Last night, going through a box of stuff from the crawlspace (as the wife dug out T-shirts to be made into a quilt), we unearthed a particularly unflattering sweater of mine, vintage September 1990. I didn’t want to throw it away, but I couldn’t put into words why. And then, this morning, came the most unexpected news ever: David Lynch confirming that twenty-five years after the end of Twin Peaks, there will be more. Showtime, nine episodes, 2016, picking up right where we left off (when Laura Palmer, or her doppelgänger in the Black Lodge, said “I’ll see you in twenty-five years”).
And it all came rushing back, with Gene Loves Jezebel’s “Jealous” underneath. Because I know what I’ve talked about before with the beginning of my college experience and how it all went wrong, but…
There is another edit.
In this edit, I don’t panic at the failure of my abortive Greek experience, and I don’t latch onto the first girl who shows an interest for fear no one else will. In this edit, the show I fell in love with over the summer becomes the hook by which I meet some other people, and we watch the season premiere with coffee and cherry pie to see if Dale Cooper was really shot dead at the end. In this edit, I meet some fun and interesting people who aren’t tied to the Greeks or the theater department and who have an interest in politics and this new show called Seinfeld (since Jerry Seinfeld is honoring a prior commitment and doing a standup show on campus despite his new program taking off like a rocket since then). In this edit, I pile in a car with people, go buy ice cream, and have to eat it all because it doesn’t fit in the dorm fridge. In this edit, I don’t have all my chips on one immature and jealous girl and I actually make friends instead, because I make a smart decision instead of panicking.
And that’s where the film runs out, because I don’t have footage of that decision, because I didn’t make it.
I have a vivid emotional feeing around September 1990, because it was a liminal moment at its truest. There was a brief window where maybe the college experience could have been salvaged, maybe things turn out differently, maybe I get to have an acceptable college experience rather than spending the next twenty years trying to retroactively piece one together out of a scattering of memories and a series of increasingly poorly chosen compensations.
Maybe I want that sweater to be its own sort of memento mori, but in the opposite direction – instead of remembering your own mortality and fragility and inevitable doom, remember that you can make the right call and make life a little better in doing so.