Watching Yourself Live

Selected for AGON Journal Issue 2 but shelved when AGON went on hiatus.

Also a short film (in post-production)

You left home and you walked. You packed your bag with supplies that would last nowhere near as long as you needed, but you packed your bag, you left home and you walked. When you left, this is what you remembered: Your name is Kris; Your parents were Ann and Francis; You were born on March 26, 1997; You lived… 

You walked a block and you already began to forget where you lived. You forgot to write that part down. You wrote the rest down in a notebook but you forgot to write down where you lived. You walked through empty neighbourhoods and saw the burned out husks of houses caused by wildfires that stretched too far into the city whose name you couldn’t remember. Some houses were still burning, and would probably continue to burn. You didn’t remember the wildfires. You didn’t remember the mass evacuation. You didn’t remember years of climate scientists telling politicians that we were headed towards a point of no return, or the politicians choosing to invest in offshore drilling, fracking, war and genocide instead. You didn’t remember that you weren’t the only person who left wherever it was you lived, trying to escape from whatever it was that you were forgetting. 

You reached the city limits and walked into the forest. The trees at the border were scorched, dead. You kept walking and found greener and greener trees the further you went. You also found more and more gaps in your memory the further you went. Eventually you came to a small river and walked along the riverbank for a while. You couldn’t remember how long you had been walking but you knew you needed to rest soon. The river led you to a fen and along the way you collected different flowers and with each flower you cut from its stem you felt a flash of memory. Fire; floods; hurricanes; riots; bombs. The sun was setting so you decided to rest in a nearby thicket for the night. The next morning a spider woke you crawling across your face. You opened your bag to look at the notebook and remind yourself who you are. Kris; Ann and Francis; March 26, 1997; You stared at the names and the birthdate and they started to look wrong. When was 1997? Where had you just come from? Why hadn’t you written that down? 

You continued to the other side of the fen and through more trees. Eventually you came to a small radio tower behind a chainlink fence. You followed the perimeter of the fence and eventually found a small single room cabin. 

Outside the cabin was a bathtub and wash basin and a well with a pump and a bucket. You approached the front door and could see through the window that the cabin was empty. You looked around and called out to whoever might be nearby but there was no response. You opened the door and found a bed, an armchair, a wood stove, a desk, an office chair, a shortwave radio, a lighter, and piles upon piles of old books. Among the books on the desk was a notebook filled with incoherent writing and several drawings of strange humanoid creatures as well as a person—you couldn’t tell if it was meant to be a man or a woman—sitting in an armchair with a dog laying at their feet. You were tired from days/weeks/months of walking. You laid down on the bed and slept. 

The faint sound of radio static woke you in the middle of the night. The radio was off but you could sense something in the room with you. You took the flashlight from your bag and shined it towards what looked like the drawing in the notebook sitting in the armchair, but the figure and the static melted into air. 

The next night after the sun went down you lit a fire and used it to boil water from the well. You used some dried flowers to make tea. (Were these flowers you had collected as you walked? How long ago would it have been since you collected them if they were fully dried?) You boiled more water to fill the bathtub outside. You turned on the radio hoping to find something to listen to as you bathed, maybe a radio station that was left on the air when it was abandoned by the DJ escaping the same event(s) you don’t remember escaping, maybe left playing the same CD single on repeat of a song you had heard a thousand times that would sound like a new song to you every time it played. What you found was a voice speaking through heavy static. The voice told you all about the world that you had abandoned. 

You laid in the water until it was cold, looking at the stars you hadn’t seen since you lived in whatever city it was that you had just left. You took a deep breath and submerged yourself, staying underneath the water as long as your lungs would allow. When you came back up and caught your breath you thought you heard a dog bark just beyond the tree line. You called out and asked if anyone was there but there was no one. 

Now you are drying off and heading back to the cabin. The sound of radio static once again fills the air but this time it feels present. When you walk through the door you find me sitting in the armchair, my dog at my feet. You ask who I am and I ask you the same question but you can’t answer me. You ask what I am doing here and I ask you the same question but you can’t answer me. You look at the drawing in the notebook and I tell you that it’s a self portrait. You tell me this feels familiar, that we have had this conversation before. I tell you no, we haven’t. I tell you that you are experiencing déjà vu, that this isn’t a memory of the past, it is a memory of the present but you have abandoned the present and your memory with it. 

You don’t remember who you are or where you came from because memory of those things is the memory of your connection to that world. When you abandon that connection, when you abandon that world, you abandon your memory. You abandon yourself. I tell you that you have two options. You can continue to abandon everything—to simply watch yourself live—or you can choose to live.