March 19
Years ago, I was working a freelance writing job that required my signing up for several academic content libraries. I was looking for work that felt like but wasn’t grad school, and I had genuinely enjoyed JSTOR in college, so I didn’t mind all the new logins and passwords. That job eventually ended, though, and I said goodbye to my career in faux academia (I had to think of it as academia-adjacent; the truth of the job would have been too depressing otherwise.) I deleted Slack from my phone, trashed dozens of documents on my computer, and unsubscribed from all my accounts.
Except for one.
I didn’t mean to remain subscribed to this particular content library—it certainly just fell through the cracks—but to this day, I am on their list. It’s a website that notifies me every time someone cites “my” work in another person’s work, the catch being it’s not my work at all. It’s some other K. Markovich, a K. Markovich who actually chose a life in academia and publishes heady, peer-reviewed papers. I have what I would call a “boutique” writing career, but believe me, there is no reason a legitimate academic would ever cite me for any reason. But they’re citing somebody, someone whose life and work and identity is right next to mine, so close that it winds up in my inbox.
Each of these notification emails comes with a button that reads: This is not me. I never click it.
I’ve been working on a short story for a few years now. In it, the protagonist meets the future version of herself. It is LITERALLY her in the future; though there’s some subtext and metaphor and I suppose some whispers of the surreal, I am telling you, it’s her. They converge because of some apparatus or rule or magic that I haven’t quite cracked yet, but the point is, their paths cross. It doesn’t break the universe, it doesn’t affect future outcomes. In fact, the whole thing is quite boring, awkward even. I started writing this when I lived in Los Angeles, when I would get lost any time I tried to take Sunset Boulevard home from work, when I’d stare at decrepit mansions in Los Feliz and wonder at the last time anyone lived inside. I was thinking a lot about ghosts, time, COVID, myself, Billy Wilder movies (apparently). I happened to read It Chooses You, the Miranda July photo-essay collection in which she responds to Penny Saver ads around LA. In one essay, she writes about meeting a woman who is selling suitcases so that her grandson, a mannequin salesman, will have a way to transport his wares. July wonders what the experience of meeting the woman might be like, and says that she pictures herself as a child emerging from one of the suitcases. She wants to discover that this social experiment has meaning, that she’s somewhere out there while she’s still right here. I remember reading it and knowing exactly what she meant.
I think I keep the emails coming in because I like imagining the out there. I like seeing the This is not me button and wondering, isn’t it?
