I Asked Craiglist If I Was There

SARAH NEILSON: Hi, Elissa.

ELISSA WASHUTA: Hi, Sarah. 

NEILSON: How are you doing? 

WASHUTA: I'm all right. How are you?

NEILSON: I'm doing pretty well. I'm excited to talk to you again about White Magic, one of my favorite books.

WASHUTA: Thank you. That means so much to me. 

NEILSON: In White Magic, you write about seeing an older version of yourself in the Seattle neighborhood where you lived at the time. Can you tell me about her? 

[Deep, mellow music plays in the background]

WASHUTA: When I try to think about how White Magic came about, how I started writing this book, that's the point when the book started to become the book. In November 2012, I was living in Seattle, in the Madison Park neighborhood. I was taking the bus home from work. I was hung over. I was in a very, very dark place at that time. [Laughs] For a long time.  

Really, I was slumped. I was just in my seat looking out the window at Lake Washington, [a] few stops away from home, and this woman started getting off the bus, and I looked up startled, and she was startled. I could tell because she was me. It wasn't just that she looked a lot like me. I felt very strongly that this was me in the future. She had the same widow's peak that I have, the same dark brown hair, the same shape of black framed glasses that I've had since I was 12. She was wearing this wool cape and a surgical mask. She just stopped and paused before getting off of the bus and then got off.

I thought about going after her or, I don't know, trying to talk to her. What about, I don't know, but I was just really— disturbed isn't the right word. I felt that something had happened. So, after that I made a Craigslist ad, and I think the subject line was, “you were me from the future wearing a medical mask.”

[Music fades out]

I asked Craigslist whether I was there. 

NEILSON: You were wearing a medical mask though, and that feels very prophetic. 

WASHUTA: I didn't know what to make of it at the time, but it seemed like the kind of thing I would want to put in a book, I guess. [laugh-talks] And I was really struggling with writing at that time.

I was trying to write a novel. I was trying to write a memoir about food. I was just trying to do something that would be easy to sell. Nothing is easy to sell [laughs] and nothing is easy to write. So, then I just wrote about this woman that I saw. And I saw her again two more times, no mask, but I saw her again, once on the bus and once in the grocery store. I just wondered, especially with that first time, “what does it mean? This person is wearing this medical mask.” 

It was late spring or early summer of 2020. Of course, it’s not like I had forgotten about this woman. I had been, you know, revising the book and getting it to its final draft, her final form. I was going to the grocery store and wearing my medical mask, wearing a wool cape with my hair pulled back into a bun just like hers with my same style of glasses I continue to wear. I got out of the car in the grocery store parking lot and saw myself in my car window and thought, well, there I am. I'm the future now. I thought maybe that meant I was going to die, but that didn't happen. Nothing happened. I mean, nothing has happened for months and months [laughs]. 

NEILSON: Yes, I suppose that’s true. Although, you could also say everything has happened. 

WASHUTA: That’s true. Everything has happened. Yeah, but it feels like everything is the same every day.

[A soft, droning bass guitar is heard over the sounds of rain]

NEILSON: I’m interested in the way you wrote about Seattle as a “mirage,” which really resonates with me as someone who lives in Seattle. But I’m wondering about what felt mirage-like to you and how that connects to seeing this woman who was you. Did she feel like a mirage to you or did she feel more like a real thing in this mirage of a city? 

WASHUTA: She felt real because I was inside the mirage, and in the world of the mirage, and the world of Seattle, and all that happened to there, she was real. Seattle always sort of felt like a mirage to me because it was a place that felt mythical when I was a kid. I was a huge Nirvana fan, which I’ve written about in my first book, and a lot of my family lives in or near Seattle, so I had gone out there a lot during my childhood and teen years. 

I just loved it. I just always wanted to be there, and it felt completely unreal. The mountains and the evergreens felt completely impossible to me. It felt like they were defying the natural laws of the East Coast [laughs]. I think, in part, because of those things, but, in part, because I felt for so long like I was just waiting for my life to begin and I wasn’t fully in it yet. 

[Music and rain fade out]

NEILSON: What kind of meaning do you make out of seeing this woman in this period of your life and the context in which that happened?

[soft, atmospheric music, befitting of meditation, fades in]

WASHUTA: You know, during that time I was… I know I was deeply unhappy. I don’t know exactly what was going on around then because there’s a few years that just feel like a drunken blur. I was just drinking a lot. I think I felt like… I couldn’t imagine a future really.

I didn’t have a best-selling first book. I didn’t have a breakout debut. I had a book and then I didn’t know what to do. I felt really directionless. I was just trying to figure out what I needed to do to make my life begin and was just so hopeless, and so in despair. I didn’t know how I could ever get a full-time job.

I didn’t know how I could write another book. I didn’t know whether any publisher was ever going to want another book from me. And I didn’t know whether I should bother trying to be a writer. So, I just drank, and I drank, and I drank, and I think seeing the woman, I don’t know what it meant. I don’t know what it was, this visitation, but I know that it was a piece of the future that was unlike anything else that was in my life at that time. 

[Music becomes very pensive and dream-like]

I had had a friend who suggested that maybe this was a sloughed off version of myself that I was never going to become. I thought, maybe, she was the real future me reaching back into the past, into her past. 

I would like to know from her whether she has any information about the lives that I didn’t lead. Maybe I don’t want to know that. Maybe that’s bad, but [laughs] I'm very curious.

[Music fades out]

NEILSON: Do you think the word “apparition” is an accurate description of what you saw?

WASHUTA: I think that she was really there. I don’t think it was an immaterial vision in any way, but, having been raised Catholic, I have a lot of associations with the term “apparition” and I think of a saintly person.

I am a much better person than I was then, and I’m not saintly, but I know that I am trying my best to be useful to other people. Maybe what was important or significant about that event was looking into a future where I am really starting to see the physical toll, the health impact of doing so much and trying to be so much for other people. 

Looking into my car window and seeing the woman from the future is a time when I was starting to get really sick with my chronic illness and realizing how bad stress is in my life and how much I’m taking on. Maybe this woman from the future was just there to let me know to pay attention to my life as it’s happening. 

My body’s decaying. That sounds really dramatic, but [laugh-talks] all of our bodies are decaying. Maybe was not there in my past to tell me anything about my past. Maybe she was there for me now to think about who I am now and what is remarkable about, you know, June 2020, or whatever it was that I saw. 

NEILSON: Maybe there’s some magic in that too. 

[ominous, atmospheric music, as from a mystery drama, fades in]

WASHUTA: I think so. It feels like everything’s no longer magical. I hardly believe in magic now that I’ve written a 400 page book about learning to believe in magic. I’ll have to put an addendum on the end that magic’s not real, but it was one of the more magical moments, magical in that actual magic sense of something totally unexplainable. 

Everything has felt very explainable for a long time now, for a whole year. You know, except for human motivations and the existence of evil, that’s the only thing that’s felt really, truly incomprehensible over the last year. Nothing has felt magical. Nothing has felt unexplainable in that sense that it causes wonder in me.

[Music continues to play until fade-out]