There is something to be said for tragedy. It brings out my inner poet. It forces me to live in the present. It puts things in perspective. It gives me a new expression, a new outlook, one of wide-eyed, focused and reckless determination. Every emotion stings with a new gravity, coincidence becomes an omen. Secrecy and denial become an art. Life beings and ends simultaneously.
Sometimes I hardly even notice, until the voice jinxes the whole thing and remarks how I haven’t thought about it (dwelling on it forthwith). Tearing me up; I can feel the rollercoaster inside me. Beautiful reassuring facts, horrid terrifying facts, comforting lovely emotions, destructive tortuous emotions; but I never cried about it.
I told someone, in passing. Like it was nothing. Like it had happened before to me or someone I knew. Like I was mostly sure and didn’t really mind. She winced and continued with her trail of thought.
They can’t fucking touch me now. They have no idea what is going on in my life. Somehow there is power in that. A new kind of drive.
All the frustrated actions; all the pride and cowardice drain out of your body and into this one event, and all of a sudden you can achieve anything; but it wouldn’t matter to you anymore.
I know she would understand. She would understand what it feels like to be dead already. But I still haven’t written the letter.
Nothing matters anymore. I had so many things planned to write on the blog. I wanted to share my formal with you. ‘A Not So Formal Occasion’. Except I never much wrote about it to begin with. There was so much material there, teenage clichés, preparation, shopping, expectations. I thought it was going to be a pathetic watered-down waste of time prom, but it was one of the best nights out I’ve had in a long time. But it was an account just like all else, a pointless everyday occurrence. Maybe, in different circumstances, I would have delighted in the storytelling of it all. But I got complacent and time dragged into this week, and suddenly it just wasn’t significant anymore.
I wanted to tell you how I fought with my mother over university life. How my whole housing arrangement changed, left up in the air; all prospects of university vaporised, stuck between a rock and hard place – ‘Disaster On The Home Front’. But after a time that all came to a grinding compromise and sorted itself out too.
If you’re lucky you do something good with your time. You realise this paradox and you use it. You take affirmative action. You pray you will be there on the other side to see it through. You pray that you haven’t shut the gate after the horse has bolted.
There should have been an intermediate blog for this. If I was keeping up and not just struggling to survive through the shell shock, there might have been. I heard a song; which I hadn’t heard for ages. It had a great strong distinctive intro, and sitting on the bus dwelling on my predicament, I thought it might be something to cheer me up. I enjoyed the song and desperately tried to hold onto the lyrics. When I at last Googled them and read them I realised it was quite a sad song and I was very moved. “No Rain” by Blind Melon. I think it is a great soundtrack to this past week.
I did something today that came straight out of a dream; straight out of my worst case scenario phantasms, something that you lie awake at night knowing, hoping you will never have to do. Something you walk yourself through a million times and still mentally look away each time at the same moment. It’s nothing; it’s everything. Once you being you can’t turn back; no, I can back out right up until the last moment. A fatal combination of trivial things. I’ll flip a coin. I’ll do it. Everything is a bad choice, it’s already done so nothing matters. They’re all good choices, I’ll make one and come out on top. But if it’s heads, you mark my words I still have the option of not doing a thing…
And you stand there, in that moment, living your own movie. Still, somehow, agonisingly moving forward. Best laid plans. Accomplishing something only to find that there is no victory in defeat. I blew a kiss and thanked the city for its anonymity.
Then only half the battle is won.
One reassurance isn’t enough, you want it to hit you hard in the face. You need to be hit, and hard, because it takes so long to wake up from the dream when it’s over. Then suddenly all the sleepless nights hit you all at once, and all you want to do is collapse into a heap and never wake up. But you do.
And it’s over.
It’s over.
I have never been so happy to be alive in my whole life. I hugged myself. I love me. I am amazing. I am here. I never want to let go. I swear to god I will never feel bad about anything ever again. Not my body, or the weather, or a cold, or arguments, or idiots bullying me, or my goddamn shitty future. Take a moment to appreciate that in your own life. I couldn’t recommend that highly enough. Look at each catastrophe as a possible opportunity to come out the other side and grab life with both hands.
I am alive.
☆
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Hi Anika,
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how I felt having you not blogging these past four weeks. Anticipation. Wonder. Anxiety, maybe, at the length of the hiatus. A bit a guilt, surely, for not having time to complete my comments. And if I am truely honest to myself, probably a glimpse of relief, as caught up in the writing of my thesis I was that I did not feel up to accomplishing the task of being a good commentator and, mostly, a loyal friend. But now I am relieved of this thesis, and relieved, though not much, of this anxiety of not hearing from you, and I see what I did not during this time of awaiting. How this is all crucial, both for me and for you.
My eyes scanned rapidly the first post, and I was overwhelmed, because, though i did not see yet the pattern of what was going on, I sensed the words, and it ringed through many concerns I had, and I felt you being so alive in every word it already struck me. I'll explain maybe how it touched me, at first, not knowing, not understanding, in the end, because you're more important.
I don't know how to start commenting. Those three last entries were probably the best I've ever read -but literary talent or intensity seems trivial in such instances you describe. The contrast is striking, and it feels odd commenting on the former after hearing the latter. But I don't want to deny this first entry its honour. I'll therefore be chronological.
After scanning the entries, I knew I had to hear it. Not read it. It was the proper way. My eyes were blocking out the words, because I knew I had to hear you.
I listened chronologically. This also seemed very important to me. I'll try to retrieve my original reaction to the Toothbrush Experience, unaffected by the experience of the next posts :
I laughed out loud, in the middle of the subway, with people looking at me doubling down in hilarity. Again, the inherent ubiquity to the podcast.
Your tone was much more into it than most podcasts before, restrained just enough to be the right amount of sarcasm, but boiling inside. You were attacking it all with skill and devouring hunger and it was deeply enjoyable.
I particularly liked your performance of Miley Cirus song in recitation. That's what started me cracking. Than it just when on. I severely snorted and hiccuped laughing on you shouting "grow some balls". Then again on "i just nearly impaled myself on the discount bra stand. And then again on the sickly swet tones that made you want to vomit on her.
Miss Bitch seriously reminded me of the stereotypical villain in teenage soaps, a personal nemesis so dearly focused on making your life miserable they forget to lead their own. It sort of put a real face of characters like Draco Malfoy (I'm rereading Harry Potter, blessed be my inanity at literature). And it fitted with you being the very real character of you own soap opera, delightfully dubbing it with witty humour in a, again, "my so-called life" way.
Let's say this was later hit right in the face with reality by the next posts.
But let's get back to this first radiant one. The Toothbrush experience. I loved you for saying that. Once again your performance of the advertisement was hilarious. Right timing, right inflexion. Perfect. And your analysis, brilliant. It's not a toothbrush, it's an experience. I'd bless you for, after all those year of industrial brainwashing that we all suffer, that you could still tell apart from real life experience, as you said, traveling or having a child. I know some who are still pretty confused on that, but pointing it out, once again, is an immense relief and clean out for my sanity. I suggest you read No Logo by Naomi Klein. I love how she precisely describe how brands are trying to become experience and appropriate free cocnepts such as courage (for nice) or cosiness (for starbucks), when they're just in fact selling fucking damn shoes or coffee.
I was in the mecanic stairs out of the subway when the second post started. First, the change of tone. It was as if everything had gone more silent. You said the date with this drained, white voice. The word "crutch" sounded like a piece of paper tearing. I emerged into daylight and the crowd but I felt yet very alone, only person listening to this small, fragile voice, carried from many miles and weeks away. There was something gone in this voice, something that was always here even when trying to talk about sadder things, calming down a bit the excitement of sharing it all, but still having it living breathless between every word. Here it wasn't. every end of a word was a question to keep on talking. An understanding that this wasn't really important, though crucial.
Even just your voice knotted something hard around my throat.
And then the words. How ironic is it that it is maybe one of the most beautiful thing you've ever written ? and in a close call of what I've ever read ? When you probably don't really care about it anymore. I don't know if it made me felt as you felt. Or as a tenth, or a hundredth of how you felt. I can't pretend I even know how you must have been feeling then or rigth now. But I entered a mood i had never known, or only just had glimpses of, through my own experiences, in many domain, of catastrophes, losses, and general inner chaos of received ideas. And when it touched feeling i think i've ever felt somehow, you said it in such a brilliant, diamond-hard, crystal-clear way that it made me feel like opening my eyes to a cliff over a sea, and suddenly seeing this mass of opacity from high above, instead of the thousand of drops I would have seen before. schrodinger's cat, drama queen privilege, statistics, even just the way you said it, with every gem in every word, this all rang daunting and beautiful, in a way that was maybe never called for. This is maybe irrelevant, due the situation, but one of the many feeling I had, beyond the ones described later, is being overwhelmed under such intense, skilfully laced tragic beauty.
Then the content. I walked across the city square, and the light was blinding and the crowd rustling but my earplugs created a room in which your voice was teloling this all to the unknown, not me this time but an anonymous listener, and this was as tragic as receiving a message in a bottle. I heard you saying to the unknown the solitude of being confronted to tragedy, the solitude of your own situation, and I felt my heart break, I felt like arriving too late after a lost battle, felt like i had no way, no way to reach and touch the owner of this voice, for the distance and the time and the anonymity barring the way. I felt my eyes tingling badly and my footsteps slowed down, as I had to meet a friend, for this wintery parenthesis, inserted between lines of shiny summer and busy passer-bys, not to stop.
At night, as I got back home, I listened again to the second entry, and then to the third. It was almost religious, sitting and pressing play, entering in the focused composure of a prayer, listening to the voice now resonating inside my head. If I was touched and amazed by the previous one, this was ever more. Here and there there was truth, tragic, beautiful, sculpted, fragile truth. Thin and uncatchable like the shadow of a butterfly wing. I'm not sure I can really comment or respond or detail all of this. I remember listening to it, maybe for a second or third time, waiting for a bus that seemed never to come, between the gray walls of the bus station, contemplating the light playing on the large window panes, and the pigeons running amock on the large strands of bitumen, and hearing the words collide with reality, bringing up the concrete of the walls, the people waiting, memories, emotions, and your voice, your own experience together in something apparently coherent. something bold and terrible, and moving. I can't find the right word in english. "Bouleversant". It means both "very moving" and "that has the action of turning things over, to change them". Not quite "upsetting", but close.
I can't imagine what you had to do. the progression here is fantastic "Everything is a bad choice, it’s already done so nothing matters. They’re all good choices, I’ll make one and come out on top. But if it’s heads, you mark my words I still have the option of not doing a thing…". Just the way you could think that, in that moment, is brilliant. precious. "Accomplishing something only to find that there is no victory in defeat. I blew a kiss and thanked the city for its anonymity." Rang again in the dusty streaks of light dancing in the station.
Your last paragraph made me actually cry, after all the tingling induced before. Hearing your voice shake after "i never want to let go" and " i swear i'll never feel bad about anything ever again". It was crushing. It was like so called reality tv will never get to be, and what movies or books can't convey. Real, and yours, yet as beautiful and wonderfully elusive as a piece of art. I wanted to hug you over this invisible wall that is internet for all the amazing strength and the fragility that was in your voice and words then. I wanted to kiss you for the beautiful life lesson you offered us. I wanted to do something, for it to be materialized, in any way, to give back, to talk and call up to this disembodied voice floating like an ominous ghost in the room between my two ears.
so here I am, typing though it's now 2 AM and I told myself i would go on healthier sleeping habits, though i'm in "holidays". I want you to know my email address, still hidden some place in the old comments back when you didn't know where to put your podcast, is also for you to write when I'm not around, to talk when comments are long gone. That, if you are still keen on anonymity yet more shared proximity, i have skype and you can use it with the protection of your screen name and the absence of webcam. I want to hear from you soon, even though i am deeply happy for this optimistic ending.
As an ultimate question, do you still want me to comment on the old posts i missed back then ? if it's of interest for you, i will. I have a bit of time for myself now.
I'll spare you the personal interpretation of the first reading for now, tiredness is getting the best of me.
Hugs and love
Amelie