turned to the predators. The rustling stopped. They were still and silent in there now. They were positioned to pounce. I tried to calm myself by lighting another joint and taking several deep hits.

But then my fear of the coyotes gave way quickly to a more general fear of death. From the perspective of another, I saw myself walking around in the street. From the perspective of a stranger, I heard myself telling dumb jokes and passing quickly through people’s lives. I watched as I laughed when no one else did. And from the perspective of this other who couldn’t even spell my full name, I saw myself die, and I felt the indifference of the other. I experienced how they moved on contentedly with their lives for decades into the future after I was gone.

I saw myself from the perspective her. She was that stranger, she was that other. For her, I was an alien now. She was the one who moved on into the decades indifferent to me.

I needed to leave something behind to last beyond me, something that would haunt her throughout her life. It was as a primary character in her crippling nostalgic fantasies that I would continue to exist. I would be there when she listened to the mixed CD’s I’d given her.

I got up and walked to the front yard and then out into the street. I walked down the road in the dark taking hits off another joint.

I would write a novel that captured the whole story of our relationship. I would write in such a way that anyone who read it and had been involved in the events would, for a moment, experience that same sensation yet again. For at least a few seconds, everything that created the sensation of existing in that time would exist yet again, intoxicating the mind. She wouldn’t be able to help herself. She’d read it.

I imagined myself as a famous writer haunting her with my image everywhere bombarding her. She reads all my books and feels me speaking to her. But she can’t reach out to me, she won’t do it. I’m too far away, too alien. She is crumbles from nostalgia every time she reads my stories about us, every time she reads about my yearning for those days. She reads them all over and over, night after night, ignoring her husband and obsessing over my pictures. I pretend I’m looking into cameras and I know I’m looking at her somewhere out her, I know I’m looking her in the eyes. I know she is forever haunted by me.

When I got back from my walk, I sat down again on the patio and listened to music. For fifteen minutes, I just smiled slightly and pretended to stare into a camera. But I knew through that lens I was looking her right in the eyes. I knew as I was interviewed that she felt I was speaking directly to her.

And as I sat there in the dark on the patio, I started saying things out loud to the interviewer, who I fancied to be sitting in the empty chair across from me.

“No,” I said aloud with a deep sigh. I looked not at the interview, but rather directly into the camera. “We haven’t spoken in many years.”

“What would you say to her, if you could?” the interviewer asked.

“I would tell her that she has inspired me,” I said, looking at the interviewer, but feeling her staring at me through the camera lens that was broadcasting this live to the world.

“What does your wife think about all this?”

I laughed. “She knows it’s not that I’m not over her or something like that,” I said. “It’s just that she’s such an important part of my past.”

“So,” the interviewer asked, “there’s no part of you that’s still in love with her?”

I sighed. “There’s a former me that loved her,” I said.

Then I pretended to be in a whole different interview, with a different interviewer, this one in a different kind of world. It was a world where I denied that any of the women in my stories were based on her, and yet it was so obvious to her that they all were.

I pretended to look at the interviewer in the chair across from me. He was a white-haired white man in his sixties wearing a tan suit over a light blue shirt. He didn’t have a tie. He was smiling at me and had one of his legs resting atop the other. One of his hands was kind of cleaning to the ankle of his lifted leg. And then he made a very skeptical face at me while I imagined I was saying something to him. Clearly he didn’t buy what I was telling him, although I myself was not quite sure what that would be. I just kept making different facial expressions at him, which I pretended were linked to things I was saying. Sometimes I even moved my lips, but without actually making a sound. And I pretended to see him making very animated gestures and expressions back at me. I pretended to see him moving his mouth as he spoke, although he was like a character on a muted television show.

And all the while as I made those faces in the dark, I could feel her looking at me through the camera that broadcasted it live right into her living room. As she watches me, as she stares at all my books stacked up in front of her, I sense how devastated she is by her yearning for the past. She gets on her computer and looked at every single picture of me on Facebook. She saves her favorites just in case I defriend her. She reads everything I’ve ever posted and everything I’ve ever commented that she can find. She makes back-ups of all the copies of all the emails and messages we ever sent each other. She digs up the photo album of us that I made for her and she looks through it every day, sometimes hiding it from her husband and her child. I pictured it all as I continued to make my faces and move my lips and watch the old man react to me.

But then I started speaking more somberly in the interview. I was suddenly afraid maybe nothing I was sensing was reality. What if all of that fantasy was just madness? What if in truth, the woman looking at me through that camera lens on the other side of the patio was just pitying me. What if she wasn’t even watching me anymore? What if she had just turned off the TV and muttered about what a fucking lunatic I was? What if she talked with her husband about how creepy me and my stories were? What if she and all our old friends got together and talked about how I’d really gone off the deep-end?

And then I wondered – does this whole project fundamentally cross a line of creepiness?

So then I looked at the interviewer very seriously.

“Can I be very serious for a moment?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said, leaning forward in the patio chair across from mine.

“I want her to know,” I said, “that not one of these characters is based on her at all. Yes, maybe situationally, there are plot points in my stories that are inspired by something that happened with her. But the character is not based on her. But sometimes I’m afraid she thinks it is based on her. And I’m afraid that makes her think I’m like, crazy or something.”

The interviewer raised an eyebrow. He was silent for a while. And then finally he spoke. “You must understand, then,” he said, “how all of this makes you seem… a little obsessed?

I went inside. I made a pot of coffee. I stayed up watching reruns of New Girl. But now and then I was distracted by the prophecy that I would die young and before I was able to carry any of this out. I’d be dying on a hospital bed and yearning for a chance to look at her through a camera lens. Instead she would just be the indifferent other, hardly aware of my death.

When the sun was rising, I smoked another joint. I took a walk around the block.

I pretended I was an AI character in an RPG video game. Whenever anyone walked by, I pretended they were the player and I was the computer-simulated AI person in the village where their character was walking around. So I always waved at them in a very exaggerated manner. I made sure they really heard my hello. I always wondered if they would come up to me and hit “A” on their controller so we could have a conversation. And what would I do then?

I went to sleep in the mid-morning. I woke up in the late afternoon.

I decided I would send her a story about us, but a silly one. Not a story about how deeply we loved one another, but rather a story about how awkward things could be. It would be a way to communicate with her but without seeming creepy. Gradually, however, as I would sent her more and more of my stories about us, she would become increasingly haunted by a yearning to go back in time to those moments. She would demand that I write even more of my stories. I’d send a new chapter to her every couple of days until it built itself up into an epic novel. Then she would send me her address and I would come to see her, the real her, not a phantom of the past conjured up by the sunlight in my parents’ driveway.

I spent the evening writing a story about an early encounter. I stayed up all night watching reruns of The Office. When the sun rose, I sent her the entire story without explanation in a series of lengthy Facebook messages. They were the first messages I’d sent to her in three years.