If there was one character I related to most on ‘Twin Peaks’ it was Audrey – the young, sexy vixen who had the hots for Agent Dale Cooper, who was supremely uninterested in her. I know that song, I know that dance, and I know that no matter how silly and sophomoric it may seem, those feelings can rip apart the heart, rending it doubly difficult of loving later on. Audrey managed to be seductive and sad, a sex-pot who didn’t so much have sex as inspire it, someone who longed for the one man who wouldn’t long for her in return. Not that way. Never that way.
You can have the eyes and the desire of the world, but what good is it when the one you want doesn’t even notice? Sometimes I think that’s what drives us – the elusive other, the one who got away, the single person who will only ever like you, not love – not love in the way you need and crave and want, not love in the one way that will mean everything and turn you inside out and bring the world crashing down so they can build it all back up. No, not that kind of love. Not for her, not for me.
The breezes of fall rustled through the pine trees in my childhood backyard. The abyss of darkness, and the safety and the danger of night, stretched out unseen and unknown. I could only feel it, even when I reached out and stepped over broken leaves and matted grass. I could only listen to the rush of it, pulsating with the quickened beating of a heart – a single heart – the aching sound of loneliness. Longing is louder, but loneliness rings deeper.
The soundtrack to ‘Twin Peaks’ brings it all rushing back to my mind. I was in high school then. Practicing marching band music after school, fumbling with math proofs, and squeezing a frozen juice box into a messy accordion. On certain Friday nights, we had to perform in the football halftime show, running out into the middle of the surreal, unforgiving illumination of the football field, blaring ‘Fanfare and Entrance’ while the majorettes kicked their legs and waved their pom-poms in the air. When the halftime show was over, and Friday night fun was just beginning for others, I traipsed my way through a darkened field back up to my home. I passed dimly-lit baseball diamonds, and a patch of blackened forest that beckoned with the fate of Laura Palmer. I did not know fear then. I did not know what it was like to be unloved. I did not know how lucky I was.
