JESS: Hey there, listeners. It’s been… 7 hours, or somethin. Twice in one night, I know, I just… I guess maybe “surprise broadcasts” are a little bit my thing now. It’s… late. I don’t really know, or care what time it is. If you’re listening, we seem to be in the same sleepless boat.
Though, I’d be surprised if anyone was listening. Anyone, but… well, you know who you are. Hi.
First thing’s first, apparently that CD I played earlier that I thought was music didn’t have anything on it, someone told me a while after the show, and if I’m being totally honest I wasn’t monitoring the broadcast once I hit play so… I’m sorry if it was just silence… but, on the other hand, I’m also sorry if it wasn’t silence. I can only imagine if something played, it was… strange. I’m sorry if it was.
You’re probably wondering why we’re on air. Well, me, I guess. It's just me.
I can’t sleep. Nothing new there but…
I can’t get what happened earlier out of my mind. Still no updates on Don, though not for lack of searching or trying. We’ve handed off the camera, talked to some folks, and I went for a walk… to try and clear my head, which didn’t really work. But the night air was clear with a gentle northern wind, and weirdly full of distant rumbling and howling, and whispering… Those voices… I still don’t know where I knew them. And the sky was darker than I think it usually is, and the sunset was… odd. Oddly coloured.
Like, too red, too orange, the sky a little too purple and– the layers seemed to swirl in a way that made me feel like my eyes couldn’t focus and– made me feel almost dizzy. The longer I stared at it. Like— heat rising off the summer-drenched road. Not sure if that was just me, or…
Anyways. I can’t sleep. I’m not sure the reasons are important, and it's not exactly weird for me, but I- tonight I wanted to talk. And everyone else is asleep, it was a… heavy day. We’ve all been processing. Trying not to believe the worst even though we can’t help it. It’s so quiet around here. A weighted sort of silence. Sometimes it's nice, the peace, the- stillness, but sometimes… it's an invitation. You create an empty space, at some point, something will fill it. Something loud or cruel or…
Tonight, for me, at least, its memories. Both old ones and new, in this… mental cacophony. And no matter what, I can’t– drown them out, can’t ignore them. Like fingers tapping on my window in the dark. I kept tossing and turning and… yeah.
I’m reminded of something I was told once, I think it was in a dream. A dream about my mother, except she was this- flock of birds. A scourge of starlings, ebbing and writhing like a dark, breathing cloud over an open field. And in this dream she said to me, with a mouth of a thousand birds:
Your memories have mouths. Do you hear them howling? Calling to you in the quiet? Do you feel their sharp teeth, tearing through figurative skin, through metaphorical flesh?
They are trying to tell you something. Clawing their way to the surface. Sometimes the past burns when it comes back up, like bile against the back of your throat.
They are hungry. They are gaping. They are asking.
Will you feed them? Hear them? All they ask is to be remembered.
So, that’s what I’m going to do. Its not often these days I get to take advice from my mom, so… I’m just going to talk. Let my memories bring up what images they’re going to bring up… and share those images with you. Something of a… meditation for myself, I guess.
For those of you listening, hopefully this is interesting enough. Or not, maybe. I hope its- peaceful enough. I hope maybe it helps you sleep.
[DEEP BREATH]
I’m gonna close my eyes, and… yeah.
I remember a river. A wide river. A deep, blue-green river surrounded by rows of tall, ancient trees. The current, gentle, shuffled by a west wind that blows through the wall of forest in a rhythmic ebb and flow. The sun shines overhead, bright and clear and it warms the shore that shifts and gives under your bare feet as you approach the water.
Imagine you stand, just ankle deep, in the frigid water. It laps against your bare skin with a wintery tongue. But you don’t mind. It is a kind of cold that is a reminder of life.
The riverbed shifts as you take another step in. And then another. Soon you are knee-deep in the fresh water, feeling it pulse against your legs. One foot in front of the other, squishing into the soft wet-sand floor. Waist high now. Ripples extend, contrasting out against the waves as you walk.
As you walk, you see someone standing on the other shore. Distant enough, you can’t make out their face. They seem to be waving to you. Calling, but their voice gets caught on the wind. You don’t know what they’re saying. You’re too far away to hear them.
The water gets darker the further you wade, and just a few feet before you, the shade of the water fades into a gaping shadow. You stop. Shoulders deep. The other side of the river doesn’t seem all that closer. The person standing in the trees is still standing there. You can feel that they’re staring at you. You can feel the sand before you dip forward. Where the shadow starts.
You know if you take another step, you’ll have to start swimming. With the dark lurking beneath you. The water so deep and dark.
The person waiting on the other shore keeps calling to you in a voice you only get a vague echo of. But you can’t bring yourself to push off. To venture into the reach of whatever your gut tells you is lurking down there.
[LINGERING SOUND EFFECTS. SWITCHING INTO:]
Now, think of an open field. Knee high grass. Soft earth beneath you, warmed by a day’s worth of sun now lowering overhead. It is spring, it is evening, the sounds of dusk echo over the meadow and swirl around you. The sky gets darker in layers. Gradual. Blurred. It all seems to go on forever. Wide and free and full of the breath of the earth. Its so open. So open, it makes you feel so small.
And, dirt beneath your feet, sky above you run. And as you run, the grass tickles against your legs and the fresh north wind surges through your hair, strokes past your face, and in the distance, you see… something. Just, close enough to be a shadow on the horizon. Almost translucent. Looming. And you run. Towards it. Towards the end of the field…
But the field doesn’t end. It goes on and on and on and that shadow you see in the distance you think, you hope, is the base of a mountain you try so hard to reach but you never do. You never will. The field goes on forever.
And you slow down. Your breathing as sharp cold gasps that scrape as they go down. Your limbs burn. Shake. Your feet buzz. You can’t keep running towards nothing.
And you’re wandering, alone and unaccounted for in an empty field that never seems to end, and… you call out, but your voice just echoes alongside the song of the evening and you have the terrible feeling no one can hear you.
[QUIET, REMEMBERING]
“You’re not lost if no one is looking for you.”
Lost. In these quiet moments, it's hard not to think of everything we’ve lost. Of everyone we’ve lost. Not just the absent, or the missing, but the dead. We call the dead, lost sometimes, don’t we? People we’ve lost, it usually means…
The dead are the lost we are always looking for. A figure across a river we are too scared to swim. A shadow at the end of a field we’ll never reach.
[CLEARS THROAT]
Um, next…
You’re lying on your back on something flat, smooth, cold. Facing the sky. You wake to find you have been sleeping on a rooftop. Like you usually do. You are somewhat rested and mostly unscathed and hidden from the eyes of those you don’t want to find you.
And you aren’t sure what’s happened. Aren’t sure why the world looks like everything’s been taken and shaken in ruined in unkind hands and like… like everything you used to love has been left the echo of a warzone.
And you lie awake on your back. In the only safe place you’ve been able to find for weeks. And you feel like a meteriod, doing everything you can to stay off a collision course. Or like a dust particle in the tail of a comet, trying desperately to hold on to the streaking light, no matter how much it burns.
And when you sleep on rooftops, you do a lot of stargazing. Looking upwards at a sky, a collage of constellations that are different than the ones you’re used to. The sky is full of colours and shifting but also a darkness you’ve never seen before. But the sky is the only thing quiet and unruined. The only thing that doesn’t that doesn’t seem like a fixed point.
And you think, maybe… maybe death isn’t a destination, but just another road, another path we’ll end up on at some point. An exit on a highway to the next place. Another place. Not a doorstep we’re destined to end up on, shivering and lost and trapped, but instead an opening door. A warm, shifting, swirling light that swallows us into the next place.
And you think, for a second, underneath a sky you don’t know, that maybe you’ve died already.
But you’re lying there, with your back against a cold, flat height, and you can hear the unquiet sounds of calling and howling and cosmic groaning in the distance. And your hands shake, but still, you look at the strange constellataions overhead, and name them after people you loved, who you’ve lost.
[MUSIC. SOUND EFFECTS SHIFT.]
And now- you’re… stepping into a gas station. It's just a gas station. A random stop on a highway you’ve driven many times. A throughline from everywhere you’ve been and back to home. The paved, worn, winding path home. A quick step off it to refuel.
And it’s just a gas station. Fluorescent lights and linoleum floors and isles of things you mostly only see at gas stations. You’ve known so many places like this you might as well be anywhere.
Every time you think back on this moment, you wish you were anywhere, anywhere else.
You smile at the man behind the counter as you move to the coffee machines, hoping to grab one last boost that’ll get you home. Home.
You pull your phone out of your pocket to text your mom that you’ll be there soon. A few hours.
But then- you feel strange. The buzzing of the lights swells into… pitched, piercing ringing. And the world swells into— light. Deep purple, shimmering green, blinding white- it’s painful, and searing, and hot—
And it’s all just warmth and light in a way you want to be comforting but it’s searing and smothering and…
[DEEP BREATH]
The sky goes dark above you. A storm, great and terrible and writhing and alive looms above you. The great wide blackened sky. When the lightning flashes, so close it hurts your eyes, so close you feel a rush of heat in the air, you see something moving, just beyond the cloud.
[CLEARS THROAT]
I think… I think that helped. I feel… purged. Like a storm that rains itself out.
[SIGHS. QUIET]
God, I’m exhausted. Today was… this week was…
Everything just… seems to happen all at once, doesn’t it? All the time, there’s always something. I’m always something. I’m doing my best, I am trying so hard to be here and a person and the person we both know I was, and I want to be that so bad.
But I can’t keep— trying.
[BEAT.]
I can see the stars from here, through the window. A familiar sky of… dwindling constellations. Sparkling eyes in a dark and shifting void of cosmic layers.
We all deserve a break, folks. Don’t we? I think the earth knows it. Senses our weariness. Our desperate grief. The north wind tonight seemed… kinder than it normally is.
The days are getting darker and the nights are getting deeper. The silence is getting thicker.
But, [SIGH] we will always be here, for as long as we can.
That’s about all I have in me tonight. I’m gonna— I’m gonna have a drink. For Don, wherever he might be. And see if I can get back to sleep.
So, goodnight to any of you still listening.
Thanks for tuning in.