Physically present, but mentally a lizard in the desert.

Whenever I feel a way that I don’t know how to explain I try to tie the feeling to artwork or a movie or a song. Anything that can help me to understand it.

For about a month last summer I felt like the first couple of moments of the song One Head Light from the Wallflowers- not the whole song- just a few seconds of it.

For a good chunk of time, I felt like this painting of a girl laying on a green couch by Ramon Casas. For the longest time, I felt like this small snippet from the movie Call Me By Your Name.

Sometimes I’ll see something or hear something and everything in me wants my existence to feel like the essence of whatever that thing is. The song “Milk” – always makes me feel the best sort of melancholy. The movie “Someplace In Time”, the painting “Sweet Dreams” Giclee. It's like someone pulled out a whole other existence within those things and I’m desperately chasing it. I want to exist within the feeling it gives me.

There was one day a few years ago I was driving to class and the windows were open in my VW and I was listening to some really good opera. It was warm and super early in the morning and the sun was just starting to show up. I was drinking a coke and had a pack of Fruity Mentos and it ended up being a really lovely day. For some reason my mind has tied the really good day to the coke and Mentos – so if you see me lugging those two things around its because I’m trying to re-create a very specific moment or feeling or essence or whatever you want to call it. 

When Faye and I were in Duluth there was a moment when we were driving – nothing really special about it. We weren’t talking, just listening to music – but everything was so seamless. The roads were all curved and winding and the air was messy with fall leaves and it had just rained and the earth smelled good and I could have carried that one moment of feelings washing over me for forever.

Or when I was leaving the movie theater this one time. I was the only one that had been in the theater – the hallways were dark when I was walking out, I could hear someone vacuuming and the parking lot was empty and it was so still and silent and like I wasn’t even really in the real world. It was strange and calm and so invigorating.

I wish I could bottle it up. Wear a particular feeling like I do perfume.

Have you ever seen the movie Rango? The cute little lizard guy gets lost out in the desert and he ends up just wandering and searching for water? He has this beady, bewildered look throughout most of the film – the whole movie just has this odd, adventure feeling about it. It teeters on the edge of the bazaar. It’s weird.

That’s how I feel right now.

There’s always a moment of relief when I can tie what I'm feeling to some art or moment or whatever- like ‘oh – there's no way you can possibly be alone in this feeling, look, this person also had this feeling and turned it into this (insert music or movie or painting or book or saying)'.

It makes me feel normal? Or justified or understood?

Do I sound like I’m crazy? I’m crazy. It’s fine. 

If you see me this week and I have that bewildered, wide-eyed look going on about me just know that physically I am here, on earth doing normal person everyday things. But mentally I’m a lizard in the desert wearing a button-up Hawaiian shirt with no pants on, trying to find water.

That's all I have for the void right now.

Safe sailing.

- A.ray

(Original publication date March 9th 2020)