IGOR, FL \\Places I Hardly Know\\

Written May 2017 - Asheville, North Carolina
I G O R,  F L is a place I thought I would hate.

     I did hate it.

     The crowd I was with could have been a part of that sensation. I was driving a load of British and Scottish camp counselors around Florida and I was grumpy, sick – and even more sick of driving. I had spent an afternoon at the Tampa Aquarium, staring mindlessly into tanks and sidestepping around many erratic children.

     “Igor is a MUST SEE,” my friend Kat said.

     I had torn myself away from Jellyfish and Stingrays for Igor. I had once again braved the onslaught of Tampa’s rush hour traffic for Igor. I was enduring the incessant whining of French pop music for Igor.

     And we finally got there, and . . .

     What a disappointment.

     The cobblestones did not make this town feel quaint and historic – no. It felt trapped, suffocated by the past. Some type of Eastern European music trailed out of tin speakers as we trudged down the sidewalks searching for the rest of our crew.

     Bars on windows added to the oppressive feel. Most buildings stood abandoned. Rusty fire escapes hung low over the sidewalks, making the streets feel like cages. What was most distressing, however, was the people of Igor. They were few and far between, as most of the people walking these streets were decidedly not natives – women in heels clinging to the arms of their dinner dates, teens running in packs with their polaroids, tiny groups of middle-aged women pointing at falling down storefronts and frowning – these were not the people of Igor. These were the tourists of Igor, which for a few brief minutes, was a club I was a part of.

     No – the people of Igor were distinct. I saw them sitting on the tops of fire escapes, shopping in the corner markets and the curb shops, working behind the counters at the dark and dingy bars. An elderly man limped by us on our promenade down main street – pushing a baby in a faded red stroller – a baby not more than two months old, wrapped in a large t-shirt and loosely bouncing back and forth in her grubby chariot, her head heavily dangling on the top of her tiny body, her eyes open and wandering.

     I felt sick to my stomach as the old man continued on past us. There were a million questions present in my mind, but I felt I had no right to ask them, and so I silenced my discomfort and followed my group up to the edge of a tattoo parlor, stinging my eyes with all its neon signs, where the rest of our friends were waiting for us in a cloud of excited conversation.

     “Let’s get our ears pierced like Kat has hers done!” One of the Irish girls yelled.

     Somehow, with the town decaying around us, and my spirits deteriorating even faster, I agreed. We all crammed into the parlor. I paid my bill before taking a seat in the chair; unsure of what to tip for services I had not yet received.

     The needle was large and dull and I watched in wide-eyed horror in the mirror as it dove into my sunburnt earlobe and the blood slowly pooled. I thought my small silver hoop was beautiful, but the hole got infected and ached for weeks and weeks, burning hotly through the rest of our Florida nights, keeping me awake and tossing irritably between the dull bodies of my sleeping companions.

     Eventually, I took it out, but still to this day there is a miserable little lump in my ear, and when I feel my broken cartilage I think, “Igor! What a terrible place.”

A Response to (There Was Love.)

Two years ago - almost to the day - I posted this poem.

He was punching holes in walls and I was making 911 calls.

(We were holding hands and making jokes and cooking casseroles.)

     He swerved off the road screaming "I oughtta kill us both!"

(He massaged my aching neck when we got home.)

     There was cursing.

           (There was loving.)

                  There was abusing. 

                       

                       (There was loving.)

   

                             There was hurting.

                                  (THERE WAS LOVING.)

          There was choosing.

               (And I know he chose wrong.)

          But it's so confusing.

               (My enemy held me all night long.)

     

          And I'm still losing...

              (I'm still fighting a war that can never be won.)

               But I still love love.

               And love is never done.

Reading those words today sends a gross wave of nausea over me.

And also, relief.

Because HOLY CRAP have my feelings changed!

I don't want to invalidate all the heartbreak that 2016 Sarah was feeling in the immediate aftermath of abuse. I don't want to disagree with the fact that she DID feel love for this person who wrecked her life. But, having two years time and the Blue Ridge mountains in between he and I, my approach to the past has changed.

I want to throw up anytime I see the word "love" remotely close to his name.

That was not love.

No matter how many tender moments existed within the chaos - that was not love. He did not love me.

Did I love him?

The answer to that question no longer matters at all. Because I no longer have room in my heart and mind for that question to nestle, like a little bug chewing on a leaf.

These Nights and the Snow and the Books

This time last year, I was in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. 

It was already beginning to snow - and frequently - with white blankets of storms swirling in one day and blown away by sunshine the next. It was a strange and tender time in my heart. I went there to dwell on my life and to write, but I hardly did. I never really spoke while I was there - mostly I just listened. 

There is a certain kind of meditation that happened for me out there. It was not intentional, by any means. It was, in a way, forced on me by factors beyond my control. 

One, there was no cell service. That alone forced me to forget about scrolling through Instagram as a mindless hobby. I carried books around. I read so many books. And while I wasn't really writing, at least I was reading. I was soaking up the beauty of my beloved craft, even if I wasn't actively creating it. Reading books might not seem so different from reading off a screen, but it really is. Somehow, it's quieter. I go deeper into myself, while at the same time, farther away than I ever get when I'm scrolling on social media. Reading took me beyond myself, beyond the rickety twin bed and the screeching porch rocker, beyond the Rockies. 

This was a form of meditation for me, losing myself (the shallow, contrived, play-acting part of myself) to find that part of myself that does not babble mindlessly but that listens, and watches. 

There is a me within me. She is my core, and she is nothing that you see. She is not funny, or tragic, or dramatic, or angry, or sorrowful, or idealistic, or anything, really. She is beyond all that, further back than all that. She is quiet. She is eyes and ears who aren't looking for anything in particular. She is a pure drop of me-ness in a sea of world-ness.

And she is who I became when I read my books.

And what else brought me down to her? The snow brought me to her. I liked watching it fall like dust blown off a windowsill down on onto my life. My life was suddenly fully contained between Long's Peak and Big Thompson Canyon. There was little else. There was no downtown Atlanta, there was no Veritas Christian Academy, there was no ex-boyfriend, no childhood home, no bible studies with girls I "kinda sorta know" and no one that knew me. 

That was all gone, and with it, gone was the Sarah that was concocted to survive in those worlds.

I was now somehow different.

That's not to say the same petty worries and lingering character flaws didn't follow me, because they did. But, thrust out of my normal environment into this strange and beautiful world, I had less time to exercise them.

It was a tender time, a raw time, and I was busy doing not much of anything. I spent nights either alone, in my small and quiet twin bed beside a drafty window, or with Jon. His cabin was sweet and small and in need of a woman. We spent many nights together, on our sides, gazing up at the window to our right, outside of which some sort of moon was always hanging. I liked to listen to his voice as I was falling asleep. 

I was unable to write. And most of the time, I was unable to speak. But lying here, in the safe blanket of darkness, I could begin to whisper fragments of thoughts to him. It was different - he didn't try and make sense of anything I said. Some boys before had tried to "understand" me, and I never felt like he tried to. He just held my hand, squeezed it maybe, and said very little.

This brought me down to myself, to my core of "me-ness". These nights, and the snow, and the books, and many other things which I long to write about as well. 

sk

Where Has Sarah Kane Been?

My blog currently consists of 141 published posts and 7 drafts.

Lately, it has been very hard for me to write. I sit down and open my keyboard, but something inside me balls up tightly. I have a hundred thousand words welling up within me, yet I can't express any of them well.

What has changed from two years ago, when words flooded out of me so easily that I actually had to work HARD not to spill them all out?

It's tricky for me to say. Perhaps it's the grind of being a senior in college, of writing paper after paper, essay after essay, speech after speech.

Or maybe it's the monotony of working in customer service, in a job that requires me to keep a smile plastered on my face and a script flowing from my cheerful lips at all times.

Or maybe it's feeling an immense amount of pressure from the world around me to be perfect. I've already shared so many of my failings - so many epic flops of my life. Failed relationships, failed jobs, failed friendships, failed educational pursuits, and the list goes on.

Maybe I'm sick of faking it at work and school, but maybe I'm also sick of being brutally honest here, in my writing. My life is so messy and imperfect as it stands now, but I feel no need at the moment to invite anyone into the complexity. It's also, on a daily basis, very mundane. I get up, I go to school, I go to work, I see my boyfriend, I go home. My days are riddled with the same daily anxieties and to-do lists, the same simple pleasures (ice cream, Netflix, going on walks) and none of it really seems WORTH writing about.

Then of course, as I type this, I recall that writing isn't so much about what you have to say as it is how you say it. I could write about the ice cream cone I ate for seven long and winding paragraphs, and if I'm really getting into the ART of writing, it'll be good. Or at least... I'll feel good, after writing it.

So, why did I say all this?

Really, this was a horrendously forced post. I sat myself down and said, "right, I don't care what you say, or whether you blatantly lie, but you MUST write something."

And, so I did.

I will make a valiant effort to overcome the artists' blues I've been so deeply in the throes of, because even now, as my finger gets close to the "publish" button, I feel that little twinge of gratification, and it makes me long for the days when I typed up a daily fury.

sk

two poems

//Sad Girl//

Sad girl does a good job cleaning up
Shutting away her sorrow in her cabinet brain.
It is collecting slowly behind her eyes
Dripping back and forth between her ears everytime she tilts her head
to listen to your stupid jokes
while you are mesmerized by the dangling bluebird earrings
that try to take flight when she laughs

she laughs
and her shoulders curve up
Her body is a bowl holding sadness that she struggles not to spill
onto everything she needs.
all her papers and books
the ink drawings from a man she works with
the sad poems that she eats for dinner
and the long list of things that broke her heart.

//Train//

I would like to hop the train that runs through biltmore village
And leave behind all the beauty gurus yammering at me through a screen
And the fifteen minute workout for the perfect butt
And the aisles upon aisles of the ideal vitamin
And the shelves of books on how to stop being sad
And I would like to sleep on a hard metal engine room floor, 

next to some burlap bags of carcinogens
and dirty ashy puddles of rain water

that offer nothing to me whatsoever.

The Tragic Teens

[This is a story and he is in it.

But it is not about him.

I have spent two years mourning the loss of almost a decade - a decade of stories that I feel I must bury along with him. I have said before I struggle to detach myself from him, to unravel the twisted thorny vines that he rooted in my tender, developing heart, to edit out his dark narration of these years of my life.

I have thought about throwing all that sweet soil of ages 12-20 out with the weeds.

But I refuse.

He is in it, but it is not about him.]

I. 

I do not recall what kind of underwear I wore when I was twelve.

But I do remember with great detail my choices when it came to my socks. 

They were plaid, and they had to be knee-high. I owned three pairs in different colors and I cherished them. 

Knee-high plaid socks were a no-brainer. I was a private school girl now, after all these years. But, I didn't like my knees and thighs. They looked strange and bulky, poking up out of all that argyle. My solution was tights, worn strategically under the socks, to give my legs what I perceived to be a flattering "airbrushed" effect. Then, it was shoes. Ballet flats, of course - something cheap, and very bad for arch support. Unless it was PE day, and then it was sneakers, yes, right on top of all that plaid and those tights which were all on top of me: Sarah Kane, age 12.

I never doubted that these fashion choices were right for me. Were they ideal? Of course not. In an ideal world, I wouldn't be wearing a starchy pleated skirt and a white polo shirt - and I certainly would have had better legs - but, even at 12, I knew what I had to do, and that was to focus on my strengths. 

I knew my strengths had something to do with the fact that I was half British, could play the piano, and was very good at reading. And, newsflash, none of those things had anything to do with the way I looked. So my plan was to distract from my mediocre appearance by covering up as much of it as I could - and hence, we find 12-year-old Sarah layered in tights and socks, no matter the time, and no matter the place.

There exists somewhere on the internet a relic from the past. A photo of me and a few of my classmates loitering outside a gas station in Washington D.C. on our eighth-grade trip. It was sweltering, we were miserable. The baby hairs at the nape of my neck were curling in protest, my palms were damp, a sunburn was creeping across my forehead, and my socks were still over my tights. 

"Why do you do that?" One of the girls in my class asked, snarling her upper lip and looking down at my legs. 

"Do what?" I asked.

"Wear your socks over your tights." 

"I don't know what you mean." I was completely thrown. Was this girl crazy? What kind of a question is that? 

"It's just, normally, you pick one or the other, it's just... oh, never mind." She gave up, wandering away to purchase a soda. 

II.

I am grateful not so many people bothered me about these things. The comments I do remember still sting today. When I suggested in my video production class that we do makeup on the boys for one of our projects, one of them raised his hand and said mockingly, "yeah, well too bad YOU'RE the one who really needs it!"

"Adam, that's enough," our teacher said.

He silenced my foes, he stood up for me. He was a good teacher.

A few weeks later when I came into class wearing a little bit of eyeliner and mascara, our teacher peered at me curiously. "When did you start wearing makeup?" He asked.

"Today," I blurted out. Crap. I had meant to say "oh, I always have" or something less monumental than the truth. 

"Well, you don't need it," our teacher said, "but you look very pretty."

My cheeks felt hot. I had never been told that in that exact way, that exact tone. There was no shock, no surprise, it almost as if it was a fact and not just something to say. Fact: I look very pretty.

I rose from my seat and walked to the door where I paused. I knew that socially it was required of me to provide some kind of reply. I turned to my teacher. "Yes, it was very kind of my parents to let me start wearing makeup. They knew I wanted to look pretty for my last few weeks of life." 

"Are you dying?" He asked, a brow raised.

I shrugged. "Only of boredom. Boredom, boredom, boredom." With these words and a flush still warming my cheeks, I dramatically exited the classroom. End scene. 

III.

Drama class was shockingly boring. I had expected something much more stimulating than what I remember taking place.

What I remember is being handed sheet after sheet of white printer paper and being asked to draw set designs for this scene and that scene. But we couldn't even draw the sets so they looked pretty. If it was a chair, it was just a circle with the word chair inside it. If there were steps, we just put lines with the word steps on them. No shading whatsoever! It was a disgrace, really.

But one day, when I was done early, I crept over to the grand piano that sat solemnly in the corner. I never, ever recall that piano being played by anyone other than me. 

I gingerly touched the keys, hoping that the chatter of eighth graders would swallow any noise I was making. I played. As I let myself wash over the keys I felt the excitement of creativity buzzing in my veins. I was making it up as I went along. It was a thrill.

And then, my drama teacher was behind me, her swaying bosom right beside my ear. "Oh, that is delightful!" she swooned. "What are you playing?"

"I wrote it," I said. 

"Oh!" She squealed. "Incredible! You must write for the senior play!"

She needed some lines from The Tempest set to music. Eight or nine lines, to be exact. I worked on it for days. I wasn't used to my creativity being commissioned. It was painstaking to carve out a melody. The problem was that the lyrics were so short, it was almost impossible to create a complete piece of music with them. But I did it. And I played it for Mrs. Stone and she clapped her hands with glee and shoved a cheerful senior in my direction. "Teach her," she said. 

I wish I could say I remember this senior's name, but I do not. I remember she was so tiny, tiny as a bird, I thought. And her hair was dark and she had bangs that swooshed across her beautifully crystal clear forehead that housed crystal clear eyeballs which were surrounded by thick, overwhelming shards of mascara. She was perfect.

I taught her the song, and I gave the pianist for the play my notes for what to play. 

The day came to go see The Tempest. I considered this not only my virgin expedition but my magnum opus, my pièce de résistance. My supportive parents peered over my shoulder at the program. I hope my name was in there. At this current moment, I can't be sure it was, although I do feel a distant memory of myself looking at my name in striking black ink against the cheap yellow paper and thinking, "that little name right there, is me?"

The time finally came, it was my song. I smiled as the pianist began. And then, the senior opened her mouth, and out came a vile, off-key rendition of my masterpiece. She was squawking out the iambic pentameter like a sick, sad parrot and I wanted to sink into my chair and die, die die!

"She was just nervous," A well-meaning grown-up soothed me later. But I had lost faith in seniors, utterly and absolutely. However, I now had something absolutely despicable to ruminate on during drama class for the rest of the semester. I watched my drama teacher pace the room while I scratched away at printer paper. Chair, chair. Table. Curtain. I was relishing my first real taste of humiliation, of failure. 

I was a true artist now. And even better, a martyr. I was suffering, and I was very, very good at that. I added it to my list of strengths. 

-Half British, can play the piano, good at reading and writing, with an aptitude for suffering. 

[to be cont.]

I wrote a book about you.

"Are you going to write about me?" He asked. We stared up through the wavering pines to the sequin sky. The tender spring grass sank into the damp earth under our shoes. His eyes twinkled mischievously. He was a strange creature, one I was quickly trying to understand as there was not much time left. I hardly knew him, and in a few days, I would leave for Colorado. This evening marked the end of our brief time in the same galaxy. We would know each other for less than one full revolution around the sun before I would pack my bags and turn to face the west for seven months.

"Maybe," I said teasingly. "Are you scared?"

"No," he laughed, nudging a tall dandelion with his foot and watching it spring back up resiliently. "Well, yes. A little. What's it all look like from inside this mind?" He tapped my temple with his calloused finger. "I wish I could know what I'm like."

The conversation rings familiar.

"Am I in it?" someone would say, and point with a wagging finger. Point to what?

To my manuscript.

MY BOOK. That strange little novel that came to be for no reason other than a strange urge inside me to get. it. out. (More to come on this later. Maybe.)

I was shaken from my writing reverie by the words "am I in it?" constantly. It came from people I sat next to in class who saw me clacking away at my keyboard (obviously I was not practicing accounting with such distinct focus and passion). Friends I hadn't really been friends with for years, if ever. Old boyfriends, squirming anxiously and wondering if I revealed anything unsavory, sending messages because they too had seen the stirring of the beast. Family members peered over my shoulder, anxious to catch something, anything, of themselves in my pages. They all wanted to know.

Am I in it?

I hadn't pondered this much until lately. But I have pondered it. And my thoughts are as follows:

I have a very dangerous weapon beneath my fingers at this very second. 

I think of those boyfriends squirming, those friends dying of curiosity. Why do they care?

They care because of a few reasons. One, people are quite self-centered as I'm sure you've noticed. Two, people care what other people think. Three, nobody wants to be outed.

No boyfriend wants to open a book about themselves to read "he was handsome enough, but a terrible kisser." No mother wants to turn the page and see her shortcomings in weeping black ink. No friend wants to finish a chapter in which they were a villain, or perhaps worse - in which they didn't exist at all.

And so, as I begin my next book (well, I think I've begun it?) I keep in mind the fact that by writing, I am, in a way, interacting with my world (past present and future). It isn't so much about control, as, well... let's be real. It's about control. It's a little bit about revenge, a little bit about cathartic release, a little bit about expressing the immense amounts of love and awe I hold for people, and a little bit about finally, for once in my life, getting things my own way.

So, should you be scared?

Probably. I spend my day collecting lovers, monsters, sidekicks, mentors, and muses all to throw into blank pages.

No one is safe.