i got soul, still

I’m not gonna put you guys behind a pay wall this time.

Current Muses: the Noah Kahan album came out. And I reread “on earth we’re briefly gorgeous” by ocean vuong.

This album ripped me open. More than any of his other music ever has, which is saying something. It is no coincidence that this year is the first time that I was ever able to get Noah Kahan tickets. It is no coincidence that when I was still dating men I hated, I ignored my date to sing “Dial Drunk,” in the bar, loud as fuck, word for word, post-seven beers on his tab, close to tears because in a song I could finally feel something. And it is no coincidence that now, sober, I can listen to “Dashboard,” and know that running away from yourself is something that you must unlearn, or you will become cruel.

My friend A and I recently experienced a deeply serendipitous mutual creative ascension (a text message I sent her is now being featured in the beginning of her book, which is SO so chic) —--- and in the process of talking to her, I’ve been in conversation with my writing practice in a whole new way. A is also a multi-media artist, something I’ve been meaning to get back in touch with on my own terms.

So, life has looked like —- redefining what I think about when I think of being in love, cooking honey butter brown sugar squash in my baby pink heart shaped pot, scream crying to The Great Divide and Dashboard in my ashy Volkswagen as I drive so fast down winding Pennsylvanian roads that the green everywhere blurs together. I think about all of the things that my body is a container for, think about how Ocean Vuong wrote that “we touch each other to remember that we’re still here,” think about all of those times that I begged my body for mercy because I was scared, and then my body begged for mercy from me back because I was destroying it. And then Ava’s giving me psychic readings at the coffee shop, talking love and intensity and green eyes, I’m eating tofu scramble (whatever that is) and Dani’s driving us through the rain, there’s a tattoo needle penetrating our skin, and the artist is sober and gay and I am coming home to myself, repeatedly. There are so many ways that I’ve learned to forgive myself, but this month, I’m april forever, I’m awake and I’m here and I’m allowed to want everything in the world. I am allowed to want the job that I’ve dreamed of, to build creative community for the young people who repeatedly show me how much they need it. I’m standing on my tiptoes, haphazardly hanging framed pictures on the wall, even though she used to do it for me and idk how to use most of the tools but I just swing a hammer around and try my best and YOU KNOW WHAT? I like it when it’s done, cause it’s mine. I’m loyal to prose, I chase impulses and stomach butterflies, I roll my eyes at my imperfections but I don’t let them take me out, I take pictures of the bumper stickers that speak to me. I’m writing music again, really writing it, the kind of music that I know I’ll drive back to the mountains this summer to record for real. I’m beefing with my E-Harmony date/blue eyeshadow wearing 65-year-old neighbor because she hates it when I shred. I think it’s funny, and I use my writing abilities to my advantage as I win the email war with admin. I sit on the curb beneath the stars by the graveyard, around the corner from the train tracks, wispy smoke circling my lips, almost-summer night getting colder. I’m on the precipice of great creative freedom. And so it is.

****Now, for an experimental activity, here are some of the lyrics that struck me most from The Great Divide, a picture I took that I think goes with them, and some prose. Abstractions to follow. I’m gonna do a part two because there are too many lyrics that i adore from this one.****

(me, circa 2021, the worst place).

“AT LEAST I GOT SOUL STILL

EVEN IF I’M IN A BAD PLACE

EVEN IF I’M EATING FAST FOOD

SLEEPIN AT MY DAD’S PLACE.”

I can’t explain how much “at least I got soul still, even if I’m in a bad place,” means to me.

I’ve been in many a bad place, but I’ve never gone to any of them without soul. My soul feels like heat lightning in the dark, a purpling sky after a vehement storm, running my hands through her hair, twirling every single curl and watching it bounce back into place, laying on my back at the pier, listening to the chirp of the crickets, engaging in the agonizing art of becoming. I’ve been to hell and back, North Philly to Brooklyn, hospital rooms and homeless squats and the Ivy League and abandoned mining towns, the PA mountains and the dead-eyed lull of the strip malls on their outskirts. I’ve loved and I’ve lost, but never without soul. It’s a forever nightlight, a spiritual center, an innate understanding of myself in the context of the art that I want to make and the love that I feel for other people. Having soul is tender. It’s chic. It’s leather and lace and low-rising Levi’s. It’s irreverent. It’s carried me through, carried me through to the morning, to the next poem, to the next line, to the right medication, to telling the truth, to surviving, then living. One of the biggest differences between her and I was the soul-gap. She was living in a nullified soullessness. I’ve never once known someone intimately who didn’t have a soul before her. It made me guarded, for a while. To understand that someone could be made of bricks like that. Regimented and cold and always in the same Adidas sweatpants, never crying at commercials or movies or songs, calculated and full of hate. She was only trying to protect herself, because she never healed from what happened to her. Which I get. But, still. No soul. She hated babies and dancing and dogs and movies, she was a pre-enlightened Bukowski-type A whose tenderness was dosed out like a biweekly paycheck. I was gentle with her, mostly. She was patient with me, like a task. And most of all, she made sure I was quiet in the grocery store and she did NOT want to take pictures in the rain at the farm. So the soul contrast makes me think of her and our life together and what I thought we were building, but it also makes me think of the light within me that carried that terrified 18-year-old who was hungover in the McDonald’s bathroom on North Broad street to therapy that year. The girl in the beer shop in the fur coat with the badly-dyed pink hair who giggled and laid with her best friend and roommate and smoked menthols and sipped on french vanilla over pours, door dashed from the diner. The girl who did, in fact, spend time eating fast food and sleeping at her dad’s place, who was 22 and thought her life was over. The girl who was clueless at math and phenomenal at navigating the grid of En Why Cee. The girl who thought her chest was about to cave in as she worked in the urban outfitters fitting room hungover in a nylon pink top and high rise white corduroys. I think of her often. I’d thank her for never letting go of that soul, but I don’t know that it was a choice. People often tell me I have style, which I’m flattered by, because I do have a sense of what is chic and I do love vintage and fashion, but I think at the core of what is inherent to people about their style, is their soul and what it looks like and what is’ composed of. Mine is classic rock and near-death experiences and holding on for dear life and my head out the window in the passenger seat. Mine is holding sweaty palms with strangers in the AA meeting. Mine is listening to “I want you” by Bob Dylan over and over again, eating greasy pizza over the steering wheel while I drive. It is destigmatizing mental health and creating space for those who need to be heard. People who are new at writing, people who are new at being sober, people who want to know if I liked their poem or their outfit or their musical cover. I LOVE YOU ALL and respect the fuck out of your souls and how tightly to them you cling, how you honor the propulsive light within and continue to make things in a world that demands consumption to be our primary mode of existing.