the sensation (additional extracts — written August 13, 2020)

additional extracts from the sensation

I drove toward the high school. 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. At the end of the night we’d do what we did back then. We’d park the car on the side of the road somewhere and we’d slow dance out in the middle of the street. When I did it fifteen years ago, I knew it was corny but I loved all the more-so because of that, and so did she. I never did all the corny things I thought of back then; I was afraid of being too corny. I wished I had.

I dreamt that night that I just woke up in 2006, that I was 18 again, that I could just call her on my flip phone and pick her up. It was the fall now. My dream was a memory of day that had become existential to me. It was almost Halloween. We went to Target to look at the CDs and buy random accessories for our costumes. We held hands while we walked down the aisles.

We drove back toward my house with leaves falling all around the car.

“When we get home,” I started to say.

“Aw,” she said. She squeezed my hand over the cupholder.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m a part of your home,” she said.

“You are my home,” I said.

And we didn’t care that it was a cliché. Soon we’d be sitting in a circle around a fire pit with our friends, sharing a blanket and touching underneath. “I’m going to marry you,” I’d tell her. We knew that it would sound silly to adults. But we knew they didn’t understand how much we loved each other. They couldn’t comprehend how she gave me a reason to live.

******

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 that 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 those things that nurtured 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 for a moment I was still growing up here at my parents’ house. It was the sun from fifteen 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. 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 fifteen years ago in 2005, when our relationship had begun.

I designed a mechanism for achieving the sensation. I would repeat 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. It was, after all, the act of driving past her house that seemed to have summoned the sensation I had on my driveway. Just like then, again there would be a few seconds in which everything that was lost 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 of being in that time with her.

That sensation had come to me when we went to her church together on Sunday mornings. I felt it when I picked her up from musical recitals, marching band practices, and voice lessons. It was with me when we went to see her sister perform some music at church. I drove to her house and gave her Cold Stone ice cream as a present while she was studying for her finals. She came to my house with a 12-pack of Fresca because she knew I loved that drink, and then we cuddled in my basement while watching The Notebook. We were with a group of friends walking toward my car and it was understood that she automatically had shotgun. The sensation came to me also when I put my fingers on her cheeks, which felt different than any other cheek I’ve ever touched before or since. I felt that surging meaning whenever she looked at me and whispered: “you take care of me.” And now I knew it was possible to have the feeling of being in that time again.

******

I listened to the whole album three times and slipped into memories. I took her to a Death Cab concert in late summer of 2005, fifteen years ago. I was 17, about to start my senior year in high school. She was 16, about to start junior year. We hadn’t kissed or even held hands before then.

The concert 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 feel certain that the seventeen-year-old her would be standing on that driveway waiting for me. I would conduct the ritual this afternoon.

******

I spent some time one afternoon trying to find a recording of her voice on her Instagram or Facebook. I went through her entire Instagram feed, back to the very beginning, and played every single video I found. But she never spoke in any of them. And it was the same when I repeated the process on her Facebook.

I sat for a while on the patio smoking a spliff. I could hear her voice in my head. But it had been so many years, I wondered if my memory was really even accurate. I had listened the other day to a Malcom Gladwell podcast about how faulty human memory is. What if the voice I summoned in my head wasn’t truly hers at all?

Then I remembered a CD I had found in the boxes of my stuff in the basement. It was in the middle of a pile of blank CDs stacked up on top of one another. Some of them were severely scratched and nearly broken. In the middle I found one labeled “Pictures 2005.”

I couldn’t see any pictures on there at first. I had an external CD player, but my MacBook Air didn’t have a USB portal for some reason. I had to order a USB-MacBook Air adapter on Amazon. It had come a few days ago, but I didn’t dare actually look on the CD yet.

But now, after a failed search for her voice on the Internet, and after the realization that all my memories of her from our first year as a couple might be fake, I realized there might be videos on that disc. There must be pictures I hadn’t seen in over a decade. This was pre-social media material that had nearly been lost forever; 2005 was the last year before we had Facebook.

I went into the kitchen and opened my laptop on the counter. I plugged the external CD player into my MacBook Air using the adapter I had bought on Amazon. I downloaded all of the content from the disc onto my Google Drive. There were so many folders and dates; I knew right away there was going to be a treasure trove of forgotten memories here.

Once everything was downloaded to my computer, I unplugged the external CD drive and went outside to the patio to sit with my laptop in the rocking chair underneath the trees. I began going through the pictures. I looked first in the folder for “Fall 2005.”

There were about 10 folders for 10 different dates within that folder, most of those dates concentrated on either side of Halloween.

I opened one at random and immediately noticed a short video with her in it. I couldn’t remember knowing about this video. I had no idea what would be in it.

I blew it up to cover my whole screen, and I pressed play.

I’m filming so I can’t see myself. It seems like I’m just lying on her bed in the bedroom. The quality of the video, recorded on a bulky digital camera from 2005, is significantly lower than the normal quality of my iPhone today. But I see her clearly in the bathroom wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and a cardigan. Her bedroom door to the hallway is also open. There’s some sort of punk music playing faintly in the background.

She walks out of the bathroom and heads toward me. She does a little dance as she passed the lens. She is shuffling around in her things to the right. She glances at me and giggles with a beaming smile. “Where are my socks?” she asks herself. Then she walks to the left and finds them on the ground by the bed on which I am sitting. She picks them up.

She goes and sits down on the couch across from me and starts putting on her socks. She’s smiling at me. The punk music continues playing faintly.

“Why don’t you film me doing something exciting?” she asks in a playful nod and smile.

I had forgotten this entire scene playing out in the video. But having forgotten it merely makes it hit me all the stronger now that I am living it again. I sink deep inside of myself at the sound of her voice. It is, I realize, exactly the voice that I remember, precisely the voice that I so often conjure up in my head. I feel now the actual sensation of being in that time with her, the same sensation I failed to achieve on my grand tour of our town with her ghost beside me in the car. But now I really am present here in the past. I am with her in an even physical sense, a sense that takes over my body and my mind. I am basking in the truth of our close she is to me. I am terrified at the thought of not having her. I am so fucking deeply in love with this girl.

“Everything you do is exciting,” I hear myself tell her.

She giggles. She smiles so brightly. “Putting on socks?” she asks, as she playfully rolls her eyes.

“I know,” I hear myself say. “Look at it.”

And I briefly move the camera down to focus more on her socks. The fuzzy quality of the video makes it seem even more real, like I am actually gazing into the past not through a camera but through some kind of portal I could walk through this moment.

She goes and stands at the mirror. She looks briefly at her reflection and then twirls toward me.

“Should I button it?” she asks, doing a motion with the cardigan.

“I don’t know,” I hear myself say jokingly as she twirls back and forth, “I’m not gay.”

I cringe hearing that, remembering how I used to use the word “gay” in such a terrible way when I was a teenager. It isn’t something I think about often. Hearing it now makes me ashamed. I can’t associate with it, and I’m not there anymore. I’m pulled back into the present.

But she laughs loudly, looking right in the camera, and then she twirls back to face the mirror.

“Make your own decisions,” I hear myself add, as she plays with her hair in the mirror.

She laughs again.

I try and hear the lyrics. I realize she’s listening to “Magic Monday” and singing along.

Still singing along, she walks suddenly back into the bathroom. I watch her looking at herself in the bathroom mirror. She examines some product on the counter. Briefly, I feel the sensation again. I feel just like I would if I was actually there in that bedroom with her.

“La, La, La,” I then hear myself say.

Why? I think, cringing in humiliation again. It pulls me again out of the sensation of being there.

She walks back out from the bathroom toward the bed and grabs something off the nightstand. In that moment it shows her face at an angle that’s precisely how I remember it in my dreams. There’s something so distinctly beautiful about her cheeks and nose. Then she walks back into the bathroom singing the lyrics – “He tells me in his bedroom voice,” she sings softly, before a more sexy: “Come on baby, let’s go make some noise.” At that moment she pauses at the bathroom mirror and plays with her hair. Then the video ends at one minute and two seconds.

I set my computer to the side for a moment.

*****

I sent a audio iMessage to a friend explaining what I had just watched and how it made me feel. I said I had truly just traveled back as a ghost into the past. I had been there observing what happened as it happened. Simultaneously, I told him, I felt like I myself had been the man filming the video, and yet I felt alienated from him. I felt the sensation when I saw her at the beginning of the video and felt how she interacted with me, but it was unstable. It easily crumbled when I realized the contradiction. And yet for brief, magical moments, especially in the first twenty seconds of the video, it was real. I was living it, not watching it. My nostalgia, I told him, was replaced in those moments by the actual present reality of her being with me, tolerating me, loving me, and smiling at me like that.

There was power in video, I reflected to him, so long as it was a video of something deeply personal and forgotten. To be forgotten, it couldn’t be uploaded onto social media. Because then it would be resurrected on the News Feed too often by nostalgic commentary. People would re-watch it periodically or, at least, discuss it with each other more frequently. And so it could never have the effect that this video, unseen for fifteen years yet depicting something so real and so deeply personal, had just had on me. I needed to find more videos like this.

I hit send.

******

I found a video from October 31st. The day after the last one. I was nervous. This was a night I had remembered so often. I remembered sitting on our friend’s bed at one point, where I ran my hands through her hair on the bed. I remembered how she looked up at me and smiled at me. She told me for months afterward how special that moment was to her.

I hit play.

I am filming so I can’t see myself. I’m sitting on a couch in our friend’s basement. We were all eating our candy from trick-or-treating. I had completely forgotten about this part of the night. I turned the camera to the left and there she is. An entire side of her face is completely in the camera. It hits me just as it would have back then, just as if I am sitting beside her now. There’s no question I can kiss her right this moment. With her cheek so close to the camera, I feel on my fingertips the exact unique nature of the texture of her cheek. And by the end of the video, she says: “Why don’t you video tape things that are” – she’s cut off. The video ends. 15 seconds. And I felt then like it was happening now, like soon we’d be on that bed upstairs where I’d be running my fingers through her beautiful brown hair.

I searched again through the folders, hoping to find another video that could hit me like these. And I found several more that repeated inside me the same process as the others. In some moments it even seemed impossible that we weren’t still together. I believed this girl in these videos was out there right now. I believed she was my girlfriend.

I realized the roots of the power of these videos. The fact I had forgotten them made their impact like that of an extremely recent memory or of an event that was happening right this moment. Suddenly, things I knew intellectually had happened long ago were emotionally happening right now. And so after each video I felt just as if I’d just finished hanging out with her and she was still out there, because I suddenly had this very recent memory of my relationship with her.

And I couldn’t remember the names of the bands, but that just made their music all the more authentic to the sensation. Because I heard it just I heard it back then, unmitigated by the way a song changes its meaning to someone over time when played regularly across the years.

******

It was no wonder now to think about the things that happened the second year. We were screaming at each other after Homecoming that year out in the street. We broke up off and on every few months until the very end.

I scrolled back in our Facebook Messenger history to read a message that had always bothered me. It was about the guy she dated between me and her husband. She wrote in this message that she had never felt that way with anyone before. She said she was sure he was the one. I remember realizing in that moment that she’d never know how deeply important she was to me. I remember feeling still so in love with her and hiding it from everyone, especially her, all the way up until the end of our friendship. But she had gotten over me so quickly.

I went down into the basement to touch the gifts she’d given me. I’d found them in various boxes and piled them up on a table. She made me a little sign in the shape of a heart on cardboard paper. With letters cut out of magazines, it read, “Dear Y, I love you more than anything.” Had I ever made her something like that?

She knit me a beautiful scarf that was a little bit too short. Holding it now, I hated myself for never having worn it. I held it and remembered thinking I’d never worn a scarf before and maybe I’d look weird. I thought about how good I would have made her feel if I’d worn it and loved it.

I found 10 hand-written letters she wrote me. I read every word repeatedly and could feel how much she loved me back then.

She gave me a picture of the two of us in a rocking chair frame, because she knew I was addicted to rocking. I displayed it in my childhood bedroom, but I couldn’t remember bringing it with my to campus when I went to college. I wished I’d displayed it there on my desk in my dorm, just like I always carried her picture in my wallet.

She made me a photo album for my birthday called “Y – Then and Now.” I had made her a photo album for one one-year anniversary, but I was sure by now she’d thrown it away.

Did she have anything from me stored in boxes in a basement? Did she save and sometimes look at the photo album I made for her? I knew that once I had given her a Valentine’s Day gift, but I couldn’t remember what it was. But even if once she did save those gifts from me, I knew that it would never have survived her parents moving. It would have been thrown out with the garbage during packing.

The sun disappeared behind the roof of my house. The shadows on the patio and all over the yard got longer. And I truly desired to kill myself for what I’d been.

I tried re-watching the other videos, but the sensation never fully returned. I wasn’t the boy in those videos. Wherever she was now, she wasn’t that girl, either. Both of those people were gone. They were fundamentally different entities than the two of us were now.

I had never stopped loving that girl, but was she even out there anymore today? How deeply did this present-day version of her regret spending those two years with me? How fucking weird did she think I was for sending her “Happy Birthday!” messages? How often has she thought about defriending me or blocking me?

I wanted to die. But instead I just smoked another spliff like always these days. Three years of silence. And before that, she’d given me the shortest responses to all of my messages. She never once wished me a happy birthday no matter how often I wished one to her. She was polite and kind in everything she wrote, but I was sure she felt like there was something weird or creepy about me. Or she knew already what these videos proved: that I had always been a piece of shit, that I had been a fucking asshole to her.

And here I sat with nothing bad to say about her. She was unblemished. If it hadn’t been for me, we’d still be together today. We’d be married. I knew it every time I saw a picture on Facebook of her in her wedding dress. And I’ve seen myself falling to my knees before her holiness.

I wondered for a moment if this was the true un-romanticized sensation I’d sought all along, this feeling of a doomed relationship. What if all the positive feelings were rooted in my brain inventing memories to make me happy? That loving sensation I experienced briefly on my driveway could have just been fantasy to cover up the real, painful history. The truth of existing with her back then was perhaps a general sense that no, things should not fucking be this way, something is deeply wrong here. And yet I was so sure that I never really stopped loving her.

We had broken up after just two weeks of dating, only to get back together days afterward. Six months into the relationship I was constantly convinced she was going to dump me, and I often called her to ask her for reassurance. Later on, even when things were so much more secure and we reached the zenith of happiness around our one-year anniversary, I often fantasized in terror about a future without her. I saw myself deep in the distance looking back on this time, and I imagined reflecting on her nostalgically. I foresaw her transforming into a giant character of my imagination, into a literary figure that haunted me. I could feel every moment I was with her that we were doomed, that she would become the most cherished relic of my distant past. It was a devastating, tear-inducing certainty that was inherent to the sensation of being alive in that time with her. And now I felt it again.

There was one video I found of her and our friend. It was in the spring before we had started dating. I was filming. We were at the park. I recorded her loudly singing a love song to our friend as we all walked up a hill. I sent her a copy of the video over Facebook Messenger just because I felt like she deserved to see it, she deserved to be pleasantly nostalgic about a friend.

I remembered how the two of them used to call each other “bridesmaids.” They were committed to being in each other’s weddings. But I’d seen both of their wedding pictures, and they weren’t even each other’s guests. Would these images haunt her like they did to me?

“Haha so embarrassing!” she wrote back. “But thanks for sharing!”

“Haha happy to!” I replied.

I imagined what she’d think of me if she knew what I’d been up to.

I sent the videos to our friend who was in them, too. She chatted with me for a while.

I remembered how this friend would talk to me about my relationship long after it had ended.

“Will you ever get back together?” she asked once.

“No,” I said. “We won’t.”

“Aw,” she said.

“You liked us together, didn’t you?” I asked.

She nodded.

I took another walk around the block that night. I was so thankful that I wasn’t that person in the video anymore. I was so ashamed.

But I knew now that girl I cherished as a holy relic was always here with me on my computer, even if she had died long ago. I still go to her from time to time, and I say the things to her that I should have said back then. But I’m always careful to leave plenty of time in between my visits. As long as I ignore the video with my friend and her in the car, the good sensations do sometimes come back. But I know the day is coming when I’ll have watched these videos too often. And then I’ll have lost all trace of her forever, just like she did so long ago with me.

Sometimes I sit on the patio. I pretend to have a conversation with a friend sitting in the chair across from me. I make faces and gestures at the chair I pretend he is sitting in. I talk about everything going on in my life. But I imagine that instead of a camera recording all this, she herself is sitting there watching and listening in the other empty chair. I tell my friend about the things I wish I’d said to her.

Sometimes I go to the park where I have a video showing her singing to our friend. I stand exactly at the points from which I filmed back then. I walk with the footage so that I’m always standing right where it all happened. I listen to her sing and giggle. I feel her around me there. She’s still there beside me in my car when I play the CDs she mixed me.

She’s with me wherever I go, whoever I’m with. She’s always sitting there in the corner.