#gaz musing

At first you think there's some sort of mistake. The long stretch of tracking at the start standard with these cheaply produced films takes its time - enough so that you check to be sure it's playing properly twice before the graphics of the responsible studios begin to reel by. No names, all. Long defunct, no doubt. Kyle always knows how to pick 'em.

It's a cold open - a dynamic shot, evidently POV, shoe gazing as the camera man walks down the street. Like the opening static, you not something is amis, spend too long looking at nothing. You wonder if this was perhaps supposed to be the opening credits, an unobtrusive background shot and tuneless whistling of the camera man that never did get overlayed with the proper attributions and graphics. It makes sense to you at first. Combined with the unmarked spine of the tape, you wonder if Kyle somehow managed to get his hands on someone's proof of concept, if this is perhaps the proto-tape of some big blockbuster you've already seen a million times. The thought makes you chuckle, the odds just as long as the ridiculous scene.

Bored, your thoughts start to drift, and just as you're getting ready to mark Kyle down for his first L, the shot changes, the camera man glancing up to nod amiably at someone walking in the opposite direction. It's more of nothing, really, but it grabs your attention nonetheless after the long lead up. You start to infer things about the faceless character - a man, judging by the shoes; likely attractive if the number of women you catch turning their gaze to follow is anything to go by. It's borderline clever film making, leaving them in. They distract from the brief glimpses of location that trickle through - nondescript brownstones and low-lit windows just beginning to flick on with the early hour. The camera man also seems to note this new development, the shot largely panned up now to take in the brief samples of domesticity, and as it does so, the gist of the movie begins to take shape, gauzy and ill-defined as the people who move about their lives behind the scant privacy of embroidered curtains. You slip past many buildings, each with some perverse peek, but the camera man doesn't slow, pace dogged and practiced and he turns down streets he never bothers to look at the names of. 

And yet, you seem not to need him to. 

It takes a while, but it's there. Familiarity. Deja vu. You know the streets he will turn onto before he even reveals them to you, the windows of which apartments will be left dark as his steps take him to a busier corner of the city, where the rent is cheaper and the neighbors know better than to test the integrity of each other's curtains. You don't recall leaning in so close, and yet you can feel the static of the CRT pulling at the errant strands of your hairline as you watch him stroll confidently closer, as if he's supposed to be there. Nonsensically, you check your window as if you'll be able to see him outside, but of course he can't be. This video would have been filmed decades ago, and Kyle, probably finding it funny that someone would have kept such a strange home video, had leant it to you as a prank without knowing the significance of how close to home it would have landed. Still, you snap the curtains closed when you're done, the rosy sky reflecting in the puddles outside just a little too familiar for your comfort.

But as you sink back into your seat, your heart feels as if it keeps falling through the floor. On screen, gloved hands shove through a misshapen shrub you know well, scrabble along the ledge of a windowsill and pull the camera up over the mass of the plant to rest front and center against the pane. The lens adjusts a few times, struggling to make sense of the amorphous sheer sitting static in the foreground and the writhing mass behind it. And still, like deja vu, you know what it will finally settle on before it does. 

Four nights ago, the last of a brief stint with a man you'd met in the produce section. He'd been charming and smart, if not a little self absorbed and it had all come to a head that night, dissatisfying sex from a disappointing partner who couldn't listen. You'd been fine enough to leave it buried in the past when he left, but with dawning horror you realize someone else wasn't. His fingers trace the shape of your heaving chest, exertion pinching your face in lieu of pleasure. The cameraman scoffs but he keeps watching, zooming in to where a fluorescent green vibe is pushed against your mound by unpracticed hands, far too high to do you any good.