Memories of J

“Through my lens, I intuitively aim to capture the joy of fleeting moments – it’s not about creating the perfect shot, but instead capturing and preserving a feeling or emotion. The way it feels, rather than the way it looks.” –Anna Landstedt

I met J. on the smoker’s patio at Common Grounds on one of those interminable Texas evenings in 2004. In April of the previous year, I had moved to Waco, Texas, after finishing my Ph.D. in theoretical physics to start a post-doc at the Physics Department of Baylor University. My apartment was on Baylor Avenue, and Common Grounds was this really cool, indie café just down the road from where I lived.

J. and I kept running into each other and having interesting conversations about literature and the arts. She was a music student, and whenever I saw her, she seemed to be deep in thought and writing in her journal, drinking coffee and smoking.

In the early summer of 2006, we started dating. That year, I was transitioning from being a post-doc to teaching. I was also writing a long article on higher-dimensional geometry that had been gestating for a while.

J. had come to Baylor to be a pianist, but after her undergraduate degree in piano performance, she had switched to music composition during her master’s. Back in those days, Baylor used to have an outstanding faculty of music, and I have beautiful memories of the time when J. played the harpsichord as an accompaniment to a suite of songs sung by one of her friends. As a kid growing up in Bangladesh, I loved Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos featuring the harpsichord, but I had never seen them being played live. So, it was a pleasurable experience for me to watch J. play this almost magical instrument wearing a dark blue evening gown. (I regret not having the camera on me that evening.)

When we started seeing each other, she was living with two rescue cats she had taken in – Sparky and Gordon – in an apartment in which her bedroom served as her composition studio, while she made her bed in a small den she had made out on the other side of the kitchen counter. Outside, on the balcony, J. had made a cozy corner for smoking. I remember sitting there with her after dark, talking, smoking, and looking at the sky. Although I met both her cats at that time, I had no idea how important they would become to me later in my life.

Baylor was outside the centre of research in theoretical physics, but despite my isolation from mainstream academia, I liked my life in Waco. I had managed to make many good friends, and the summer of 2006 was perhaps the most memorable of my years in Texas.  I lived in an old wooden house with a wrap-around porch on Columbus Avenue. I loved the old tall trees that lined that neighbourhood. I remember J. strumming Stairway to Heaven on the guitar on the candle-lit porch of that house.

It was a summer to remember. Waco has a very nice zoo, and J. and I visited it on one very sunny day. Here are some shots from that day. Years later, when she was living in Santa Barbara, J. wrote a song for me in which she wove in memories of the tigers that we saw that day.

Later that year, in the fall of 2006, J. moved to Antwerp, Belgium, to study music composition at the conservatory there. She and I met up during the Christmas break in Washington D.C. where my sister lived. We visited a lot of the art museums in the D.C. area, and I remember buying a lot of used poetry books from the bookshops around D.C. From Kramers, in Dupont Circle, we bought each other copies of John Cage’s book “Silence,” which I still have on my bookshelf in my study here in Bangladesh.

About a month before I met up with J. in D.C., I had rescued a tabby kitten from around my house in Waco. I had named him Chaka after Sally’s dog in the Sally Lockhardt Trilogy by Phillip Pullman, and also for its mystical connotations in Bengali. I had left Chaka with some friends in Waco when I went on the trip, and I was scared that he would forget me during the two weeks I had spent away from him. But I needn’t have worried, because when I came back and went to my friends’ place to pick him up, Chaka came running across the apartment and jumped straight onto my arms as if to say: Let’s go home.

A few months after we met up in D.C., I decided to take in J.’s cats, Sparky and Gordon, as the friends she had left them with couldn’t take care of them anymore. So, on one fateful day in February 2007, Sparky and Gordon joined my little kitten Chaka.

Together, these three became my companions for over a decade as I moved from Texas to Ontario, Canada, in 2009 to work at a theoretical physics institute. In 2020, I moved to Bangladesh to take care of my ailing mother and teach at a university there. The three kittens, by then old cats, moved with me. Since then, they have all passed away, as has my mother.

J. and I are still good friends, and we have seen each other many times since the summer of 2006. Last year, she interviewed me for her YouTube channel about the relationship between creativity and science. Like me, she has also moved around – from Belgium to Miami, then to Santa Barbara, and now back to Texas to be near her parents. We share a rich and long friendship. She is one of the most creative human beings I know. She lives with her husband and their dog Lenny.

Over the years, I have given an essential bit of my soul to everyone I have ever loved and called a friend. Some have honoured it while others have thrown it away. With J., I feel that what we shared has grown into something that has become part of our beings.

All photos were taken with a Pentax K1000. The text and the photos in this essay have been approved by J.

Share this post: