This summer at a party I asked the ultimate mood-killing question. It wasn’t on purpose. I wasn’t trying to be edgy or philosophical. I just wanted to survey the room: Do you ever lie awake at night paralyzed by the fear of your own mortality? The resounding answer was sometimes, sure, with a few emphatic Yes’s. I asked the Yes’s what they do to cope, but no one had a good answer. Coincidentally — or perhaps not — I asked this question during the week when I was devouring Charles Yu’s science-fiction novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. I picked it up because my roommate really enjoyed it, and we generally have similar taste. The book is difficult to describe, but the pared-down summary is that the protagonist (a time machine repairman also named Charles Yu) is on an inter-dimensional search for his estranged, lost-in-time father, a disgraced scientist. In Yu’s science-fiction world, futuristic advancements in technology are no match for the endearingly stubborn hearts of its human user-base, and most people’s lives remain unchanged. In a striking example of this sentiment, Yu’s mother chooses to live inside of a twenty-minute time-span of one unexceptional family dinner that happened years ago. When her son comes to visit her, thus jolting her back into linear time, she is listless, longing for the routine she has come to know and love.
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe made me think a lot about the beginning and cessation of patterns, and how we don’t really notice them until they’re no longer present. When we talk about creatures of habit, we are talking about that fact that our ape ancestors took hundreds of thousands of years, unfathomable swaths of dull rubber-band time, to build even the simplest of tools. In other words, we must be literally on the verge of extinction before we finally decide to try things differently. While reading Yu’s book I thought about the near-certainty that one day my roommates will no longer be my roommates, my ballet teacher will stop being my ballet teacher, and my phone number will belong to someone else. These thoughts are destabilizing, the impermanency of everything I cling to so inevitable that I feel nearly dizzy. I drink my tea too fast, I eat my cake too fast, I’m so afraid of The End that I induce it as quickly as possible.
I don’t know what to do with these feelings, don’t know where to find the appropriate container. I suppose that’s what I mean when I say, “I would write even if no one read it,” because I need a repository. I can feel myself actively stitching together these moments, welcome to the nostalgia factory. I wonder if other people live this way, or if this grief is inherited, passed down from my father maybe, the man who worships at the altar of Hallmark Christmas movies and Home Depot Halloween decorations. Even now as I write this sitting in the park, the smell of someone grilling has sent me hurtling back to suburban summers-into-fall. Sometimes I feel sick with sentimentality, literally sick — flushed and fevered and delusional. Or as troubadour of Difficult Feelings Mitski writes, “It left a pearl in my head and I roll it around every night just to watch it glow… every night, baby that’s where I go.”
What I find so striking about Yu’s conception of time travel is his factoring-in of human gooiness and error. If we had the capability to travel in time we would not go back to our moments of triumph or frantically attempt to right past wrongs. Maybe you would, but I wouldn’t. No, like Yu’s protagonist, I would use that unimaginable piece of technology to relive the most ordinary blips in my timeline. But I’m already sort of doing that, I realized. One of my guiltiest pleasures is to repeatedly play songs that remind me of the past. Usually, these times are not exceptional; rather, they mark moments of ambivalence or transition. Like the smell of a specific Lysol cleanser catapults me back to the hallways of my preschool, certain songs transport me to the time when I was listening to them most frequently. I began to think about how everything we know is like a song, contained within a limited time frame, destined to end, except unlike a song we don’t know when that end will come. These two loose frameworks — time travel and music memory as muscle memory — collided to produce this “essay.” It still feels a little fragmented, but this is the nature of internet writing: I don’t have an editor leaning down my neck, asking for this to make sense.
What I’m trying to say is this: In 1977, two spacecrafts called Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched into the cosmos each carrying a phonograph disc dubbed the Golden Record. These records are time capsules, meant to convey what life on Earth is like to any extraterrestrial neighbors who come across them; now, the Voyager 1 craft is the farthest human-made object from Earth. The Golden Record contains 116 images, a survey of nature sounds, greetings in 55 modern and ancient languages, footsteps, laughter, a message in Morse code, and several musical selections. There are symphonies by Bach and Mozart, electronic music, folk instrumentals, and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” When naysayers claimed that rock music was too adolescent for space, committee chair Carl Sagan replied, “There are a lot of adolescents on the planet.” It’s silly, but I am tearing up as I write this. Maybe an ungenerous interpretation of the Golden Record would suggest a human attempt to impose itself upon any and all life forms, a sort of cultural colonialism; but really, it’s sweet in its futility, because there’s an overwhelming possibility that these records will never be found. I think if there is a heaven it will look a lot like this: an endless film reel of life lived from the beginning. Consider this essay my own personal Golden Record.
I’m so in love that I am constantly on the verge of vomiting. That’s how fifteen is for girls, or at least it was for me. I have my first “real” boyfriend, and though we spend each waking moment together — holding hands and trudging to class, embracing in a playground tunnel — it’s still not enough. When you’re really enamored for the first time you feel eternally in trouble. I am sneaking around for no reason with a private grin on my face. Bad things happen to me, and I don’t care, I just pull him into a closet to kiss between class bells. I burn every other relationship in my life to spend more time with him. That kind of thing, we’ve all felt it, all been there. It’s not original, but it feels like it is. I am struck then by the idea that nothing ever slows down. I miss him when we’re together in anticipation of being apart. I live in a hologram with you. The week leading up to his confession of feelings we spent loitering with our mutual friend. It was June, hot already, and we trawled the “cool” part of Louisville with no money. We paid for the bus in quarters, and our knees knocked against each other, and our friend wore a sly, knowing smile, worn by everyone watching two people fall in love.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - The Platters
For the first time in my life I have a secret that I really need to keep, or that’s what I tell myself. It’s like the coal that burns to produce the fuel that guides me through my days, it’s strong but it makes me cough, it’s probably making my lungs black, too. It’s my senior year of high school, I’m seventeen but I feel much older. I wear a floral strapless dress with a faux-whale boning bodice to my friend’s birthday, and I run into Him on the way to the bathroom. He looks up at me on the steps, and I can tell that something very subtle has happened, something I am not allowed to talk about on Monday. I go to the only arthouse theater in town with my boyfriend (who is mean to me) and we see a forgettable movie about an older couple trying to fall back in love; in the end scene they dance to “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” I listen to it incessantly and think about Him. One morning, while playing it on the ride to school, the chorus aligns perfectly with the bus emerging from a tunnel that provides a perfect view of downtown Louisville. It’s still dark, the lights still twinkling. When your heart’s on fire, you must realize, smoke gets in your eyes.
Mac Demarco - My Kind of Woman
I’m nineteen and I’m walking home from TA’ing a class of students just one year younger than me, listening to “My Kind of Woman” in the orange glow of college-mandated street lamps. It’s September, and there’s that first thrill of autumn in the air. I still permit myself to be very indulgent about my emotions — I am misunderstood, I am abject, I am Your Kind of Woman. I skulk around like I am hiding from something, scribble in my diary like I am a kid again. There is no sense of gravity because everything is so so serious. I never thought I’d be the kind of person who cared about the end of my teenage years, but it turns out that I am that kind of person, and it’s killing me. For a while I believed that my youth was the only thing that made me special; teachers called me precocious, men called me wise beyond my years, all short-hand for “annoying.” I’m exactly like my peers and yet I fabricate a critical distance, like I’m watching everything unfold from very far away. I ingratiate myself into my professors’ lives because I want to count in some way that only makes sense to me.
I christen my twenty-first year by moving to London in January 2019. I’ve just ended my longest relationship, and I feel new like a drugstore lipstick still sealed in plastic, or like a fortune cookie with only a blank slip of paper inside. I go on dates with men old enough to be my father because I am trying to prove something — that I am invincible, that I cannot be hurt, that I can feed myself without spending any money if I have to. Unlike my friends, I don’t opt for a European cellphone number when I move, instead choosing to careen through the world with no tether, only activating the costly ‘international hotspot’ feature on my phone in emergencies. Before leaving my cramped Bayswater apartment each morning I use the building Wifi to screenshot maps of the city and walking directions. I do this one night before attending a date with an author at a dark pub about twenty minutes from my faux-home. I know I look too young in my red lipgloss and skirt, a child’s approximation of sex and maturity. My phone is very old and glitchy, and it dies while I am walking home and using the last of my battery to listen to “Angeleyes.” Don’t look too deep into those angel eyes, ABBA sings, but do I listen? I feel no sense of panic, only the possibility of immortality, and I wander in circles torturously close to the apartment until my roommates somehow bump into me in the middle of a McDonalds run. They corral me home, and I am giddy.
I am sloppy sticky sweet tipsy in a European club, fireproof and dancing up on my fireproof friends, across the ocean from home. Techno music is playing, and I love it for ten minutes, until the beat starts to sound like someone knocking and knocking on the door. My drink sloshes over the rim, but it’s okay, because my money doesn’t feel real yet, it’s incapable of being wasted, it’s a scholarship, why would I save it? Why not burn it? My dress doesn’t look how I thought it would look in my head, but I’m attracting the attention of lascivious old men anyways, expats in Dior Sauvage and bald German men in too-tight button downs, their soft pink stomachs showing through the gaps in their shirt. At a Time Indistinguishable someone calls a cab and we all funnel in, like a reverse clown car. I am shoved into the middle, poking my head over my friend’s body to look out the window. As the foreign highway speeds by I am reminded how highways look like highways everywhere, too homesick for home and homesick for the feeling of homesickness.
It’s October 2020 and everything is hollow: the streets, the buildings, the trains. I take the C and I could roll a marble from one end of the car to the other, it is so empty. I’m meeting someone I barely know and don’t necessarily like so that we can walk around in the cold and maybe make eye contact or share an illicit, need-based kiss. I arrive on the West Side very early and walk all the way to the Hudson, staring across the river to the hulking grey factories of New Jersey. I feel such a sense of depletion that it’s almost freeing — I am futureless, the world is futureless, the past seems so foreign that it’s not worth the rumination. I plop onto the steps of the Whitney, my skirt trailing the ground, and I stare at my shoes. “Pulaski” pulses tinnily from my cheap wired headphones. I hear someone approach — the tentative footsteps, the pause, more footsteps. “Alexandra?” a male voice. I look up into eyes as unenthusiastic as mine. On the train back to my apartment I think about my childhood in Kentucky and I weep.
I have a crush and it’s making me insane. It’s January, and I’ve just started a new job that demands very little of me. It’s a job I’ve wanted for a long time — a gallerina position at a museum. I am the 5’2 gatekeeper. It has been a very long winter, but I refuse to wear a down coat. My high-heeled black boats are slicked with a permanent layer of rock salt from strutting the streets. I go out very late and sleep very late. In a few months something really terrible will happen — prophetic perfect tense — but I sense no doom on the horizon. In fact, I really don’t sense anything on the horizon, I am pleased by the smallest of gestures. My friend and I go to a man’s birthday party. We barely know him and know the other guests even less. We play pinball at a bar beneath an above-ground train, and we sip soup bowl-sized margaritas in the back patio despite the frigid weather. “Are you into government conspiracy theories?” asks a forty-something man in a metal band t-shirt who plops down across from us. “No!” we chime in unison, and we don’t go to bed until the dawn, we don’t understand that last call means "go home,” and that one day we will stop staying to hear last call.
In and Out of the Shadows - Dion
I’m listening to “In and Out of the Shadows” and I am in agony, but it feels so good. I’m excusing myself at two a.m. and dancing around the subject, not a tango, but a tarantella, the dance that makes you crazy. I once read of a town in the 15th or 16th or 17th century where everyone danced themselves to death. I don’t know if it’s true or if it’s an urban legend, but I understand the sentiment now. We went to a brutalist museum in the freezing January cold, and we went to a bar and didn’t drink. When my friends ask me how I feel I say I feel “like this” and then don’t explain any further. I have the distinct sense of an ending, I see it before it happens, it casts everything in a dim light, like vaseline smeared over a lens. I walk in the park before winter sunset — 4 p.m. — and I know deep inside that I am entering a different phase. I am in the chrysalis, I have been for a long time, I am being dissolved in acid so that I can emerge clean and new.
Substack won’t let me caption a video but just know that I cried to this edit obsessively in college, just absolutely weeped. Now pretend this is in a caption and not awkwardly in the body of this essay!
"Maybe you would, but I wouldn’t. No, like Yu’s protagonist, I would use that unimaginable piece of technology to relive the most ordinary blips in my timeline. But I’m already sort of doing that, I realized. One of my guiltiest pleasures is to repeatedly play songs that remind me of the past." Love this.
❤️❤️❤️ love this. Great writing
My favourite song from the Golden Record is Blind Willie Johnson’s “Cold Was The Night, Dark Was The Ground” used on the record to describe the feeling of loneliness 🥲