@ZARA | letter to an art form

Dear friend,

A while ago, my sister asked me what my three self-indulgent wishes would be - no charity, no selflessness, just a triple set of honest-to-goodness wants. I don't remember if I answered out loud, but I thought about it a whole lot and finally came to a decision encompassing all my most blatant insecurities, putting a mild resolve to all my flawed perceptions. The list was as follows:

1. An ACT score of 34
2. Acceptance to the Colburn school of music
3. The form and face of a Zara model.

Even now, writing this down seems utterly ridiculous if a bit melodramatic; even with a 32 and a music scholarship my adolescent inclinations toward perceived perfection have remained pretty much intact. The longing nearly ate me alive, but after spending a few months in rehab I got to thinking a lot about you; you and Lily and Lola and all the other teenage wonder-women representing some senior class of serendipity, looking pretty for a living and being chalked up to a fault. I don't care what your BMI is, love, but they don't seem to either and that's what worries me. So I just wanted to ask you,

What did it look like when you first walked into Los Angeles?

Was the skyline tinged with eggshell-white like it was for me, smoky at the center and reeking of cigarettes and celebrities? Did your ankles hurt in your stilettos when you stepped into the building with the big windows, eying the Starbucks across the street and wishing you knew another lonely stardom-seeking city slicker to talk to? Did you brush your teeth more than once in the morning, letting the listerine seep through your tongue like a revelation, staring down the mirror in a reflective contest of wills, terror and gratitude thriving as one in your skeletal structure?

Did it hurt, when they asked if you were fourteen? Did you wish you'd lived a bit longer?

Did you order the sandwich on rye bread instead of wheat and pick out the cheese with your black-painted nails, tipping the waiter with your card instead of cash and drawing in block letters on a cardboard-colored napkin? Did you leave half behind, love, and walk away hungry because this, this frame of yours, is now your paying job?

Are you afraid of the cameras? Do you sleep with sore eyebrows, sore from the frowning?

Does it hurt, when they ask about menstruation? Did it hurt to hear "ses jambes sont laids" behind the picture screen, to know they never guessed you too spoke French? Does it hurt to know your bones are breaking?

Does the makeup make it better?

You and I seem to visualize ourselves something akin to the end destination, a nirvana of the mind; a place embroiled with cinnamon scents and flannel sheets, shaved legs and lotion and running water and healthy vitals. Safe potassium levels and red blood cell count, a decent heart rate and blood pressure and a somewhat stable self-perception. We seem to see ourselves as impenetrable, a societal ideal defying odds and laws of physics in one, living the way Holocaust survivors died because we are the achievers, we are the founders, we are the transcenders of sad human necessity. When they found your skin searing with bruises they laughed at the thought of leukemia because you were "fragile" - they didn't know you were dying.

Everyone's dying, love.
But we're still pretty young.

I don't want us to become another number in a statistic; I don't want you to be valued solely for the length of your limbs and the prominence of your collarbones. I want them to listen to the way you laugh over vanilla bean frappuchinos and part your hair on the right, to know that you always sleep in earrings and cried the first time you read A Separate Peace. I want them to know that you peruse Italian philosophy and decorate your home with recycled magazine covers, that your first cat was named Fitzgerald after F. Scott and your brother is your best friend; that your shoes long for Tuscany and your heart belongs to Portland. I want them to know how many stars you've watched fall and how many reams of mascara you've gone through before wishing on an eyelash; I want them to know that you are alive and whole and human, not a pinprick on a map where a tack was removed - a whole world of potential in that tiny frame.

You are more than an emaciated body in a dress, love - don't forget.

Always,
Soph

(somewhat cathartic)

I was certain it would be obliterating, lavender dripping in droves from my graduation gown hem - how it would feel to walk in borrowed finery and let adolescence drip off, just like that --

"You know, I didn't ever really get that orange peel thing"

"Huh?"

"You know, where you peel it and it spells out your husband's name?"

"I just hate oranges."

My fingers are throbbing with octave twinges and my shin is bruised. I'm gaining a complacent kind of physical awareness, of the subtle greens in the veins under the skin of my hands and the calluses of the Korean aesthetician painting my toenails black. There are a whole lot of kind people in the world, actually, and I'm over here vibrating and appreciating them from a safe distance --

I guess the real question is what are we supposed to give the next generation? What're they even gonna think of us?

We tried, man. Some Bach just can't be played on a 15.5-inch.

serenity prayer

Blessed virgin, I've been eating roses
By your hedge grow. Mother
Mary in the morning
cutting crusts from salad plates -

you are the reason for my opalescence. 
I've spun the rug of crumpled wrappers 
and they shine like supernovas on your oyster shells -
coral-hot, they glisten. I am satiated
in your stark iridescence 

and you dress me in moonlight. A bride
of sweet, sweet apathy,
arrayed in spotless dishrag rays
I crumble, awed by your simplicity. 

You've crowned me in apple peels. 
Appoggiaturas unapologetic, we worship in wavelengths 
together, fourteen and trembling 
and skinny in our unburnt skin. Bless 

our fast, we pray
and coalesce my meal to your devotion. All these strings 
hung from your fingers strum me,
vilified -
a song of orcas
underneath an oil-spilled shore.

Dear Mother, you enthrone me 
in your loveliness eternally. May
canopies of full disclosure 
rest upon the both of us tonight 
as operatic crickets mourn 
the loss of freedom's breakfast. 

let's call it "visceral"

I don't mean to romanticize this, but when I speed-walked down to campus yesterday on blistered feet in all black with a viola on my back listening to some emphatic Tchaichovsky, I thought man, someone outta write a book about this girl

[SHE'S A PIECE OF WORK]

This June feels vaguely cinematic, faded technicolor and VCR quality. I'm frustrated by the monotony of adolescent emotion and my inability to transcend it all; the dull throb of humanness that accompanies elbow bruises and razor scratches. What a curse, man, to bleed out through pinprick marks on our index fingers and observe the endless complacency of mind against the unending vitality of biology. We are repaired almost faster than we can break ourselves, and that, she said - running her hands through her grown-out hair and leaning forward, sneaker catching on the end of her chair leg - that's some incredible sh*t right there, the things people survive and come up kicking. She looked so deified, sitting there in her sweatshirt, a Madonna in a rehab center come to Let our trails Be, to sweep us from the droves of trial and carry us to freedom -

"They forgot to draw on my coffee cup," she said, coming in and throwing her bag on the table. "I mean, don't they know who I am? Marisa draws on it every morning."

She shows me cat videos and I feel the inside of my sleeves, reveling in clean cotton and lavender laundry detergent. Strange how the clock-like thuds of a washing machine could somehow validate a familial struggle, some need for parental guidance in the terror of the adult unknown - but I can do my laundry now, I can wash this blue-striped thing and call it clean - what a blessing, what a privilege; the endless joy of hamper autonomy -

I stayed up reading, similar to elementary school, less-than-similar course material, though probably comparable themes. I almost teared up once - "You always look so cool," (what Daisy told Gatsby) and probably shivered. Fitzgerald solidified the statement as an amorous declaration and I think nothing could be more on-point, really, the wavering certainty that the glowing pink suit across the room was rad enough to be repeated five years later, wineglass trembling in hand and hanging on words like trapezes. Such a pity for the guy, five reads later, when he still goes out to swim and scores a record low-attendance funeral. I love you, F. Scott Fitzgerald, I said before I went to sleep last night. What a homie. Keepin' us deterred from any existential meaning since 1925.

I couldn't stop thinking about how real it all was, so infinitely opposite from running my fingers along a five-inch screen. Cloud cover of necessity, but so much grey - covering the sky from end-to-end with everything, some archaic cricket chirps against the grey-green weeds and sidewalk cracks. It felt like embroidery, braided somehow into conversation, deft and clean. Straight stitches, Ursa Major, sisters talking. She looked like a picture and the day was all-encompassing, pressing furtively then furiously against the night. I could count things to say like freckles, but I blinked them away bc

[VISCISSITUDE  > VULNERABILITY]

"I don't wanna talk about it - "

"Okay."

"But let's just, like, think about it at the same time."

"Okay - "

a plant called Cecilia

I named a row of treatment-spurred succulents after Simon and Garfunkel songs, because why the cuss not? I felt the weight of my adulthood, walking through the rows of ceramic vegetable pots and wishing I remembered the genus and species of the specific carnation in the soil bed to the left. There was sand seeping through my salt waters and some mediocre ambiance; a bunch of songs I'd only heard vaguely while trekking behind my mama's shopping cart, enduring Saturday morning grocery outings, rewarded only by the apologetic Smarties at the cash register.

I turned 18 and felt absolutely nothing. My family sent me flowers and a three-by-three note, and I spent the day with people I'd never met, covered from head to toe in confusion and wondering where I'd misstepped on my railway of resignation. Horticulturalism meant much less than the surprising proximity of the Botany Pond when I finally moved home, which in turn was much less surprising than its being named after the university Botany department. I remember her telling me about her dreams of art therapy, her voice like hazelnuts and her skin like maple leaves, lovely and teeming with nostalgia and charcoal tones. I remember her writing about dogs meandering along Mexican roofs and wondering where, where on earth the time went --

"I swear, I was in middle school two weeks ago" --

It felt a bit ridiculous, after a while. The rooster lamp on the dresser beside mine, bought solely for the purpose of a college dorm--who even conceptualizes aviary lighting devices?!--but I put up with it because Lauren was everything to me and I would've put up with essentially anything, granted there was leeway for a few snide remarks and a lot of veggie straws, altoids on the side and enough Taylor Swift to render us emotionally static in a blissful, teenager-y kinda way. She's in England now and I'm feeling 

so 

cussing

young --

It kinda hurts, almost, how young I feel.

ok except I actually really love Hau'ula

The streets were thick with hot air; with the smell of crunching gravel and unfamiliar foliage. The flowers were uncharacteristically bright, incandescent; maroon and gold like cheap high heels. The houses were tired, leaning on their sides. Sighing. The people were quiet, limping with crutches, at times gesticulating ardently to nothing but sky.  

My legs were white in teal shorts, three years worn and counting - my favorite favorites because I bought them at a J Crew outlet and they fit, for once. Still loyal three years later.

My headphones were scratching the inside of my ear and so I pushed them in harder; that's the only thing that really takes the sting away, I guess. I blinked and wandered down dead end street after dead end street, No Outlet signs a quiet regularity in all the solitude, trying not to think for once

Chains on fences, weeds covering the sidewalk. A layer of rain-scrubbed dirt shimmering idly over everything. 

A cat far too expensive for the street meandered up to me, mildly curious, and then splayed out on the road, a grey-and-white conglomeration of fur with a tongue somewhere inside, flat and formless. The stillness was so tangible even interspersed between moaning car engines, streaking past blatantly while any eyes sober enough to see stated apathetically, unruffled by the disturbance. 

TOO POOR, TOO HUMID

They let their front doors swing in their hinges, let their nephews sit on tattered lawn chairs, fading into the porch like antiqued wood, everything deteriorating as the occasional peacock strolled over the driveway, watching the socioeconomic crisis like an uninteresting firework display. 

I stepped around the neon cones on the trash-littered sandbar, turning up the volume, blocking out the incessant waves. So many screaming cars. I wouldn't have heard a thing anyway. 

[squawking seagulls + stillness, a detangling breeze]

"Je cherche une cle pour decouvir," accompanied by heavy bass. Feet sweating in my sandals. So many black flecks in the sand. The air was heavy enough to flatten me, but I rose. 

I think I might've figured out some vital identity pieces in Hau'ula OR SOMETHING; I don't know what I believed in but somehow it meant a whole lot and I came back with branches of Hawaiian leaves in my hair, roaring Chevy trucks ringing in my blocked-out ears, my mind probably 

this much 

quieter.

lace-ups; golden years

I want to say that the thought of stepping into this actual real live life that's been built for me since I started stumbling around trying to teach my legs to walk makes me feel

but tbh it doesn't feel like I'm jumping off a cliff, not a bit; it's more like I've been slowly wading into cold water all my life and now I'm finally realizing -

this is it, babe, this is it

the future or whatever

hot tramp, I love you so

I don't think about dying
the way David Bowie thinks about dying.

He's a peripheral infidel; his psychedelic death chants are incredibly beautiful in the most haunting way but I don't wanna haunt people, I wanna save them

So maybe in the midst of all these ch-ch-changes we can picture a man (probably in full drag) dying at 69, enwrapped in a sullen vortex, black hole-like, detached from his own umbilical cord and floating in space for eternity, stamped

the idea of Bowie frozen in carbonate, a cosmic masterpiece suspended forever in a galaxy

utterly consumed by black holes.

just some avant-garde dog songs, probably

So first of all, this is a thing.

All I can say is, major props to Laurie Anderson and all similar canine-music enthusiasts, also every single cussing experimental composition supporter who turned up with his/her golden retriever to appreciate the beauty and wonder of this exhibition of utter brilliance.

Soph approves.

I don't remember what she was wearing, but I remember when she told me about Avant-garage - we could've been in her car, in that strawberry red-truck with soft seats and the incredible, incredible aux cord that gave us access to everything from Vampire Weekend to Taylor Swift to Muse to Macklemore, or it could've been her house on 700 North, in the tiny kitchen with something savory cooking on the stove - simmering in some kind of herb I can't remember

11pm, we'd still be sipping tea on those wooden chairs, listening to the Gossip Girl soundtrack and talking about Leighton Meister's yellow dress and the boy that's so hung up on her and I remember the henna on my hands, rubbing it into Gwen's hair, I remember laughing about the drug smell and the nasty mud-like slime congealing on our hands

I remember the One Direction posters and the anime postcards scattered among books about constellations and post-world-war Japan; the rabbit in the closet, sharing dresses and jackets, staying there past midnight and hugging my knees on Mary's bed, feeling so cussing safe I never wanted it to end

I miss the fragility and simplicity of college being an abstract idea, a far-away entity that enwrapped my caretakers, that brought them warmth that I felt through their fingertips, that gave them light and concerts and shadow-scattered tinfoil in freshman art portfolios;

I miss the future the way I used to see it, an eternal kitchen with tea whistling on the stove and a laptop blazing with only the things I loved

I miss the people who made me feel like I could reach out and touch them - all those evasive coming years of mine.

like who/what/where even are we

My roommates at camp had never even heard of Provo.

Not that I'm surprised - Utah isn't much of a landmark (despite its National Parks, obi), but as a seventeen-and-a-half-year-old riding on what seems like an eternal Provo trajectory, it was maybe the tiniest bit unsettling. 

Like, my universe doesn't exist in someone else's??? Um okay wtvr but like actually, yikes.

All of the sudden Provo feels like some weird crater-struck iceberg floating in the middle of nowhere; in a place no one even cussing thought about

and here we all are, freezing to death.

Ok pause. I'm really not gonna be antagonistic - at least I'll try because Provo is in my blood & bones, man, it's given me opportunities Charlotte Brontë would cry to think of and taught me viola and provided me with neighbors, which is an actual huge thing,
when you think about it.

Just the overarching identity crises that seem to hit all these eighteen-and-something-year-olds time and again while they stumble around those padded-down HBLL stairs and stare at themselves in those smudged-up HFAC practice room mirrors seems maybe a little too timeless.

You're suffocating in the feeling that your holistic society is leaving you behind, that the cookie cutter somehow broke on you and you're burnt and useless because for whatever reason you can't conform

and that, that is terrifying.

It's kind of like an

kind of situation, and you think "but do you?! do you?" And tbh I really don't know what they want from us.

I think we sometimes feel like Provo is eating us alive; that the iceberg is turning us to ice and we start running like mad because the bigotry and perfectionism just doesn't jive with these preconceived life notions, it's a broken record repeating what they taught us in Sunday School while we stared at the carpet creeping up the walls, sound-proofing the room and doubt-proofing our minds

but hey, sometimes doubt really is the best thing.

DON'T BE SCARED, LOVE

I look at those sweater-clad kids with "freshmen" etched into their faces and high school backpacks hanging off their shoulders and I just want to say

"It's okay, babe."

It's okay that you don't know everything; it's okay that you can't hit that shift ten times out of ten because Christ is not Provo, Christ isn't gonna demand perfect arm vibrato and a 4.0 right now, even though that's the machine you're putting yourself through, the pain of perfectionism and the sickening feeling of responsibility just to not fail. 

He wants you to keep going. I want you to keep going. You are an incredible source of power in this fading world; you are color, you are vibrant. 

People talk about Free BYU, but I can't stop thinking about Free All of Us - from this mess of mistaken identity and this misconstrued mob psychology city. We need to free us from ourselves because we are not, we are not the byproduct of a shapeless society; we are not the cultural result of something conspiratorially bigger,

we are the something bigger.

I guess what we need to do now is figure out how to jive with what to do with all of that 

and I don't really know how to start, tbh, but I think we're gonna get there.