Director's Notes – Episode 112

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

In high school, my friends and I invented a game where we would sit in the town park and compete to identify each person that drove by. Whoever yelled the person's name first was awarded the point. We sat in the park for hours shouting things like “Hank Rayley!” “Tess Freeman!” “Bill and Sadie Daubenspeck!” There were only 2000 people in my town. It wasn't a difficult game. Between us, we knew almost everyone. Except for that one day. Car after car drove by and we just stared, blankly, no sparks of recognition. It started to become disconcerting. Who were these people? Where did they come from? They drove casually, on their way to the market, the bank, the library. They acted like they belonged there, like they were a part of the community, like they'd lived here their whole lives. All of them utter strangers. And did they recognize us? Or did they wonder, as they drove by, who are those kids sitting around the park like they own the place? Why haven't I ever seen them before?

A new version of this game happens now, twenty years later, whenever I go back to my hometown and run into someone in the grocery store. I'll say hi there, Sadie Daubenspeck! And she regards me with that same blank stare I once gave to a parade of unknown cars driving by the park. Sometimes a man I've never seen before greets me by name and asks about my family. Sometimes I can't recall the name, face, literal existence of someone I spent fourteen years going to school with in a class of merely 80 people. And when someone forgets me in the same manner, or perhaps remembers me as a different person altogether, my own reality starts to feel a little unstable.

Night Vale is similar to my hometown in many ways. As a guest writer, I enjoy spending time there and exploring the familiar and extraordinary within it. It's like going home but being a stranger at the same time, the way that Sigrid Borg is. To me, Sigrid is the purest form of self, beyond facts, memories, and biographical details. The idea that beneath all the hazy layers of distortion that are projected onto our identities throughout our lives, there is still a core Sigrid inside. A stable force in an unstable universe. The truth beyond the reality. At the very least, a metaphysical distraction that keeps you from wondering who all those strangers were, and if they're still around, and why Melanie from homeroom doesn't remember you.

- Brie Williams
August 15, 2017