“There”

1/6/2023 a sort of déjà vu

I awoke before 5 AM — lay There — half-dreaming — moving across the convoluted plane of the last 20 years

It’s impossible to even navigate the last 6 — let alone a fractal 40

When I surfed myself awake — I had received a text from a friend I’ve known for 40 years inviting me to see a movie — I replied at 6: 15 am and he immediately replied

Soon after — I sent a few select friends who had been There at the time — a YouTube sent out by my friend Gwyllm Llwyd who I’ve known for about 21 years — as a temporal reference point —

Now another friend who I met and was There about 35 years ago replied to the video at 6:30 AM with images and a poem to summarize it all:

There
By Kitty J, 1/6/2023

I said, 
“Hard as a thigh bone” 
The Voice is deeper than me; 
I hate the new reality 
LOL

We mostly talked about movies — although to make a point she replied:

I kept wondering what we were all doing up at that time in the morning — in the 80s we often were — but we were coming from the otherside — yesterday into today without any in-between

We were talking about how much our generation thought in movies — how we used to do 12 to 24-hour marathons of our current favorites — all of us contributing videos when I asked:

O yes. Were you There for the incident where she showed up in the middle of Betty Blue after she broke a pint glass on her forehead? And me rushing out to take care of her, leaving a blood-covered bathroom behind?

I barely remember the rest of the evening or the trauma we went through, yet I remember distinctly, although I wasn’t There, the horror our host experienced when after she finished the movie and the climatic suicide scene and going into the bathroom finding all that blood.

A strange quirk of our essential nature seems to be the ease with which we remember the story and forget the experience.

Not that you doubted me — but another friend who was There — who I had sent the bat video replied — Have you seen the Nick Cage Dracula movie trailer?

Much love,

Con/Jur/d, 1/6/2022