no. 4
“I remember damage. Then escape. Then adrift in a stranger’s galaxy for a long, long time. But I’m safe now.”
from the after/hours archive: Don’t Tempt Me With a Daydream [February 12, 2022]
Q: WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU FELT TRULY LOST AND WHAT GOT YOU FOUND?
I must admit that I woke a little weepy today, a little reminiscent, and a little embarrassed. Like a dream, I know the story will come as mostly refractions and odd lines, but I cannot shake the sense that these are my words for the week.
I am a cartographer; I am a collector of hand-me-downs. Each week I collect odd bits and weave a sort of map from what I’ve seen, how I was told to go, and how I got to where I am now. I’m not sure where I learned this habit of spotting synchronicity, but my mother sends 3am emails with links to stories, and didn’t she always leave particular clippings by my bed?
So now I’m weeping in the coffee shop, and that’s not a metaphor. I want to write a bridge so you can meet me where the threads connect. Bear with me.
I remember damage.
New York had been grueling and expensive, and I had loved every minute until I didn’t. I had expected to be discovered, celebrated. I assumed I’d find my forever love somewhere in the bevy of international lovers I would accrue. I would, naturally, be top amongst my year and a shining star of our school. I’d easily find an agent and stage work within the first two years and a small, but recurring, guest role on an established series after that. I wouldn’t want to move to LA, but there might come a time, if the role was right.
The reality of mediocrity is a shock to the system; I was decent, but I wasn’t good.
& I didn’t want it. (I couldn’t articulate it then, and it always seems a lie to tell the story at all now, looking back as I am with age, but) I didn’t want that life. It was two years of challenge and, dammit, I got good, and I didn’t want to be a starving artist begging to play a corpse on Law & Order or waving a rose in the ensemble of some crappy upstate workshop. I didn’t want to be a body at all. I didn’t want to be a cog in that machine. I didn’t want to be a working actor, I wanted to be a successful actor, and acting school taught me the distance left to run*, and I got off the track, and that opened up a world of possibility I’d never considered.
* acting school taught me more than this, most of it unrelated to acting specifically.
Then escape.
It turns out I’m pretty smart.
Or, like, I enjoy using my mind. I like smartness and invite intellectualization. I want to know things. Not facts, really, although I am an excellent bar trivia partner. I want to understand. I want to know. Which is, honestly, adorable of me! and the next four years were equally cute. I risked trusting my ideas. I spoke up in class; not like the constant chattering I’d always provided as side-commentary to the classroom experience, but true dialogue and I dared myself into a semi-professional track record of excellence. I wanted to apply what I knew. I had done it: proved my merit, and now doors would open.
Cut to: jutting up and down the east coast for countless gigs between semesters, building a career from scratch, stacking up opportunities, and banging on doors.
I remember damage.
Bars! Boys! That time I met Bowie! Back to pavement stopping + clawing time for my work + squandering time on The industry was saturated, nepotism yada yada yada, but I moved to the city for culture and I can’t even afford it! It came down to this:
I am a creature whose soul cracks and goes dry begging to be seen. The tendrils of my roots wind up my throat, choking me, leaving me gasping and desperate for water. Left to dry, I will run.
Then escape.
I moved to New Orleans desperate for two things: I was gonna love my day and I was gonna be loved by a man. I had pictured him. Frankly, I had designed him, and I was determined to find him. That love would prove I was lov-a-ble and I would take impeccable care to keep it precious, no matter what. Because I was dried out, and I needed water, and I believed someone somewhere would want to water me.
Oh, love – the damage. The escape. Adrift.
When I stand with my toes facing forward, feet parallel, it’s as if my knees are bending toward one another. This awkward kiss a muscular training leftover from years of figure skating. Gently bending my weak knees and waiting for my tea, I give thanks to my feet, with compliments from my mother. I thank my thick calves, a fatherly contribution. And the scars on my right knee from the bike accent, and that time on Chartres, and in the parking lot a few months ago. I thank my loose, soft belly, house of my motherhood, child’s plaything. I thank that lump in my throat that makes me run; I hope I’ve inherited it. I bet I have.
Across my skin and path, I’ve grown all scarred and molded and I remember damage and then escape, over and over, and beyond this story or any other, for haven’t I simply been adrift in a stranger’s galaxy for a long, long time?
We really are just pliable, baked clay, bent and shaped by this place.
In the tin can of clippings I’ve squirreled away this week, I see a map. It’s only visible after you’ve walked the path. From articles and scenes and talks with friends, the map revealed itself for me again. Thousands of lines converging into a single spot and a thousand more lines running out from there…
You must understand that this isn’t really about a show or an awkward part of one woman’s history or even these few dangers, a handful in a lifetime of close calls.
If it did nothing else, Station Eleven confirmed we book-carrying ones are onto something. What we take with us and make our own in the best of the worst times – a tender consideration, and one so failingly addressed here. Mercifully, this parable nourishes beyond single bites. In it, our human persistence to make something, anything of these mightily-defended lives, nearby loved ones, through art, becomes both beacon and balm.
I truly hate to be so inspirational, but the thing is this:
There will be infinite loss and sometimes it will be you who gets lost, and sometimes it will be as petty as college-age you, and sometimes it will be as terrifying as abuse, and often it will be inexplicable, and on any given day the titles damage and escape could seem interchangeable here, adrift in a stranger’s galaxy this long, long time.
& some days the stories of my unlived lives loom heavy, and I feebly attempt to lay their disjointed pieces in place, hoping a little sense drips from the page before I get tired of explaining that which I am still unearthing. Other days, I’m keenly aware of the distance I’ve run in spite of myself, and for that artistic urge to tell how I came to honor The Thing most, best, first.
I am trying to tell you that art is the thing we do despite ourselves, and it has saved my life a time or two.