Holiday Special

There’s a girl trapped in the camera.

She’s you, by the way. You’re driving to Red Rooster. Your friend is holding that camera, the cheap Sony camcorder. It’s the last video you’ll make together, whether you want it to be or not.

You have cold drinks. She chokes on ice when sipping hers, only for a split second. Side profile shot. The sky is visible through the car’s wound down window. No stars.

There’s a memory of a place here. Of your car, the width of roads, the distance to shops, the announcer on a train, the warm dry nights. You’ve already felt how it’s different to this elsewhere, the humidity, the space. You will feel it again.

Now you (remember, this is a video of you) drive around the carpark. You say your lines you rehearsed. You say your videos weren’t about making something good, but we’re just about having fun making them. I know that’s a lie. You did have fun but you wanted them to be good so desperately. You just had no idea how. The stars still aren’t visible.

Your friend holds the camera. I can’t remember how she reacted when you said these things.

It cuts to you in your bedroom. You’re about to say something. Doesn’t matter what.

The contents of the video don’t matter at all. The process does. You’d made videos before but this one is the longest thing you’ve made. It has something in it from almost all of your friends, and it’s mostly skits, like so many of your past videos were.

There is so much of you in this thing. Your old friends, your old bedroom, your old sense of humour, your hyper-awareness that even I have, still. You poured everything you were into it.

So why does it feel like that girl on the camcorder’s screen isn’t you?

You understand the continuity between her and you. You have her memories, of being scared and alone. She even knew she wasn’t a boy. But that’s not you, because she’s acting and therefore choosing specific things to show, and because all the cells in her body have been replaced by now, and because she wasn’t a person but a biological process on autopilot, and because she wasn’t real.

The video includes her gestures, articulations, mannerisms, speech patterns, thoughts, fears, beliefs. You even have the cypher to figure out exactly what was acting and what was genuine.

And that’s how I know that she is still you. She’s scared, of any intimacy, of asking for anything, of being anyone. She’s continuously carving herself away to her core. She just got a little more verbose about how she’s doing it.

This is the most documented record of any point in your life. But you can’t watch any of it. This, or anything from before. It’s an archive of someone who wasn’t real until she was, and then she was a ghost.

But you don’t need to watch to remember how it felt. In your mind, memories of the creative process loom. Sitting on the couch talking about animated movies. Kicking a plush into the catchment near your house. Camping with friends. Skits of game shows and ghost hunting parodies and bitching in the kitchen and phone games and eggs. You committed it to memory when you made it. You have no need to disturb the ghost anymore.

At the same time that there’s a cut to you in your bedroom, there also isn’t one. You’re still in the car with your best friend. The recording is over. Now there is no event to be immortalised and agonised over in paralysing detail: there is only you and her, there, in that moment. The you in that video exists forever: the you in that moment with your friend exists only then.

So, no one will know what details are embellished. We can give you a happy ending.

You and your best friend are sitting on the curb. You wanted some fresh air. You look up at the stars. They’re slightly brighter than they are over east. They’re not as bright as when you went camping. How much does all of that show up on camera? Not well enough for you to record. All those suburbs with tiny differences. None of it will ever show in the footage, but you know it.

“End of the line, huh? You move away and we’ll never do this again.”

She holds onto your arm. Clings to it, almost.

“It’s not,” you reply, “We’ll call. I’ll come back.”

“But it’ll never be like this again. No more skits. It’s the end of an era.” She leans into you further. This touch is new. You give hugs when you say hi and bye, but this is a level of intimacy you aren’t used to from her. You don’t argue with it. There’s nothing to argue with.

“We’ll do some when we get back.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

Her hand finds its way into yours. You feel her squeeze. You squeeze her hand back. She squeezes back tighter. It isn’t a thing you had to ask for. She simply knew. She ceases to be someone that has hurt you. There, no one has hurt you. Not your best friend, and not that other girl, and not that other other girl, and none of the girls who will hurt us in the future. On that curb, she’s only someone who holds your hand.

And you’re back to when you were camping, years ago. Right next to the ocean, near a small town. You made a video then too. You can’t watch it now. You won’t. Why would you? The most important memory is one you never filmed. It was the end of something, and the beginning of something else. The sky was full of stars. That’s all that matters.

That feeling of that moment carries back to the parking lot. The lights go out. You feel nature start to reclaim the pavement you sit on. The stars slowly shift back into focus. And your friend still squeezes your hand, and you squeeze back.

I’m sorry. You still have to go home. It’s not permanent. After this, you’ll go home and edit the video, and then a few days after it’s done you’ll leave for another place and split in two, you and the ghost of a girl trapped in the camera. And yet…

“Let me have this,” you think. “Just for now.”

And I love you. I don’t want you to be defined by the footage that encapsulates your past. So fuck that video. You don’t have to haunt a camera anymore. Flash storage can’t hold data forever. You will let that storage die, but the memories will remain. And I’ll hold you within me, and remember you for who you really were and what you felt. I promise.