Hipsters, Ghost Love, Transitory Spaces


You imagined this scenario, this "not falling in love" thing, but it came to reality a little differently than you had planned.  You’re home in Sacramento, a numb city laden with a familiar ennui, which insists upon you like a down comforter.  There is a reason you left Sacramento: when you ask a passing pedestrian what there is to do for fun around here, they say, "there's a park downtown where you can take a tour of the trees."  "Trees?"  "Yeah.  About 90 different varieties.  It’s really enthralling."  You scan their face for some physical tic which might indicate sarcasm, but you find nothing.  So when it was time to go to college you migrated to San Francisco, a place where there exists no such tour of (it turns out) 94 varieties of trees.  Instead, in San Francisco, it is socially acceptable and even normative to do something like pierce your dick, or tattoo your dick, or if you're really brave, tattoo your dick and then pierce it.  Though you yourself don't exactly wish to modify your dick in any manner, this nevertheless seems closer to the aesthetic you're after – some relentless grunge that tints your skin like cultural smog.

More accurately, you'd like to live a life comprised of facial hair and Asian girlfriends and irony (if the situation calls for it).  You’d also like the world to understand how drastically inclined toward feeling you are; you are a photographer and a writer and dabble in music (read: you've bought a guitar, so the vehicle is there).  In August you secured an internship writing reviews for a moderately successful music website.  You don't get paid, but the job sets you up with all sorts of fancy privileges, like a spot on the guest list to any show you damn well please.  After a couple months, a few bands have read your articles, and more know who you are; Kevin Barnes, frontman for the band Of Montreal, made you (a heterosexual male) feel comfortable in makeup for the first time ever.  (He applied it himself, backstage, before one of their shows.)  This is your career highlight to date, and though you'd prefer to become famous selling a book of short stories some day, this internship functions as an acceptable shell of your primary passion.

Now that we've stereotyped you, let's clarify that you are, in fact, mostly a wonderful and original human being.  You can appreciate a nice walk in the park, and you don't have any sort of deep-seeded hate for your parents.  You kind of like your parents, actually, enough that you visit them from time to time, enough that you have decided to visit them now, in the middle of November in your spacious hometown, for three days over Thanksgiving break.  On the train home, you imagined yourself not falling in love.  You are twenty, so of course finding the love of your life is on your mind all the time.  You’ve had two girlfriends in the past, and each was a long-distance deal.  The first girl was a little portly, bland in the face, and too preoccupied with her artsy persona – not exactly worth traveling an hour and a half to visit (she didn't have her license), but hey, you were eighteen and you had to start dating sometime.  It lasted four months.  The second relationship was this darling bisexual girl whose hairstyle and coloring changed monthly. You were fascinated by her endearing manipulations of syntax.  She lived in Los Angeles, a six hour drive, and over the course of your two-month relationship you saw her once (not counting time you met her at a concert, when obviously you weren't dating yet).  You spoke mostly over the internet, and you broke up over the internet, because even though she was transferring to your school in a month you became restless, being the twenty year old that you are.  She didn't speak to you for a half a year after this, but you managed to resuscitate a reasonable friendship, nurse it back to maybe 85% of what it once was.  Of course, 85% is a whole enough number, and so you still have feelings for her.  But in the other 15% you sense some sort of reservation, sometimes sudden and forceful, as if a Parkinson’s patient held your puppet strings.  It’s this 15% which concentrates some core of yearning in you, drives you to muse that the love of your life, if she's out there, had damn well better show up quick.  This undercurrent of loneliness hums behind you constantly, like a restless and ancient air conditioner.  It is a monotone you wish you could stifle.

You’re only home for three days, so you resolve not to look at pretty girls.  You don't want to do the long distance thing again, so for the next three days you tell yourself: I will not fall in love.  I will not fall in love.  You are so focused on the subject that you begin to have fantasies, you know, about not falling in love.  Here’s how you picture it:

You visit your favorite record store, The Beat Records on 17th and J street, which became your haven when you discovered independent music your senior year in high school.  You haven't been there in two years.  When you open the door, things are roughly as you remembered them: endless aisles of rare vinyl, the attractive knowledge-touting employees.  You pick up a few CDs and mill around a bit until you notice an especially attractive woman behind the counter.  This is the woman who shows up in most of your fantasies, the prototype for your ideal girlfriend.  She’s what you like to call subtle hipster – the type who dresses in original clothing without looking like she just walked out of the bargain bin at goodwill.  She is post-ironic, entirely humble, and devoid of pretense.  Hell, you're only here for a few days, you're never going to see her again, so you decide to write her a letter. You produce a pad of paper.  (You don't know how you produce a pad of paper – maybe you borrowed it from someone, or maybe you had it in your backpack, even though they don't let you take a backpack into the store for fear of theft – but anyway, fantasies are incongruous, so suspend your disbelief.)  The letter, as far as you've drafted it in your mind, reads:

I’ve decided to stop standing alone in the bathroom of my mother's house.  This was an old habit of mine, back when I was seventeen; I imagined the bathroom as a cocoon.  I could be nobody in peace.  Were you ever nobody?

The tiles felt cool under my bare feet.  I would close my eyes, disembody myself from my emotions.  I always left the window open.  Sometimes I’d stand for hours, imagining I existed several years in the future.  I pictured myself as a robot whose cord had just been pulled; my eyes would flicker out, my neck and knees bent slightly, while a tinny decrescendo announced my generator had just powered down.  That was how I learned to fall asleep standing up: by imitating the future.  (The key is to relax.  Keep your feet flat).

When I came back to visit my family for Thanksgiving, I wondered if I could resurrect the ritual.  But when I went into my mother's bathroom, I noticed she had repainted it red.  Red is not at all the color for that sort of thing; it reminds me too urgently of violence.  Now, the bathroom most closely resembles the set of a low-budget horror film.  I imagine myself falling asleep – perhaps on the floor, as a compromise – a prime target for a weirdo with a hatchet or a chainsaw . . . of course it won't happen, but anyway, this room is no longer a proper setting for meditation.  I gave up on it completely.

You are beautiful; you are a beautiful human being, and I’m sure you've had an experience in the past similar to mine.  I’m in town for three days, and at some point I’d like you to tell me what that was – that experience where you flipped, in your life, from very nothing to very something.  In the meantime, while you are telling or preparing to tell me, let's have coffee.  Let’s spend a night on the town.

You write your phone number and then sign your name.  Without trepidation, you approach the counter.  "Do me a favor.  Take my hand."  She takes it (remember, suspend your disbelief).  "I want you to do something.  I want you to look me in the eyes for a full ten seconds.  Use these ten seconds to remember my face, vividly and thoroughly.  After ten seconds I am going to walk outside, at which point I want you to read this letter I’ve written you.  From there, who knows.  From there it's up to you."

Ten seconds pass.  You hand her the letter and walk out the door.  Now you're in your car, you turn your music on, you're driving off.  Of course, this is the point of the fantasy that the real you juts in to remind yourself that for a fantasy about not falling in love, it sure seems like you're about to fall in love with this girl.  So you flash forward a bit to the end of your break:

Two days have passed and she still hasn't called.  So much for being the type of person who cultivates an acute sense of displacement.  You’re boarding the train home with all of your belongings, when you feel your phone vibrate in your pocket.  You take the nearest seat and pull it out.

"Hello?"

A perceptible pause.  "I thought about it a little bit.  Are you gone?"

"I’m on the train."

"Shit."

"I know, right?  I went to a gallery opening.  You missed it."

"I was kind of intrigued."

"I know."

"You got a minute?"

"I have ninety.  Takes an hour and a half to get home."

"Okay.  Well, I want to tell you anyway.  When I was young, I spent all my time making marionettes . . ."

***

You don't exactly know how she continues her confession – the daydream stops there, partially because it seems like you might be about to fall in love again, which you don't want, and partially because you, in the physical and present reality, have just arrived at the record store.  You need to pick up the new Yacht CD, and the solo album by Animal Collective's Panda Bear (you'll recognize the title when you see it).  You park in the back lot, where you are positive the entrance has become the exit and the slant of the spaces has flipped direction.  The interior also disorients you; everything has been rearranged, so at first when you walk in you don't know where to find anything.  And then, suddenly, things get weird: you see her.

In the physical and present reality, you see her.  She isn't the prototype, not nearly.  The first thing you notice, or the first thing you would later remember noticing, are her ankle warmers.  They’re green, and they have snowflakes on them, and coupled with her red knit sweater she reminds you too much of Christmas, and a month too early.  But she has this haircut, this curved and matted haircut, the kind of thing you moved to San Francisco for – how you could walk into a salon and receive a gloriously bad scissor job which, when you walked outside, turned into an immediately fashionable thing.  It was rare to see it in Sacramento; your intuition tells you she cut it herself.  Of course, in the spirit of not paying attention to pretty girls, you try to stay away from her.  When she's near the end of the alphabet, you pretend to be interested in the B section (Black Dice, Broken Social Scene, Battles . . .); when she comes toward your aisle, you circle around and grab the Yacht CD.  This whole process takes surprisingly long, maybe fifteen minutes, as she perpetually seems to be interested in things in your general vicinity.  You really hope she is not checking you out, making this more complicated for the both of you.  It’s only when she heads into the jazz compilations, way over on the other end of the store, that you're able to pick up the new Panda Bear, which is pretty much in the center of the alphabet and previously would have been way too close for comfort.  You move briskly toward the counter to pay for your purchases, and you think you're in the clear.  But the idiot cashier fumbles your items; he's new, he can't get the scanner to work, he calls his manager over to ask how to punch them in manually.  Then your credit card, which is old and a little demagnetized, becomes finicky, and he has to fumble to get to the screen where he punches the numbers in.  Just as he takes the card from your hand, you suddenly realize she is right behind you.  The manager opens up the next register over.  You were afraid of this: she isn't ready to leave.  You hear her say to the manager: "do you, uh, know anything similar to this?"

You make what in the moment feels like the stupidest choice of your life: you look over.  Fuck.  She is gorgeous.  Her voice is gorgeous.  Fuck, fuck.  You shouldn't have looked.  But you looked, and now you're that hopeless romantic again, that wispy ideal, the guy that lies in parks and talks about music all the time with his fashionable girlfriend, each of them eating a burrito. This is a stereotype you wouldn't mind living; this is the you that belongs in San Francisco.  Instead you're here, and she's there, three feet from you.  Some might call this bad timing, but you call it bad distance; you hit the timing, but missed the placement by a hundred miles.  So much for...

"The new Iron and Wine is really good," says the manager, "he keeps getting better and better."

"Oh!" she says, "yeah, I’ve heard of that."

"And The New Pornographers.  A lot poppier, but still brilliant."

"Okay, cool."  She writes it down on her receipt.  She is definitely stalling, and in a way you want her to stall.  "Well, uh, yes."

"Yeah.  Beyond that, I mean, that's a good start.  You can always come back."

The kid finally gets your card punched in.  He puts the receipt in the bag and hands it to you.  Kind of hesitantly now, you thank him, unable to conjure small talk the way she does.  So you walk out.  Your chest feels a little bit odd, like a beehive.  Moving your legs is like dragging stone pillars.

Back in the car, you attempt a sort of strained reparation of fate, trying to snag her by chance after she's long out of sight.  You roll down your windows and look for a CD that might grab her attention, were she to walk out to her car in the parking lot.  You decide on "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea," a Neutral Milk Hotel classic, and turn the volume up.  For five minutes, you make slow laps at about ten miles an hour, pretending to be lost.  You circle the parking lot first.  Then you drive out of the alley, around the block, and back into the parking lot.  You utilize a cluster of empty spaces in the middle of a row to make a U-turn.  You skip the second track on the CD, the one about loving Jesus Christ, because you don't want to give the wrong impression.  Throughout the crawl, you peer into every car window.  You see air fresheners and car shades and "baby on board" stickers – but no girl.  Just a row of vacant, waiting machines.

***

The night passes without further incident.  The next morning, though you can't believe it, you log onto craigslist.  You click the following links: Sacramento --> missed connections --> m4w --> post --> missed connection --> I am a man seeking a woman (m4w).

You’re greeted with a field to write your post.  You've thought about doing this a few times before, but the idea of going online to tell someone what you couldn't say in person always seemed silly to you, so you had never made it this far.  You’re more compelled to follow through, now, maybe because it means less if you find her.  So you write a quick paragraph, part funny, part introspective, and all endearing.  You give them your email address and confirm the post.  Pretty anticlimactically, you don't feel much different.

For the next couple of hours, you eat miso soup and read a few short stories by Haruki Murakami.  The most memorable is about an elephant that disappears out of a town under impossible circumstances.  No one in the town can find the elephant; it's gone missing completely.  How do you lose an elephant?  The newspaper runs the story for months, until slowly, the townspeople lose interest.  After a while, they forget all about the elephant, that it ever existed.  For some reason, your mind trips back to the girl at the record store.  You set the book down for a moment, wondering what triggered the recollection.  But even without distraction you can't draw the parallel.  The human mind, you muse, is essentially one continuous non-sequitur.

You remember her once more in your time in Sacramento – in the shower after your Thanksgiving meal.  Staring into the red tiles, with a weak current of water running over your shoulders, you unfold the letter you wrote in your mind, back when you were still busy trying not to fall in love.  It had been a strange three days.  Against the shine and the grout, the prototype blurs into the real girl, until, in the record store, you're writing the latter a note on a piece of paper – maybe your receipt – of course, your receipt.  It’s shorter, more urgent, with her standing next to you, but the gist is the same.  From there, who knows.  Who knows what the hell happens: she calls you, she doesn't call you, she pulls you into the alley and puts her hand on your crotch.  You’re imagining it all, like a short movie there against the wall, when you hear a knock on the bathroom door.  It’s time to go home, your mother says, and if you don't get out of the shower you're going to be late.

***

If this were a movie, the final montage would depict you on a train, or in a car, some transitory metaphor to shuttle you home.  You have your headphones in, and your profile is framed against the window.  Power lines stream past, rising and dipping like waves, before peeling off around a bend.  The soundtrack calls for something soft, introspective, a muted electronic piece with dreamy synthesizers and a wash of ambiance.  From here, it could go two ways: 1) you stop the car at a diner back home, and right in front of you there's an angel, waiting to take your order.  Or else it's the same woman who steps on the train, takes the seat across from you, knocks up against your knee.  Either way, you share something, a surging look drenched in hope, and in a flourish the credits roll . . . 2) you're framed against the landscape and then the camera pans away, recedes from the opposite window, out to a wide shot of the vehicle, and further to a panorama of the entire countryside.  In this instance, by the time the credits arrive, we've already forgotten the contours of your face; there's only a vague imprint.  It's an artistic choice that smacks of transparent depth; an over-emphasis of a comically two-dimensional emotion.  Of course, all this is irrelevant.  Your life is not a movie, nothing so trivial.  You wanted the girl, you wanted her, and there's no cinematography to capture the tingling warmth along the sides of your throat, the dull cave of feeling that reaches through your ribs and down into your chest.