A Place That's Far So Far Away

all rights reserved, all wrongs reversed

I WONDER IF YOU REMEMBER that year we just listened to R.E.M. for a whole month straight, really just Document and Reckoning. When one was over you'd mash the finicky eject button with your thumbnail and jam the other CD into the dash. A whole June of you calling it “Don’t Go Back to Starkville” to make me mad, thirty days of yelling out “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” somehow managing to botch the timing of the Leonard Bernstein part every single time.

Tallahatchie County, Polaroid Spectra (2015)

You told me once that back at Sewanee you had a French teacher who made y’all translate all those jumbled up lyrics about doomsday, made you chant it in class as a way to try to ramp up your colloquial language speed. You said it didn’t work but was pretty fun to do. One night during the Reckoning patch we were riding down to Jackson for you to get some good redfish before the ballet. You turned the stereo down and admitted that you had always wanted to learn French, and regretted failing at it, for no other reason than you wanted the ability to navigate to Père Lachaise Cemetery, where Jim Morrison was buried.

The Crystal Grill, Greenwood, Mississippi, Polaroid Spectra (2017)

It was dark and I was driving that old burgundy Buick you'd gotten from your grandmother, only 17,000 miles on it but it smelled like a damp basement in the wintertime. You were looking out the window and biting your lip as Stipe mumbled looking at your watch for a third time, maybe needing to tell me something, maybe just because you were itchy and your shoulders were chapped from laying out all day. We didn’t really have any money but we had your daddy’s black AmEx. In my mind this is when your hair was almost a matte black, and even though it was dark already we had the a/c on full blast because it had been so hot that day.

Highway 80, Alabama, Polaroid SX-70 (2017)

I would glance at you as we drove, watch as you faded into the dark blur of Highway 49 as you stared at the blurry pines. “Where do you want to go?” I asked. “Do you want to stop?” You just kept looking out the window.

“SO FAR AWAY etc. etc.” is a dispatch devoted to art and life in the South, held fast with instant film. If you liked what you saw and read, if you maybe felt a twang in your belly while you looked it over, then this is for you, and I reckon we would be friends. Consider sending this letter to a pal who is like us. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see an archive of Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.