Spotless

Essay by Dean Bakopoulos
Photographs by Mike Belleme and Kaoly Gutierrez

Last month, an email arrived from my attorney. Attached was a divorce decree. My marriage to X, my second marriage, was officially, legally, over. 

I had not spoken to X in over a year—we’d been communicating solely through attorneys and an occasional Venmo transaction for a shared storage space in rural Iowa—and so the decree landed with no greater wallop than the advertisements from Filson and Buck Mason and the avalanche of parental communication from my son’s high school and the Substacks I never read. 

X had not been part of my life for some time and now we were separate in every sense of the word. She lives in Los Angeles. I live just outside of Iowa City. She has not seen my son nor daughter in two years; I have not seen her daughter for eighteen months. Once, we were a blended family of five. Now, there is no name for what we are besides over. 

Goodbye, X, I said, good-naturedly, while printing out the decree for my safe deposit box and noting her notarized signature. It did not look like her actual signature at all, since it was generated by whatever docu-signing software our attorneys were using. It was an approximation of her signature or not even that. Something less than that. Scraggly. Faint. 

I dreamt of X a few days after the decree arrived. I dreamt she was living in a small house in Silver Lake, in Los Angeles, where we used to live. A mangled Tesla was parked in her driveway. (One of our last conversations occurred shortly after she was in a car accident and totaled her Tesla in real life.)

In the dream, I knocked on X’s door and told her that I had come there to visit her daughter and our dog.

They are out, she said. They’d had left the house and had gotten lost, she informed me, though she seemed relatively calm about the situation. Kids do this, she insisted, they run away with their dogs and then they come home well after dark. Muddy and hungry. Do you want a tour of the new place? You can come in. 

The place was not good. Dark and leaky and it smelled—how rare to smell something in a dream!—of mildew. She showed me her windowless bedroom, which had dark red carpet on the floor. And on the walls. And on the ceiling. And on the plywood box she used for a bed. 

How do you sleep on this? I asked.

Mostly people just use their hands, she said, lying down on the blanketless bed, making her hands into a pillow, before closing her eyes and then somehow doing a handstand. It’s my turn to dream, she said. You can go see the yard. It’s the nicest part.

I went out to the yard, alone. There was a beach. There was an ocean very close to the house and the house was sinking in the sand of the narrow beach. It was windy. Clouds rolling in from afar. My daughter, who is 19, came walking towards me from the water. She didn’t think it was a very nice house, but she loved the yard! She was concerned about her stepsister. Have you seen her yet? Then I saw my son, making sandcastles. My son is now seventeen, but in the dream he was still a toddler, holding a plastic yellow shovel, sand all over his body. He played happily near the waves. I told him that maybe I would be a better father to him now that he’d started his childhood over, but he couldn’t hear me. The waves were so loud. The house seemed to sink even deeper into the narrow beach.

Then things shifted, the way they do in dreams, and X and I were suddenly all dressed up. We were going to a concert, with two television producers we used to know, my former managers, Allen and Brian, and they had given us tickets to see Genesis. 

We could hear Phil Collins warming up. The producers excused themselves to shake hands with the crowd at the bar. On stage, Phil was singing “Against All Odds.” He was rehearsing. Completely ignoring the audience who desired, craved, interaction, he was having trouble hitting the notes. 

X and I looked down at our tickets. They were not for the show in Los Angeles after all. They were for the Genesis show in Johnson City, Tennessee, that had happened two nights earlier. I lost sight of X and then I saw her riding a horse, followed by a lot of topless women also riding horses, and they were followed by the University of Wisconsin marching band. The band was now playing “Against All Odds.”

My dreams are often like this. Insane, bizarre, far from subtle. But once they wake me up, I cannot go back to sleep. 

• • • •

Lately, at the advice of my therapist, I have been doing this thing after I wake from an upsetting or unsettling dream: 

If I dream of somebody I don’t want to dream about, be it a real person from my current life or my past or a terrifying demon-like figure from my subconscious or an annoying and strange person my mind has made up, randomly, from the faces I register every day, I write down my dream in a notebook. 

I write down as much as I can remember.

Next, I calmly ask the unwanted figure to leave my subconscious. I thank the figure for trying to bring me a message. 

Carl Jung says all dreams are messages. 

Then, I wish the figure well and assure the figure that their message has been received. I did that the next morning with X. I visualized her standing in front of me. I said, Thank you for visiting me in my dream. However, I would like you to leave my imagination now as I no longer require messages from you. I would like you to evacuate my subconscious. 

Then, I stray from the script I’d prepared and say: In fact, I would like to never think of you again. 

This was not the language my therapist and I agreed upon, but it is the sentence that came to me. 

I wrote down the dream almost exactly as I have written it here. I wrote it down in longhand, in my spiral-bound bedside notebook. Then I pulled out the page and tore it into sixty million pieces and threw them out into a field. I took a long walk in the woods and tried to feel something, but I felt nothing. I was spent. Destroying that dream had exhausted me. 

It felt like something had in fact left my body. I wondered if it had worked.

Later, I was very hungry. 

It’s possible that I had this strange dream because I also had recently rewatched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Like every sad sack romantic book nerd of my generation, I love this film. It’s a film that I saw when I was young, in my late twenties, and still prone to the romanticization of heartbreak. I saw it in the theater, but I remember leaving with the feeling that I had missed something. I didn’t fully grasp the film, so later that day I went back and saw it again. 

Now, twenty years later, I decide to rewatch the film, because after years as a novelist and a professor of fiction writing, I am now also screenwriter and a professor of cinema, and I have been revisiting my favorite films with curiosity. Why is this film such a favorite of mine? Why have I—a man with a low capacity for retaining the details of books and movies—remembered the experience of first watching certain movies with startling vividness? What had they taught me, years ago, when they were new and so was I?

• • • •

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), directed by Michel Gondry and written by Charlie Kaufman, explores heartbreak through the story Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), a couple who breakup and then erase each other from their memories through a revolutionary technology invented by Lacuna, Inc.

The film unfolds mainly in Joel’s memory, as we witness Clementine’s presence leaving his brain during the controversial experimental procedure. During the process of memory-wiping, Joel decides he still loves Clementine and regrets his decision. He and Clementine scheme to thwart the erasure-in-progress. Beautifully shot and wholly unpredictable, punctuated by a moody score from Jon Brion, it is a truly original story that examines the tropes of romantic drama. 

I loved it. Why?

For starters, I am a sucker for a film that asks a simple philosophical yes/no question. In this case: If you could completely erase the memory of someone who you once loved, but who ended up hurting you, would you do it? 

Despite being twice divorced, I have been married most of my adult life. I divorced for the first time when approaching forty (an 18-year marriage). And for the second time when I was approaching fifty (an 8-year marriage). 

At one point in Eternal Sunshine, Clementine, being erased from the mind of Joel, screams: I don’t know. I don’t know! I’m lost! I’m scared! I feel like I’m disappearing. My skin’s coming off! I’m getting old! Nothing makes any sense to me!

This is what it feels like to end a marriage in middle-age. First, you don’t know what to do. Then you feel lost. Then you feel scared. But you know that if you stay in the marriage, you will disappear. Your skin will come off. You’re sure of it. You will get older and unhappier, skinless. Unskinned. But also? You have organized your life around this other person, so nothing make sense. It’s like landing on a new planet. Naked. 

You could say I have been lucky. My adult life has been largely organized around two, long-lasting relationships. Or you could say I am unlucky, because I am twice-divorced, which most people in our particular culture will say. 

In neither case did I want to end the marriage. 

By that I mean I wasn’t the first person to voice the idea of ending the marriage, but in hindsight, of course, I see that in both cases I really wanted to end the marriages. My behavior and attitude communicated this, even if my language did not. 

I think there is always the leaver and the one who leaves. But I think almost every marriage that ends will end because both parties want it to end. Sometimes it takes a while for the left party to admit this, because rejection, of any kind, puts our nervous system on high alert. We are clingy by nature; we have evolved to dig in and stay with our clan. But almost every divorce and break up is, ultimately, a mutual one. The narratives are just different. I even believe that often the person who is left, the beleaguered party, has actually and sometimes subconsciously manifested the leaver’s decision to leave.

This thought occurred to me, for the first time, this past summer, when I was spending a few weeks at a cabin on the North Shore of Lake Superior near Grand Marais, Minnesota. I have gone to this cabin every year for the past twenty years. I have been there with my first wife and her parents. I have been there with X. I have been there with my children and my stepchild. One summer, I learned that my father was dying while sitting by a campfire on the beach. One summer, I waited there while someone I loved was in a hospital in Minnesota, worrying about their survival. This summer, everyone was so busy, even my kids; I went there alone. 

I spent much of the week lying in the sun on ancient rocks, or swimming in the swollen river, or walking among the towering pines, or drifting aimlessly in a kayak, pulled into the vast blue cold cold cold of the lake. I wanted to do a lot of work that week. But I mostly drifted. I mostly basked. I lollygagged and pondered. I threw ancient rocks into the turbulent inland sea. Yearning. I yearned and yearned and yearned. 

This is a landscape that has touched me deeply. The trip to Lake Superior every summer, to the simple cabin forty feet from its shore, is my New Year’s Day. It is where I reset, recharge, reconnect. Where I embrace what is and mourn what is lost. When I am away from Lake Superior, and feeling overwhelmed by the world, I close my eyes and visualize the cabin, the campfire, the beach, the rocks, the water, the woods. I think of the line from Neil Young’s “Helpless,” whenever I think of this place: In my mind, I still need a place to go. All of my changes were there. 

If there is any part of adult life that I was woefully unprepared for it was this: the unrelenting and chaotic quality of change. All of my changes. I had no idea that you didn’t simply set up a life and then enjoy it. Of course, at the age of forty-nine, such a belief is hopelessly naïve, but when I was twenty-two, and married, and buying my first home and writing my first book, this seemed true. Set up your life, then live it. That made so much sense. I knew many adults with wild, unruly lives, but this seemed a character flaw on their part, not an inevitable trajectory of maturation.

In Minnesota, at my secret, sacred place (I confess I have fudged the location just enough to keep you, dear reader, away from it), I always begin and end my trip with a plunge into the frigid waters of Lake Superior. I was raised Ukrainian Catholic, a religion replete with ritual, but now, this is the closest thing I have left to a religious ritual in my life. I plunge myself into the water. Stay under. The cold is bracing, breathtaking, stunning. I pop out from under the water and I go and lay down on the rocks, I dry in the sun, my chest hair full of tiny tear drops, as if I have been holding a weeping mermaid to my torso. 

For a moment, I shiver. I feel like I will die. And then the sun starts to make itself known. The breeze, though often cool, dries off the droplets. I lie there, changing, becoming, reheating. 

A familiar, sacred landscape can also be an eraser of memory, like the inventors in Eternal Sunshine had crafted. But to erase your memory, you need not submit yourself to a sketchy mind-altering biotech firm. You can simply go back to the places where you feel most like yourself and you can slowly become yourself again, unencumbered, undestroyed. In a familiar, sacred landscape, you can remember this is who I am now because I have always been this way. The rocks only know that part of you; the lake just knows to envelop the animal that has plunged into its cold. 

Or, to quote Leopold Bloom, who could have used a session from Lacuna, Inc. when he found out Molly had been fucking around with Blazes Boylan: Me. And me now. 

You. Now. 

Here, among these ancient rocks, there is no other you. There is only you.

• • • •

I remember once, a few years ago, when X and I had split up for the first time—she had fallen in love with someone else at the end of 2019—I was talking to my therapist. I was telling her that everyone who knew me well—family, friends—were urging me not to get back together with X. (I eventually did, just as the pandemic broke out in Los Angeles.) My friends had heard all my woes—listened to me whine and sob and moan and rage—and they knew the relationship had grown toxic, perhaps dangerous, definitely strange. 

“But,” I said to my therapist, who I’d just begun to see, “I also have all these good memories of X. Things nobody knows about. These inside jokes that made us laugh until we cried, these beautiful vistas, these moments of complete and embarrassing intimacy and dread. This inner life we weaved together. The blurred boundary between us. Who is who? It’s like I am carrying them around in a suitcase. And I have this heavy suitcase of things, good things, that I want to remember. But I have nobody I can show them to. I have nobody who wants to look inside the suitcase. It is something I carry around. It is a weight I carry with me everywhere, a happy weight, but, if our marriage is over, it becomes an almost shameful weight.”

She didn’t say anything for a long time after that.

• • • •

The first time I watched Eternal Sunshine, the first two times, really, I was obsessed with the question: will Joel and Clementine get back together? This seemed to me to be the point of the film, the narrative arc that mattered most, that held the most emotional suspense. 

But one of the many brilliant structural moves at play in Eternal Sunshine is that the audience doesn’t learn the reason that Joel and Clementine broke up until very late in the film. This question—why did they split up anyway? —adds a suspenseful arc to the often-non-linear narrative, turning backstory itself into a mysterious subplot. The need to know the answer to that question propels us forward. 

When I was re-watching the film in my living room, twenty years later, my son, then sixteen, came up from the basement fifteen minutes into the film and asked me what I was watching. As I often do when he arrives in the living room mid-way through a movie, I paused the movie and tried to get him up to speed, because sometimes he will sit down and watch the film with me. 

After I had summarized the film’s first act for him, he asked, “So, why did they break up in the first place?”

I didn’t know, I said, because I didn’t remember the ending of the film at all. How could that be? I remembered so many of the moody and immersive and abrupt scenes, and I remember how the film made me feel, a feeling so intense I saw it twice in the same day, but I had no recollection of the ending. 

So, even though my son quickly grew bored with the film and went back down to the basement where his friends were playing video games, I watched the rest of the film with a real sense of suspense, one that is rare for a rewatch: Will they or won’t they get back together? How does this end?

But there was an even more interesting question to me this time around as well: Why did they break up in the first place? Without remembering the answer, I found it hard to know which ending to root for. 

The answer to the question (why did they break up?) finally comes at the end of act two, when a disgruntled employee of Lacuna Inc. mails Joel and Clementine cassette tapes of their intake interview, along with a letter explaining to them that they had undergone memory-erasing procedures so that they would completely forget one another. 

This is what we hear from Clementine’s tapes (dialogue that is in the finished film but not in the official screenplay): “I don’t like myself when I am with him. I don’t like myself anymore.”

When I heard that line this time, I thought, well, yes, that’s it. The reason you want to erase the memories of a love affair gone bad is often not the pain of the relationship, nor the difficulty of moving on after it ends. The reason you would say yes to the question at the core of Eternal Sunshine—yes, I would forget my ex if I could—is that you often don’t like yourself in a relationship that goes bad. 

You remember not only the ways that you were hurt, but also the ways you did the hurting. 

You remember not only the intensity of your love, but also the inauthentic moments when you performed that love. 

You remember not only the unhinged vulnerability of intimacy, but also the moments when you refused to be vulnerable. 

In relationships that are going bad, you become unrecognizable to yourself. You become a person you don’t like.

I didn’t like myself by the end of my second marriage. 

And that’s why I would like to forget it. It wasn’t about the suitcase. 

• • • •

I paused and rewatched this break-up reveal many times, listening to Clementine explain what she hated about Joel, why she wanted to leave him. She was cruel in her assessment of him, mean and full of rage. 

When, in the next scene, we get to hear Joel listen to his recovered cassette tape, he begins with predictable emo-guy bullshit: he didn’t think Clementine was erudite enough; in fact, she even embarrassed him a little bit. 

Then, he softens and says: I think if there’s a truly seductive quality about Clementine, it’s that her personality promises to take you out of the mundane. An amazing, burning meteorite that will carry you to another world where things are exciting.

Is this a healthy model of a relationship? 

When I saw Eternal Sunshine at 28, this is exactly what I saw in Clementine. And this is why many blame this film for creating the “manic pixie dream girl” trope which can ruin so many books and films. It’s reductive, maybe even destructive. I get it.

Had I not seen this film at 28, had I not become so enamored with it, and with Clementine, I am not sure if I would ever have fallen in love with X, ten years after I had watched the film. When we met, that is exactly what I felt: She is going to take me into a different world?(As I wrote about in a previous essay for Switchyard, I had been thinking of leaving this one when I met X.)

In the stairwell of a rather stodgy bed and breakfast in Cincinnati, on the way to a panel discussion at a literary festival at which we were both presenters, that is where I met X. I was standing around with a group of other writers when she came blasting into the foyer?

She had just arrived at the festival in a filthy silver Prius. She was running late. She was holding a large can of sugar-free Red Bull. Her hair was cut in a bleached-blonde pixie style that accentuated her big blue eyes. Her nails were painted a deep red; her eyelashes were long but not fake. She wore black leggings and tall black boots, and a white sweater festooned with pastel hearts. She blew by our small group, gathered in the foyer and waiting for her arrival, and said she needed to use the restroom before we departed. Then, midway up the grand staircase, she turned back, raised her hands in the air and said, “Don’t worry, it’s just pee.”

I was going through my first divorce. I was sort of living in my truck. And here was a personality that promised to take me out of the mundane. 

In many ways, she kept that promise. 

Not long ago I was reading a book by a fairly famous therapist, Phil Stutz, who asserts that in the beginning of our relationships, we tend to believe in magic. We want to find in the other person the superhuman ability to change the nature of our lives. But no other person can exempt us from reality. 

I understand the spirit of this assertion, and I understand why this desire can be problematic, but, also, isn’t that the point of love? Isn’t falling in love an act of changing our reality? We change the reality of the beloved, and they change ours? For a while, while love lasts, we do exempt each other from the reality of our lives. To love someone is one of the most profound shifts a person can experience in the reality of their situation.

No matter how badly it ends. 

Once, when X and I were dozing in bed early in our marriage, slipping into an afternoon nap, on a day when I think we were still quite blissfully happy, or some version of that, she turned to me and said: Are we dead?

I was concerned and asked what she meant.

She tried to elaborate: I feel like maybe we’re dead? Like we died and we are in some other plane now and we just don’t know we are dead?

Early in our marriage, it often felt like that. That I had died and stepped into a new life. My fondest memories of that marriage were when X and I and our blended family of three kids were together, being silly, soaking in each other’s warmth. On a trip to the beach, or watching a movie near the Christmas tree, or bombing across the highway on a road trip in our minivan, everyone chomping on their favorite snack.

Perhaps my second marriage was an act of erasure? Perhaps it helped me forget about my first marriage, the reality of a fractured family as I tried to make a new one?

Are new relationships meant to erase the old ones? Do they do the work of Lacuna Inc.? Is that the low-tech solution to loss? Is it that simple? You move on to something new, and you forget something old?

I think most Instagram therapists, at least the ones that I follow, would tell me that being deliberately single for a long time after a breakup is the only way one can properly heal. But I fell in love again, quite quickly. This made a lot of people nervous.

But why not just fall in love again? What transformation is more magical than this? Fall in love as many times as you need to fall in love, I say.

Let one love erase the last one. 

Already, I feel myself forgetting so much about X. I feel her growing murky. The other day, I tried to remember her laugh. Not her fake public one she did to make people feel good about their own wit. The private one, which I remember as being very different than her public one. I knew there were two laughs, conceptually. But I couldn’t, for the life of me, summon the secret one, the one very few people have heard.

• • • •

Okay, so, back to my rewatch: 120 minutes into the film, I now knew why Joel and Clementine broke up in the first place, but mere minutes from the end, I confess I had no memory of how Eternal Sunshine eventually did end. I was, with less than ten minutes left, completely in suspense. Will they or won’t they get back together? 

Who knows?!

After Joel and Clementine realize they already were lovers once, with no memory of their love, and after they listen to the rage and hurt and frustration on the cassette tapes, all of the demons they expressed on the occasion of their last break up, they stand together, face to face. They’ve fallen in love again, but now they know they’ve done that before, and it ended horribly.

Here are the final lines of the script:

JOEL
I can’t see anything that 
I don’t like about you.

CLEMENTINE
But you will! But you will. 
You know, you will think of 
things. And I’ll get bored 
with you and feel trapped 
because that’s what happens 
with me.

JOEL
Okay.

CLEMENTINE
(pauses)
Okay.

When I was in my twenties, I found this to be the most romantic ending. I had been married for seven years already. I was already wondering if my marriage would last a lifetime. We had both changed so much and we weren’t even thirty yet. But when I saw the ending of Eternal Sunshine initially, I thought, yes, of course they should do it all over again. Of course, despite Clementine’s anxious attachment style and Joel’s avoidant attachment style, they should give it another try. Despite being doomed. What is better to a 28-year-old than doomed love? You have all the time in the world for it at 28.

When Joel says “Okay,” your heart is supposed to melt. And Clementine’s heart does melt. She agrees to go back into it. She echoes, after a beat, his okay. 

But watching Eternal Sunshine as a twice-divorced single dad approaching fifty, I had the opposite reaction. 

“Don’t do it,” I said to the TV. “End it! End it now!”

Perhaps that’s because sometimes I think less of the suitcase full of good memories, and more about the years X and I spent futilely trying to get each other to love us the way we wanted and needed to be loved. 

I think a lot about a snippet from Braided Creek, a book-length collection of poems co-authored by two of my favorite writers, Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison:

All those years
I had in my pocket.
I spent them,
nickel-and-dime.

I feel that acutely these days. How we nickel and dime away the years. Entire decades. And what I wanted to tell Joel and Clementine was this: don’t lose any more of your years to each other. You tried it. It didn’t work. That is so okay. You have to forget each other and love someone new. 

At one point in the film, when it feels, toward the end of act two, that there is no way for Joel and Clementine to prevent the memory-erasing procedure from completion, Clementine and Joel are at the beach house on Montauk where they first met.

Clementine says: Come back and make up a goodbye at least. Let’s pretend we had one.

• • • •

Even though I had asked X to leave my dreams, she reappeared in my sleep a few weeks ago for what may turn out to be the last time. I haven’t seen her since. Carl Jung believed that if your dreams carried an important message, they would recur over and over until you accept the guidance of the collective unconscious, what ancient humanity might have thought of as the spirit world, the realm beyond our own. 

In the dream, I was at a party in the back of Regent Market, a small neighborhood grocery in Madison, Wisconsin, a few blocks from where I used to live, long ago, when I was in my late 20s. Near the house I lived in when I saw Eternal Sunshine for the first time. Coincidentally, I have a new partner now, B, who also lives in Madison, in that same neighborhood, not far from that market. 

And in the dream, B’s family was throwing a party, plying me with food and drink. Welcoming me into their warm den. Playing loud music. Laughing. Telling stories. Toasting. This is pretty much what they did when I first met them at a family reunion, several weeks before I had this dream.

But I could not find my new partner, B, anywhere in the dream. I was glad to be with her family, but I was concerned about B. Where had she gone? I was confused to find myself with her family and not feel her presence somehow beside me. In the dream, I grew anxious. I found it hard to see. My vision wobbled. 

So I went out the back door for some air and found an overgrown prairie garden, with sawtooth sunflowers towering over my head, and I called B’s name.

But I saw X first.

In the garden, X was taking photographs of B. 

B, in a black flowered sundress and large sunhat and heeled sandals, was happily posing for the photo shoot, laughing as she mugged, sexily, for the camera. Neither of them looked at me. They seemed to be delighted with one another, on friendly terms. I asked B if we could leave. I felt unwell, I said, and X looked at me and said, I am in love with Jeff. And Beatrice. And a lot of other people you don’t know. 

I don’t mind, I said, I just want to leave. 

Then, in the garden, there it was. Yes, a suitcase. An old, vintage suitcase. A stack of tan, hard suitcases with leather traps, to be specific, exactly like the ones my first wife had used as a coffee table in our first apartment in Madison many years ago. I recognized them instantly.

I walked over to the suitcases. I opened the one on top of the stack. B was watching me from a clump of blooming phlox. 

Whose luggage is that? she asked, calling out over the plants.

Mine, I said. 

I opened the suitcase. It was empty. All the suitcases were empty.

What’s inside? B asked. 

Nothing, I said. I looked around the garden. The garden was actively dying. 

Suddenly, the phlox and sawtooth sunflowers began to brown. X was photographing someone else, a couple in wedding clothes.

Somebody packed these suitcases with nothing, I said.

When I woke up, I did not write down the dream.

It seemed like something I would remember. 

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