the sensation (audio analysis included) (extracts — written August 13, 2020)
can I find her by becoming a famous writer?
additional detail that probably doesn’t matter:
another meaningless detail:
the moment Tara heard my cries?
Claire’s music — 2011 and my cries
From Diwali to venturing backward— the first time I wrote about my “first love”
Renee is just a person:
Renee the ghost that haunts me:
I guess a physical mid-life reincarnation could be possible:
the interviewer returns to ask me again:
becoming a Christian again?
memories of Renee:
dreams to reincarnate in other world with Renee:
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.
The yard behind my parents’ yard was overgrown with weeds and massive bushes. The lawn was gone now; it had given way to a backyard 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.
I sat out on the patio one night and smoked a huge spliff. 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 spliff and taking several deep hits.
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 her perspective. She was that stranger; she was that other. For her, I was an alien now. She was the one who moved on into the century indifferent to my death.
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 CDs I’d given her long ago.
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 spliff.
I would write a novel that captured the whole story of our relationship. I would write it such 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 feeling of existing in that time would exist yet again, intoxicating the minds of both the author and his audience. She wouldn’t be able to help herself. She’d read it.
I gazed out into the future. I am a famous writer because of all the stories I’ve written about her. She buys all my books. My pictures and words are everywhere bombarding her. She reads all my words and feels me speaking to her. But she can’t reach out to me, she won’t do it. Sometimes she’s afraid maybe it’s not even really about her, although she feels all the same sensations she felt back then. But I’m too far away now, too alien. So she just crumbles from nostalgia every time she reads my stories about us. She reads them all over and over, night after night, ignoring her husband and obsessing over my pictures on her phone while he sleeps beside her in their bed.
I look into cameras during my interviews. And I know I’m looking at her somewhere out there. I know I’m looking her in the eyes. I’m unable to speak on camera without speaking to her.
When I got back from my walk looking out into the future, 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. I was looking her right in the eyes through that lens. Then I turned off the music.
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 a young man in a sweater sitting in the empty chair across from me.
“No,” I said aloud with a deep sigh. I looked not at the interviewer, 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 live to the world.
“What does your wife think about all this? This seems a little obsessive, does it not?”
I laughed. “My wife 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.
“So,” the interview said, jolting me out of my memories, “you’re really not in love with her at all? I find it hard to believe.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
I sensed her watching me on her television. She wondered if I was lying like I did back then.
And then I saw it over and over again on the television: “What does your wife think about this? What does your wife think about this? What does your wife think about this?”
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 on the other. One of his hands was kind of clinging to the ankle of his lifted leg.
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 was. 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, because the only sounds on that patio were the crickets and the frogs that surrounded the nearby ponds.
And as I made those quiet faces in the dark, I could feel her looking at me through the camera that was broadcasting my faces live into her living room. As she watches me, as she stares at all my books stacked up in front of her, she is devastated by her yearning for the past. She gets on her computer and looks 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. She reads as many of my comments as she can. 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. She looks through it every day, sometimes hiding it from her husband and her child.
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 the woman looking at me through that camera lens on the other side of the patio was just pitying me? What if she had just turned off the TV? I imagined her muttering to her husband about what a fucking lunatic I was. She was talking with her friends about how creepy me and my stories were.
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, my voice interrupting the silence on the patio.
“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. And she herself can see, I’m, sure that a lot of things happen in these stories that didn’t happen to us. So it’s not 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 saw her in that moment in her living room. “Oh my God,” she said. “He is obsessed with me. This is seriously not okay!”
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, long before I was able to carry any of this out. I’d be dying on a hospital bed while 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 spliff. I took a walk around the subdivision.
I went to sleep in the mid-morning. I woke up in the late afternoon.
I took an edible. It kicked in. 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. I’d send her the whole story in a series of Facebook messages without comment.
Gradually, however, as I would send her more and more of my stories about us, she would become increasingly haunted by a yearning to travel back 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.