I had been with her long enough that being without her was a problem. Thought often about how the opposite of divorce isn’t marriage, it’s wedding. The opposite of marriage is the presence of the absence, a haunting with a negative connotation. Wished often for a way to erase it but the options were few and impermanent. Instead, I opted for the round-robin method of uncoupling and replacing.
It takes some ability to live in the present and I wouldn’t say that I was at my peak performance at that time. I felt forced into the small moments, frequently, and without consent. Like taking her and her family dog to the vet, a dog I had never yet met, who licked my finger when I offered it and looked me in the eye and I could tell was thinking, “you make her cry.”
What was fair is that it was true and I wasn’t doing a lot to change anyone’s opinions. She’d suffered enough experiences by this point and loosened her grip. Not that I needed an explanation, but playing the tape back was out of my control.
If only there was a way to really never think about that again. The whole thing, I mean. The love and what happened during. I was too plump with ideas, encumbered by thinking too often and thoroughly. The only way of slowing the thoughts was with interference, replacing thinking with various distractions. Men in Black was tonight’s replacement, as movies often were.
I always found that I watch the right movies at the right time, by accident, coincidentally relevant. Sometimes I knew this by the opening scene. In this case, Agent K takes out a neuralyzer, erasing the memory of a cop who had seen too much of the wrong thing. That’s how I felt after this relationship. I wanted a reprieve like this, a lightening of the load in my skull, to remove what I was desperate to replace.
It was genius, something I had considered only in a less concrete way, wanting the pain to disappear, to have not happened, or some other sort of removal. This presented a new avenue of reprieve, the work of a device, a sort of advantageous brain damage. It was a way of controlling the narrative and that’s what I was interested in most, in this situation.
Peri- and post-film viewing, I became fixated on the neuralyzer, knew this was the answer, and began my research into some kind of real-life equivalent. Of course I found nothing, despite being relentless. Another example of my inadequacies, exemplified by coming up empty handed with most things.
Aside from the neuralyzer, something in particular stuck in my mind. After taking a liking to J, Agent K invites him to be a member of the Men in Black, giving him time to consider giving up his life and identity to serve as an agent. J asks if it’s worth it, and Agent K answers with a challenge: “Oh yeah, it’s worth it, if you’re strong enough.”
Mouth agape, I wondered if I was strong enough. I’d like to think so. Would others think so? I have been seen as weak. That’s why I’m divorced now, among other things. At least I was hot. Tommy Lee Jones has never been hot, not even in youth. Not that it’s a competition, but I could use a win.
##
Seven years later, in the middle of March, I found myself in a theatre, the third row from the top. Another replacement, but for a myriad of wounds given all the time that had passed. This replacement was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and I was here alone. I had, at this time, moved on with my life and mostly into my career. Dateless, neuralyzerless, full of memories. There are a lot of things to live with and without, but at least the cinema was forever.
The parallels, at first, struck something inside of me, but I didn’t right away realize. Both films open with travelling down streets at night, headlight-lit, liquids: bug guts and tears. Relatable. Through to power dynamics, goals, personal trajectories; the only difference was wardrobe. Eternal Sunshine was exactly the same movie as Men in Black. I couldn’t believe someone had so blatantly taken so liberally from another film without so much as a wink of acknowledgement.
I left the theatre and went home to rewatch Men in Black, incensed and determined. Looking for something you expect to find affects an experience, but this relation was objective.
Despite knowing already what was to come, perhaps softened by the first of my double feature, I cried like I knew I would: When Agent K returns to his wife, who he had been monitoring, keeping tabs on despite leaving, erasing not memories so explicitly, but gently exfoliating them away with the sands of time.
When K returns to his wife, with amnesia, but into open arms, I wished for the same. Eternal Sunshine didn’t give this to me. It gave me two mirrors on opposite walls of a hallway asking the other what would come next, with resentment and confusion.
Also, with age, I noted the agency of the lovers, of their losses. Struck deeply by the lovers who don’t have agency, K’s wife abandoned, Joel abandoned but retaliatory, both left out of the decision. I didn’t fit so cleanly into any of the characters, but as a constellation of fragments, which isn’t a problem, more so a gift of knowing I exist.
I sat furious through the credits, knowing exactly what action I’d take next.
##
It wasn’t hard to find where Charlie Kaufman lived. I found a fan website where someone had already written a fanfic about wanting to kill him, and they posted his address in case someone wanted to really do something about it. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do that something, but I did want to do something.
I felt normal as I walked up to the front door and rang the doorbell. Charlie came to the door and looked confused.
“Hello,” he said, like I knew he would.
“Hi Charlie, could I have a moment of your time?”
He hesitated but then said, “I’m just about to sit down for lunch, you can join me.”
I followed him out to the backyard where he had a table full of sandwiches. He motioned for me to sit and have some so I did.
“I just had a divorce.”
“Do you mean, ‘went through’?” I could tell Charlie wasn’t being condescending.
“Yeah, that’s what I mean. I went through a divorce recently.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, I hear they’re difficult.”
“Thank you. It was a difficult time but I found comfort in films. In fact, Men in Black came out shortly after my divorce was finalized.”
He was mid-bite of one of the sandwiches as I said this and I noticed his jaw stutter before continuing on. It was a subtle reaction, but I could tell he was nervous.
“I was in a lot of pain at the time,” I continued, “and all I could think about was wishing I could remove what was causing me pain, specifically my memories of her. Then I watched Men in Black and in that opening scene, they use the neuralyzer.”
Charlie was looking at the new sandwich in his hand, trying to decide which edge would be the best spot to bite first.
“Have you seen Men in Black, Charlie?”
He had taken his bite and was chewing arduously, enthusiastically putting up his index finger to tell me I had to wait. It was taking him quite a long time to finish chewing, presumably because he was buying himself time. I was in no rush, so I let him chew this first bite for seven straight minutes. Finally, he swallowed and then turned to me.
“Yes, I have seen Men in Black. It was very good. I always thought it would be fun to go by Agent C.”
“Did you have the neuralyzer process in mind when you wrote Eternal Sunshine?” I asked, prepared to wait another seven minutes.
He took a bite of his sandwich and began the chewing process which did, in fact, take him another seven minutes, and an additional minute this time to prove to me that he wasn’t counting to seven and that there wasn’t a pattern. I could see that, much like the two movies, Charlie was doing his own controlling of the narrative.
“Well,” he started, putting down the rest of his sandwich and brushing the crumbs off his hands with his other hands. He took another breath, which I thought would be for the continuation of the thought, but instead, Charlie made a run for it. He hopped the fence and started down the road.
I finally caught up to him, grabbing him from behind and pulling him by his shirt backwards to the ground. He fell back and knocked his head against the pavement. I turned and saw a seam begin to emerge where there were two staples I hadn’t noticed before, and I thought I’d see blood but it was just an ear loosening.
I got down on my knees, saying, “Charlie? Charlie, did I kill you?” to which he didn’t respond. As I got closer to his face, I watched as his eyelids flickered and touched a finger to the seam of his ear. His skin was rubbery, loose, and I felt scared, cold. The ear suddenly shot out and his face opened like a door. I saw then something reminiscent of a film, something horrific. A tiny, exhausted alien in a chair looked up at me, from a captain’s seat, screeching.
I had been with her long enough that being without her was a problem. Thought often about how the opposite of divorce isn’t marriage, it’s wedding. The opposite of marriage is the presence of the absence, a haunting with a negative connotation. Wished often for a way to erase it but the options were few and impermanent. Instead, I opted for the round-robin method of uncoupling and replacing.
It takes some ability to live in the present and I wouldn’t say that I was at my peak performance at that time. I felt forced into the small moments, frequently, and without consent. Like taking her and her family dog to the vet, a dog I had never yet met, who licked my finger when I offered it and looked me in the eye and I could tell was thinking, “you make her cry.”
What was fair is that it was true and I wasn’t doing a lot to change anyone’s opinions. She’d suffered enough experiences by this point and loosened her grip. Not that I needed an explanation, but playing the tape back was out of my control.
If only there was a way to really never think about that again. The whole thing, I mean. The love and what happened during. I was too plump with ideas, encumbered by thinking too often and thoroughly. The only way of slowing the thoughts was with interference, replacing thinking with various distractions. Men in Black was tonight’s replacement, as movies often were.
I always found that I watch the right movies at the right time, by accident, coincidentally relevant. Sometimes I knew this by the opening scene. In this case, Agent K takes out a neuralyzer, erasing the memory of a cop who had seen too much of the wrong thing. That’s how I felt after this relationship. I wanted a reprieve like this, a lightening of the load in my skull, to remove what I was desperate to replace.
It was genius, something I had considered only in a less concrete way, wanting the pain to disappear, to have not happened, or some other sort of removal. This presented a new avenue of reprieve, the work of a device, a sort of advantageous brain damage. It was a way of controlling the narrative and that’s what I was interested in most, in this situation.
Peri- and post-film viewing, I became fixated on the neuralyzer, knew this was the answer, and began my research into some kind of real-life equivalent. Of course I found nothing, despite being relentless. Another example of my inadequacies, exemplified by coming up empty handed with most things.
Aside from the neuralyzer, something in particular stuck in my mind. After taking a liking to J, Agent K invites him to be a member of the Men in Black, giving him time to consider giving up his life and identity to serve as an agent. J asks if it’s worth it, and Agent K answers with a challenge: “Oh yeah, it’s worth it, if you’re strong enough.”
Mouth agape, I wondered if I was strong enough. I’d like to think so. Would others think so? I have been seen as weak. That’s why I’m divorced now, among other things. At least I was hot. Tommy Lee Jones has never been hot, not even in youth. Not that it’s a competition, but I could use a win.
##
Seven years later, in the middle of March, I found myself in a theatre, the third row from the top. Another replacement, but for a myriad of wounds given all the time that had passed. This replacement was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and I was here alone. I had, at this time, moved on with my life and mostly into my career. Dateless, neuralyzerless, full of memories. There are a lot of things to live with and without, but at least the cinema was forever.
The parallels, at first, struck something inside of me, but I didn’t right away realize. Both films open with travelling down streets at night, headlight-lit, liquids: bug guts and tears. Relatable. Through to power dynamics, goals, personal trajectories; the only difference was wardrobe. Eternal Sunshine was exactly the same movie as Men in Black. I couldn’t believe someone had so blatantly taken so liberally from another film without so much as a wink of acknowledgement.
I left the theatre and went home to rewatch Men in Black, incensed and determined. Looking for something you expect to find affects an experience, but this relation was objective.
Despite knowing already what was to come, perhaps softened by the first of my double feature, I cried like I knew I would: When Agent K returns to his wife, who he had been monitoring, keeping tabs on despite leaving, erasing not memories so explicitly, but gently exfoliating them away with the sands of time.
When K returns to his wife, with amnesia, but into open arms, I wished for the same. Eternal Sunshine didn’t give this to me. It gave me two mirrors on opposite walls of a hallway asking the other what would come next, with resentment and confusion.
Also, with age, I noted the agency of the lovers, of their losses. Struck deeply by the lovers who don’t have agency, K’s wife abandoned, Joel abandoned but retaliatory, both left out of the decision. I didn’t fit so cleanly into any of the characters, but as a constellation of fragments, which isn’t a problem, more so a gift of knowing I exist.
I sat furious through the credits, knowing exactly what action I’d take next.
##
It wasn’t hard to find where Charlie Kaufman lived. I found a fan website where someone had already written a fanfic about wanting to kill him, and they posted his address in case someone wanted to really do something about it. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do that something, but I did want to do something.
I felt normal as I walked up to the front door and rang the doorbell. Charlie came to the door and looked confused.
“Hello,” he said, like I knew he would.
“Hi Charlie, could I have a moment of your time?”
He hesitated but then said, “I’m just about to sit down for lunch, you can join me.”
I followed him out to the backyard where he had a table full of sandwiches. He motioned for me to sit and have some so I did.
“I just had a divorce.”
“Do you mean, ‘went through’?” I could tell Charlie wasn’t being condescending.
“Yeah, that’s what I mean. I went through a divorce recently.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, I hear they’re difficult.”
“Thank you. It was a difficult time but I found comfort in films. In fact, Men in Black came out shortly after my divorce was finalized.”
He was mid-bite of one of the sandwiches as I said this and I noticed his jaw stutter before continuing on. It was a subtle reaction, but I could tell he was nervous.
“I was in a lot of pain at the time,” I continued, “and all I could think about was wishing I could remove what was causing me pain, specifically my memories of her. Then I watched Men in Black and in that opening scene, they use the neuralyzer.”
Charlie was looking at the new sandwich in his hand, trying to decide which edge would be the best spot to bite first.
“Have you seen Men in Black, Charlie?”
He had taken his bite and was chewing arduously, enthusiastically putting up his index finger to tell me I had to wait. It was taking him quite a long time to finish chewing, presumably because he was buying himself time. I was in no rush, so I let him chew this first bite for seven straight minutes. Finally, he swallowed and then turned to me.
“Yes, I have seen Men in Black. It was very good. I always thought it would be fun to go by Agent C.”
“Did you have the neuralyzer process in mind when you wrote Eternal Sunshine?” I asked, prepared to wait another seven minutes.
He took a bite of his sandwich and began the chewing process which did, in fact, take him another seven minutes, and an additional minute this time to prove to me that he wasn’t counting to seven and that there wasn’t a pattern. I could see that, much like the two movies, Charlie was doing his own controlling of the narrative.
“Well,” he started, putting down the rest of his sandwich and brushing the crumbs off his hands with his other hands. He took another breath, which I thought would be for the continuation of the thought, but instead, Charlie made a run for it. He hopped the fence and started down the road.
I finally caught up to him, grabbing him from behind and pulling him by his shirt backwards to the ground. He fell back and knocked his head against the pavement. I turned and saw a seam begin to emerge where there were two staples I hadn’t noticed before, and I thought I’d see blood but it was just an ear loosening.
I got down on my knees, saying, “Charlie? Charlie, did I kill you?” to which he didn’t respond. As I got closer to his face, I watched as his eyelids flickered and touched a finger to the seam of his ear. His skin was rubbery, loose, and I felt scared, cold. The ear suddenly shot out and his face opened like a door. I saw then something reminiscent of a film, something horrific. A tiny, exhausted alien in a chair looked up at me, from a captain’s seat, screeching.