Bella Mazzocco’s Theme

There’s a small town before the mountain. I think of it often, especially when work swells up around me or when life starts to buzz too loud. That town plays like a quiet film in my head. There’s a restaurant there, stitched to an old hotel, that hums in my chest every time I crave something I can't name.

I thought of it while watching the first episode of Twin Peaks.
Something about it felt oddly familiar. Not in a literal way, but emotionally. I didn’t get that feeling with Blue Velvet or Mulholland Drive. I realized what I recognized was a version of Mt. Hood. Not the real one, but the one I carry around in memory. The one I rely on when I’m not physically there.

When the Twin Peaks theme started, it felt like I was remembering something. The music made me nostalgic for a place I couldn’t clearly place. Like a dream that had been rerun too many times.

I began to imagine myself inside the show in a strange, disjointed way.
I, Bella Mazzocco, as Laura Palmer. The murdered girl.
The more I watched, the more it unspooled something inside me. I hadn't felt that type of imaginative obsession since I was a kid pretending to be in Harry Potter, or when I was a teenager, skin breaking out and mind unraveling, reciting Lisa's lines from Girl, Interrupted like they were my own thoughts.

Maybe it’s the only way I feel understood.
Maybe I want to be cared for, even if the characters are falling apart.
Maybe they reflect something in me that real people don’t see.
Or maybe I just want to be seen at all.

I’m not Laura Palmer. Some parts of her story hit close, others don’t. I haven’t washed up on any shore.
But I have walked through towns that look just like hers.
The trees in that show remind me of the Pacific Northwest.
A place where I slip into someone else.

In Oregon, I’m Sloane.
I never had a middle name, so I made one. I’ve been toying with making it official.
I think that’s why I constantly write myself into things.
To be someone else.
To live a different life than the one I have now.