Lightning In A Bottle

Lately my choreographic motivation has begun to awaken from its long slumber (of course it's when I don't have access to a studio to work stuff out in, but I'm not going to complain too much -- I'll take the ideas, please). To give it something to do, I've been notating the ballets that I sketched out but never notated, going back to 2017. (Don't worry, it's only like five pieces... I haven't choreographed much ballet since I started college.)

This included my solo for Terry Scott Taylor's heart-wrenching One More Time, choregraphed in two days in the immediate aftermath of M's death. I found my notes for the piece, but the ending seemed incomplete. I knew I had finished choreographing it, as I remembered performing it live on Instagram (to resounding silence, as nearly everybody at college either didn't give one crap about dance or didn't think I was talented enough to bother doing it) and filming the performance on my video camera at the same time. So tonight, I dug out that memory card and found the video.

And I was stunned.

It was filmed 2 October 2018, and I found two rehearsal takes from the day before. In 2018, I was starting my fourth year of college, having been told by my program director at the beginning of the school year that I had exactly one (1) chance to 'prove myself' (whatever that meant, and no, he did not deign to tell me) or he would be, and I quote, "done with you." I would routinely beat myself up -- mentally and physically -- in the studio and at home because I was so deeply, profoundly angry at myself for continually failing to measure up to his expectations -- whatever the hell they even were. I had yet to decode them after four years, but I felt no end stupid for not having done so, despite the fact that he was the one not communicating clearly. My self-confidence waned steadily throughout my time at college, as a direct result of the way he and the instructors under him treated me. Because of how much they hated me and my work, I began to hate the way I danced, and by extension, I hated myself. In a way, I was jealous of M for escaping this terrible world and all the pressure of perfection before I did. Now I had -- and still have -- to face all that belittling and pressure alone. After I performed/filmed this solo, I never watched it, knowing I would just hate myself more for not being a good enough dancer to justify doing that dance.

Today when I watched it, I saw this young woman with a grace and tenderness that I could only dream of even now. There's an absolutely luscious back bend in there -- I thought if I lived to be a hundred I could never be flexible enough to do something so beautiful. Even in the rehearsal videos she looked like a professional dancer. The courus were perfect. Her arms just floated, absolutely effortlessly. The lines were perfect -- I made a goal at the beginning of this year to work on my lines, but after seeing this video, I'm wondering if I really ever needed to work on them at all. There was a section in the 'performance' that did feel a bit more staccato than it was in rehearsal, but the pure artistry overshadowed that. I think it may have been the most beautiful ballet I have ever watched.

Did I just capture lightning in a bottle? Was it all just a fluke? Or was I really that good all along and nobody was decent enough to actually tell me? I choreographed, learned, and performed this piece in literally two days. This was before I learned an entire staging of Oklahoma! and the second acts of Jesus Christ Superstar and Chicago in essentially a week (side note, do all theatre companies literally spend five months on Act I and then stage/choreograph ALL of Act II in one three-hour rehearsal or is this just the companies I end up working with?).

I'm still deciding what to do with this footage. It is incredible -- to my eyes, anyway. But it's also rehearsal footage, and I don't like posting full rehearsals of pieces I do want to make into an official video someday -- spoilers, you know. I would love to film this properly, but I don't have access to any studio or even a space large enough to do it. So do I just sit on this footage and wait, possibly several more years, before I can properly film it? Then comes the question 'what if it's not as good?' I'm not getting any younger (or more flexible)...

Either way, it encouraged me so much. At least I can watch and enjoy this video. It touched my heart, it truly did. If I do decide to post it somewhere, I'll link it here.

Day 23: National Choreography Month

Finished the Queen song and now I'm getting back to my choreographic roots with a large-group White Heart number -- specifically Heaven Of My Heart (1993).

I think this one comes out of some of the emotional background of Who Wants To Live Forever -- that weight of nostalgia, that longing for another world. I'm still so tired of being here. I'm not suicidal, most of the time, just weary... this breathtaking, soul-scarring, heartbreaking, physically heavy weariness, this bone-crushing, mind-melting nostalgia for something I can hardly remember or perhaps never experienced. I feel like I don't belong here, and I want to go somewhere where I do... home -- wherever that even is anymore.

Locked in a sky so blue

Is a land made for me and you

And we're going there, but until the dream comes true

There's a secret place

So full of love and grace

When the world spins and breaks apart

I'm going to the other heaven of my heart...

I've been realising lately that the theme of a lot of my work (not just choreography) is the theme of escape. Not extreme, altered-reality escape -- not detaching oneself from one's emotions; more like escaping into a better reality. I spent so much time in my head because that was where my better worlds were -- the worlds in my head that I unlocked and sculpted with my fingers on the keyboard and my feet on a creaking wood floor. Maybe this song best describes what I've been doing with my artistic output all along. The themes were about escaping because that's what I have always wanted, more than anything -- to be able to reach the goodness that exists only just beyond the curtain of the physical, time-bound world. I can feel it, I sometimes see glimpses of it, but it can't come here, and, until my time comes, I can't go there either. I guess this is why songs like Terry Scott Taylor's Beyond The Wall Of Sleep (among others) resonate with me SO strongly -- at least there is one other person on the planet who sees it too. It's not just me.

And escape is not just the theme of my work, it's often the reason I create. I can go forward to heaven, or back to times I had with people who I will never see again until I can move forward to heaven -- and in the past few years, creating art has often done both at the same time. Choreographing this song specifically takes me back to the time when I still had viable dreams of choreographing and performing, and the friendship of people like M and Brittney. If I could lock myself in any year forever, it would be 2012. There was so much potential and hope in my life then. Now I'm just old and washed up. Doing this piece has really made me realise just how critical M's very existence was to my creative process. There's a duet section in this piece, and I still see her beside me in my mind's eye, doing the beats and turns as I write them down -- her endless energy and bright dramatic eyes. She wanted to escape too, and she was lucky enough to get it. I would be lying if I said I wasn't jealous. I've already choreographed a piece in her memory, but I think this one is in her memory too. No doubt everything I choreograph from now on will be.

I'm about a third of the way through the song now. It's a light, airy allegro piece, very ethereal, lots of arms and heads and a few floating turns... a lot like the music itself, energetic yet dream-like. I am LOVING choreographing the duet part (I still have a little bit of it to go), especially making them intertwine with each other and with White Heart's glorious harmonies. I can't put into words how much I wish M could dance this with me for real. I wish the curtain of time didn't seperate us.

There I go, trying to escape again.

National Choreography Month, Day 10

For the first time in probably about five years, I was NOT dying of a severe lung infection in December/January (thanks, masks!), which means I've actually been able to properly do National Choreography Month this year.

I've almost done my first piece -- Queen's 'Who Wants To Live Forever.' It's probably the first widely recognisable band I've ever choreographed to in almost nine years of officially choreographing.

I was introduced to this song by someone I knew from college during my final year. We managed to be in three different shows together and as such spent many hours carpooling and sharing music (something we were both extremely passionate about), and one day Queen came up. I was familiar with Bohemian Rhapsody, of course (and if I never hear that song again in my entire life it will be too soon), and We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions because hockey, but neither of those cuts inspired me to delve deeply into their work.

While I picked up Queen songs that I love and play much more than this one from these carpool conversations, this one caught my melancholy mind's attention.

At that time in my life, M's death was extremely fresh, having only happened some four months earlier. Her death sent me into an odd but extremely intense nostalgic state wherein in the nostalgia is so strong it's physically painful and since I can't go back to the places and events and people I'm nostalgic for, I often feel like I don't want to be in this world anymore. I'm tired of longing for a time that can never be again, and every second of existing under that vicious longing feels like a personal attack -- like I'm being slapped in the face with all I've loved and lost. This state of extreme nostalgia continues to this day (if anything, it's intensified in the past few months). This song captured it perfectly... who wants to live forever? For sure not me. It's too painful to live that long under the weight of memories that will only ever be memories.

This is only the third not-tap dance I've choreographed since before M's death two and a half years ago (and one of those was literally the week she died). I haven't taken any ballet classes since I graduated college in April 2019. I had already begun to accept that I might never dance ballet again. I was just too beat down and too burnt out, and I felt I could never enjoy ballet again, so I focused on tap. But lately I've been feeling this pull back to ballet.

This piece was VERY different from what I usually choreograph. It was extremely slow, with a heavy focus on arms and lines (and a good bit of emphasis on character/mood). My usual work is at breakneck speed and I'm lucky if I choreograph five arms for an entire piece. It was such a departure, but at a time when I am still feeling such heavy nostalgia, the song fit and I think so did all the port de bras and lines -- this is a pensive song of reflection and melancholy, not dazzle and fun or even anger and sass. Slow movements, like that of an old man, or one who knows she is not long for this world, fit the yearning and 'so be it' mood of the song. It's a rather cathartic piece to dance.

That being said, there is this one section of allegro...

My husband and I have now been together for a year and a half (total). In all that time, that relationship has never inspired me to create anything artistic. It sounds bad, but there it is. Until this song -- the lyrics 'Touch my tears with your lips / Touch my world with your fingertips / And we will have forever / And we can love forever...'

My husband and I will not live forever, and that is perhaps a mercy for us both. But the time we have together transcends time.

I haven't officially picked a second piece for the contest; all I know is I want it to be a LOT more upbeat (read: less slow/boring) than this one. While I appreciate the beauty and the lines I've created here and I'm fairly certain this will work really well on stage, I'm tired of having slow songs stuck in my head.

Music

If you've been around here long enough, you may remember the music-collector days, circa 2010-2013. However, five years of college and six of unemployment put a real damper on the whole 'buying obscure music from out-of-country' thing.

Now, for the first time in a very long time, I have both a relatively stable job and am not paying tens of thousands of dollars every couple months in tuition fees. You have no idea the financial freedom I have. I am working minimum wage, but I have more 'disposable income' now than I have EVER had in my entire life. I'm still not well-off by most people's standards, but I feel like I'm living a life of luxury. I can buy cheap muffins regularly now instead of only buying them on special occasions. There is a massive weight off my shoulders that I have not felt since before I left for college. Lecrae's sentiment that 'being broke made me rich' is spot-on.

Anyway, all this to say that now that I actually have a couple extra pennies to spare at the end of the month, I took advantage of a few Boxing week sales from a couple of music dealers who specialise in my obscure genre of choice. One such dealer was Girder Music, and one such deal I took advantage of was the Halo/Scott Springer remastered 4-CD pack. I've had my eye on both Halo albums (particularly Heaven Calling) for years now -- since before college, but there was always an album I wanted more... then, of course, there was that college-induced financial drought.

I didn't realise at the time I bought that CD pack that the purchase included full downloads of all four albums, so even though the CDs only shipped today, I get to listen to them at my leisure, starting now.

Due to all the aformentioned circumstances, I haven't been able to buy and enjoy any of these really rare albums for a long time now. And just sitting and listening to these included downloads from this obscure early-'90s band that nobody's ever heard of was such a powerful experience that it made me tear up.

This was the music of a time in my life when anything was possible, my mental health was at an all-time high, I was surrounded by talented, creative, fiery people (who were not yet dead), and my creativity was at its absolute zenith. Even the mere act of sitting and listening to music without thinking about how I should be working on an assignment instead was almost foreign to me. For just a few moments, I've been able to grasp hold of a thin thread of what my life used to be and relish that safe, secure, on-top-of-the-world feeling that I used to have without even realising it.

Hopefully I can do a more in-depth review of the albums once they arrive, but until then I just wanted to chronicle how much I loved simply listening to the music of my younger years after such a long drought.

On The 'Guarantees' Of Christianity

I've noticed a theme among my parents' and grandparents' generation of Christians -- those aged around 35 and up.

They seem to have this idea that Christianity is easy. That if you're being a good Christian, everything is perfect and you're rich and comfortable.

And they wonder why their children, faced with an increasingly hostile world with pressures from all sides and all people -- including these 'well-meaning' Christian authority figures in their families -- turn their backs so vehemently on Christianity.

This Christianity that guarantees health, wealth, and happiness does not fit with today's world of anger and war and pressure and financial instability and political tension. Those of us who were raised in a Christian environment, saturated with this 'Christianity makes everything better!!!' mindset, quickly come to the conclusion that if God did exist, He would fix all our problems the second we pray and ask Him to. After all, how many women's studies (to call them 'Bible studies' is a bit of a stretch) guarantee this? 'If you pray for five minutes every day for a week, watch how God will change your life -- He'll fix your marriage, make your children little angels, provide money for the best food and brand-name clothing and that Caribbean cruise that you so desperately need to relax and get away from it all.'

Your children and the young people in your churches see that mindset and, however unconsciously, they buy into it. If that is what Christianity does, great. So they pray to God for the first three days of every new year and wait for the miracles to start falling in their lap.

But the miracles don't happen. Because -- news flash -- that is not and has never been how God works.

But my generation doesn't know that, and, naturally, we get disillusioned when we don't get the riches and abundance we ask for. You, Christian, told us it was our birthright. Just pray, you said. Just pray and everything bad will magically disappear. Just pray and it will fix everything. Just repeat these empty words, this carefully crafted mantra/phrase, and watch your heretofore abysmal savings account soar into the stratosphere. I guarantee that...

But the guarantee doesn't work. Because that is not and has never, ever been how God works.

Do you even know, Christian, how God works? Do you remember that out of the remaining eleven disciples after the resurrection, all but one were killed for following Christ? Do you remember all the years during the Depression and the dust bowl, when the crops of honest, God-fearing people failed just as badly as the crops of their heathen neighbours'? Do you remember that the apostle Paul, a man who you would probably list as your hero, died in prison (in the greatest and most politically and culturally with-it city in the world at that time) for telling people about God?

Ask them if Christianity made their lives easier.

And then, ask if Christianity has changed in the last couple thousand years and, if so, did it change before or after all the persecution that has happened (and is still happening) in places like Asia, Africa, and the Middle East? When did it change to Cloud Cuckoo Land and why doesn't it work for all Christians? You say 'you don't have enough faith?' Did Paul not have enough faith? Did Peter not have enough faith?

You who wonder why your children are walking away from the faith, ask yourself what they're walking away from. If you're peddling a false gospel, maybe it's better that they do walk away.

NaNoWriMo, Day 6

So I've ended up going with the sequel to 2253 -- the time-travel story. It's so weird writing this novel now. The main character was based off my friend Brittney, who died unexpectedly in 2015 at 22.

Brittney and I initially met at dance, but later reconnected and bonded over our shared loves of writing, photography, and technology. She was such an upbeat and caring person, and I miss her so, so much. She read the original rough draft of 2253 and really liked it. When I told her that the main character was based off of her, she was ecstatic. She had already told me that she really identified with that character, which I took as an honour and proof that I had succeded in my job as a writer.

2253 was written in 2010, five years before Brittney's death, ten years ago this month. I skimmed it the other day to remind myself of some of their personality traits (and some of the character names...), and it was like it had been written by a completely different person. And in a way, it was.

I was still in high school. I was at the apex of my fascination with computers and programming, and there's far more knowledge of that in 2253 than I currently have. Brittney and I were exchanging messages every single day so her voice was fresh in my head.

It's also interesting to note that the premise of the book was that the time-travelers get stuck in the year 2253 with a deadly respiratory virus on the loose. I literally used the words 'this is the next Spanish flu' in the novel. Even though this sequel is not about the virus, reading 2253 back a few days ago was a strange experience, given the current reality. (And I was rather gratified to see that I actually got quite a lot of details right about pandemic life, ten years before I'd live it myself.)

Writing the sequel now is so hard. Reading 2253 again the other day reminded me of so many things that I had forgotten about Brittney. She had been such a huge daily part of my life in 2010 and now, five years after her last breath, it's like I don't even remember her. I swore to never forget... I feel like I wrote this novel too late. I've lost so many details, and I'm scared the Elyssa of the sequel is not the Elyssa of the original.

As far as stats go, I fell behind on day one, but today I had a day off work so I made a big push and now I'm literally exactly at the word count goal for today: 10,002.

I feel like this novel has no plot. I've been sitting on this one-sentence plotline since before I wrote 2253, and only now that I'm 10k in am I realising that it was an extremely thin plotline and I have zero idea how I'm going to milk 50k out of it. I've written ten thousand words of exactly nothing so far because I'm trying to delay the actual exciting bits so I have something to look forward to to keep me moving. It's hard to trust the process anymore. I think of my old novels, like 2253 or Reuben or Rebecca's World or Chasm, and I remember how nothing fazed me and it all came so easily. I just somehow came up with ideas like drunk Mafia games or 10,000-year old roller rinks or magic teddy bears. I didn't have to work for it, it was just sort of there. And I haven't felt that since before Brittney died. I still maintain that Kyrie (2014) was the best thing I've ever written. I think it's no coincidence that it was the last novel before Brittney died, setting off a chain reaction of death and grief that I still feel to this day.

Hot Take - Bible Studies

Written 8 December 2018, 11.40pm.

Let me just say something.

The Gospel is the same for both men and women (and non-binary people, but I'm not getting into that discussion today).

I hate this culture of 'women's Bible studies.' Are we not intelligent enough to attend a 'real' Bible study? Why is there this need to direct women off the 'real' Bible studies to a rabbit trail with flowers and fancy script and (barely) grown-up equivalents of 'girl power' slogans? I know men and women are different on a lot of different levels, but why do I get the sense that women are getting a watered-down Gospel fortified with word faith? Why is 'women's ministry' a whole entire separate subculture of North American Christianity? Yes, there are things that tend to affect women more than men -- homemaking, child-rearing. But honestly that's a fairly limited part of the female population nowadays. What about your professional businesswomen? Your firefighting/police force women? Your single twentysomething women who don't have a husband or children to worry about? Your senior women whose children are all long out of the house? Your artistic women trying to create stuff on par with a Terry Scott Taylor but told they can't because it's 'too personal'?

People -- men, non-binary people, AND women have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Why then do men get to hear a real gospel from the actual Bible and dig deeply into all that it means for the way they live their everyday lives, while women only get a feel-good devotional reading that, for many of us, has little actual bearing on our actual lives and potential and gifting?

If your God is too weak to help this passionately artistic woman that you say He Himself created, I don't know why you think I should bother with Him.

Writing Update

Been a while since I did one of those, eh?

Lately I've been feeling this pull back to the keyboard. Do I have inspiration? No. But I do have this urge to write that I haven't felt for a very long time. I also, while cleaning out my old room at my parents' house in recent weeks (that's a whole other blog post and also probably one of the main forces for this sudden nostalgia for the writing beast that I used to be), I found Chris Baty's much-lesser-known work Ready, Set, Novel!, a workbook for novel planning. At the time my parents gifted it to me for Christmas, I had inspiration coming out the wazoo and it was all I could do to keep up with it (remember when I'd do three novels a year? Ah, the good old days). But now... now that I've survived a college degree that did everything in its power to kill me, now that my only real writing buddy is dead, now that I've moved for good out of my parents' house... I'm tired of the seismic shifts, and I want to go back to the good old days, the way things were. Not literally, of course, I was living with an emotionally unstable caregiver and being ostracised by the church that is SUPPOSED to be loving and kind. But back to the days where I could escape by writing. Back before all the deaths. I want to time travel, just a few years. And the best way I can think of is to write again.

So what does that mean?

I've started on the workbook, though I went through my 'story ideas' file the other day and found one idea that feels promising. I'm also tossing about the idea of writing the sequel to 2253... the first actually decent novel that I wrote. I had a synopsis for a sequel sketched out before I even wrote the original in 2009, but in my early college years I started to lose the ability to write sci-fi, then I lost writing altogether after my 2016 novel. But if the goal is to time-travel, this would be the perfect choice -- the novel itself is about time travel, and this novel in particular is very strongly tied to and influenced by my dear late friend Brittney. She was the inspiration for the main character, and she also read and endorsed the original 2253 draft. Even before her death, I had planned to dedicate the book to her. If I write the sequel, I get to re-live -- just for a few more days -- the good times when she was alive and we would talk about computers and science together and we would write things and critique each other's work. It would be the continuation of a novel I have dreamed of writing since I was fifteen years old. My concern is that I'm so far removed from the person I was when I wrote it in 2009 that I wouldn't be able to get into the characters and the world of the novel properly and I wouldn't do it justice.

The other idea -- the one from my 'story ideas' file -- deals with societal and evangelical corruption, a theme I have visited several times over the years (probably because my writing is the only place I can have the illusion of even being heard, let alone getting justice). My main concern is that it would be too heavy for me to write this year, given everything that's happening in the world. I'm worn out from reading about and seeing injustice on my social media, and I don't know if writing a novel about it will make me feel worse or better. I'm also struggling to resist the temptation to overly-politicise this novel (which is difficult to avoid given the amount of social media I've been consuming lately -- no, I'm not proud of it, but I've been too worn out/unmotivated to do much else). This temptation has so far not been an issue with the 2253 sequel.

I'm not sure yet if I'm actually up to the challenge of NaNoWriMo, mentally. Yes, I did it last year, but that novel was actual garbage and I only won with fifteen minutes to spare. I have literally never cut it that close and never hated every word as thoroughly as I hated those 50k.

For now, I'll keep percolating these two ideas and probably decide at midnight on November first which one I'm going to do, like usual (I suppose it will be nice to have a 'usual' thing though -- there's so little of that left nowadays).

Ten Years

A few months ago (June), this blog celebrated its tenth anniversary. It's outlived some of my friendships (because said friends died). Heck, it's almost outlived the Blogger platform itself. It's listened to me when quite literally no-one else will. Some people think I'm ridiculous for wanting to post my 'private' thoughts online 'where everyone can see them.' I've always had a couple rebuttals to that one:
1. Honey, this blog barely scratches the surface of my thoughts. These are by no means the private thoughts. Not by a long shot. I fully recognise that people might see them, and I am 100% okay with that. In fact, the reason I post things is because I want people to see them.
2. 'Where everyone can see them?' Don't make me laugh. Since Brittney died, there's been nobody to read these unless I post one of the especially good (or especially offensive) posts on my personal Facebook page. In a way, that's why I did this -- then those who really did care to know how I thought could read them at their own leisure, and at their own pace, and those who found this blog 'too negative' could simply forget about its existence.

I started this blog just before the car accident that almost killed me (we're talking days before). As a result, this blog has chronicled my life as I navigated through that paradigm shift and the consequences of my conclusions about life. That accident was a major life event and probably was the thing that had the greatest impact on my life up until 2015/The Year From Hell (incidentally, this blog also serves as a nice before-and-after of the state of my soul in relation to said Year From Hell). Many times I've posted things thinking it would be the final record of my thoughts before my untimely death, and I've also tried at other times to post the happy things that I could not feel in an attempt to remember something, anything besides the soul-sucking depression.

Often, this blog has been a place where I can offload some of the mental weight of depression without actually burdening an actual overstretched human being. I think in a way, that was my secret motivation for starting a blog in the first place (that and I thought people would be far more interested in me and my thoughts/writing career/computer nerdiness than they actually are). Turned out only Brittney was even moderately interested in such things, and she was the greatest supporter of this blog until her death in February 2015. (To this day, I would say she is still the greatest supporter this blog has had over the entire ten years.) I managed to somehow hold onto this blog during college, and it probably saved my life more than once by giving me a safe place to vent when not a single soul on the planet was willing to acknowledge my existence.

Anyone who's been here since the Brittney days (I don't even know if there are any out there) might remember the old name -- Thoughts From The Asylum. I named it that partly because sixteen-year-old me felt like she was living in an insane asylum (while this may have been a slightly extreme take on the situation, it was not entirely inaccurate), and partly because she took asylum from a dysfunctional home life (from which she had literally zero refuge because homeschool) in writing, which has been a focus of this blog since its inception. When dance started to become a bigger factor in my life and I started seriously considering making a career of it, I renamed the blog The Edge Of The Dream -- after the White Heart song -- in reference to my faith at the time that bigger and better things were to come for me in the world of dance and performing. (In a nutshell -- has that happened? Kind of... yes, in the sense that I have done more as a performer by this point in my life than I could have imagined eight years ago when I changed the blog name; but also no, in the sense that my hope was and still is to direct a dance team. In that sense, I am still, in September 2020, at the edge of the dream -- and wondering when I will finally start heading toward the centre.)

I'm glad to have this blog. Sometimes I read back through my own words and find deep encouragement here, from my past self, words that I need to hear in the present that no-one can provide. Often it provides me with a small escape into the world as it was before 2015, when my mother's family still spoke to each other, Brittney and I wrote copiously and proofread each other's work constantly, and I still had some semblance of childlike faith in God (to SUPER condense that update: I've somehow managed to not become agnostic. I definitely still believe God exists. But I'm still not convinced He loves me. I really think no-one other than God Himself will be able to convince me otherwise).

I plan to continue writing and posting here. Whenever I feel the urge to write but have no clear idea of what I want to talk about, I tend to go to Blogger and open up a 'new post' page. I have probably about as many unfinished drafts as I do published posts because of this practice. It's somehow different, more freeing, to write in Blogger than in a Pages document despite how simple literally all my Pages documents are (I keep them almost Windows-Notepad-esque in their simplicity, even -- perhaps especially -- for my novels). This probably also explains the amount of rambling posts on this blog (which probably also explains the lack of readership).
Anyway, where I was going with this is that this has been such a comforting habit over the past ten years. In this time of societal and personal upheaval, you'd better believe I don't plan on letting go of this blog anytime soon.

Thanks to any of you who may have actually stuck around over the years (and managed to not criticise me extensively for being 'too negative' on my OWN PERSONAL BLOG THAT YOU ARE IN NO WAY REQUIRED TO READ). Here's to another ten years at the asylum/edge of the dream.

My Room

Cleaning out my room at my parents' house for the final time.

Sure, I've moved away before, but before I always had the option of coming back. My possessions continued to reside here in this cheery pink room, under increasingly thick grey layers of dust and the occasional spiderweb. I never really truly had to move out of this room. I left for years at a time, but it was still my room.

But now I've just gotten married, and my sister is planning to take over my room. This requires me to clean it out for perhaps the first time ever. I've certainly straightened it up once or twice, but never truly deep-cleaned, and I've especially not had to pack it all away into storage at the same time. It's funny how few of my finds truly surprised me (apparently I pretty much knew exactly where everything was, despite some things not seeing the light of day for over a decade), yet when I dusted them off, only then did they bring back memories.

I'm a terribly, terribly sentimental person. I will keep a Staples receipt for pens and paperclips for nostalgic reasons, even though I know I will probably never look at it again. Part of the reason I had never truly cleaned out my room was because I was suffering so much loss already and I knew I couldn't bear to throw anything away. But now I'm forced to, and that, coupled with knowing this room is no longer my safe place anymore, is a very emotional process.

This room was where I cowered in fear from my mother's outbursts and listened to ABBA CDs nonstop on my headphones. This room was where I listened to Oilers hockey games and paced the carpet in the dark as I listened, working out some new plot idea. This room is where I would write all day long and late into the night on my old Windows XP machine with a 20GB hard drive (pretty sure the processor on that thing was measured in megahertz), or simply stare at the screensaver and daydream. This room was where I would sit on the floor after dance class and choreograph to Petra and White Heart, planning all sorts of dance shows with M. This room was where I sketched out revenge stories centering around the youth group that hated me. I've fallen asleep on the grey-pink carpet, I've made endless crochet and cross-stitch projects, I played hours of Polly Pocket with my sister, I've written over half a million words of ideas and prose, I've tap danced, I've even practiced a few ballet steps here. I've done so many self-portrait photoshoots, written so many blog posts, lost myself in so many dreams, cried so many silent but tortured tears. I moved into this room somewhere around 2003/2004, and it's been a home base for me ever since.

I found cards with greetings in both M's and Brittney's handwriting. I found a bear that my late grandfather gave me when I got baptised. I found mementos from a 2004 trip to see my now-deceased great-uncle and his wife in B.C. I found bookmarks my sister had made me, story ideas I'd sketched out on the back of church bulletins, and tickets for shows I'd performed in as a child. I even found a folder with all my work and costume designs and very early choreography for a book/dance company idea I had nursed for some three or four years in my early teens before joining the real world and realising that that exact particular idea was simply not feasible (it's not completely dead, though, the dream of a dance team and even some sections of choreography from that period still live on in my present work).

These are things that you never know the value of when you first receive them. This is another part of why I can't throw anything out. How could I have known on my 20th birthday when I received that card from M that she would be dead barely five years later? If I had thrown that card out two weeks later like I'm told 'normal people' always do, I would now have nothing left of the fierce woman who so often inspired and encouraged me. No-one else will ever exist with that exact handwriting, that exact way of wording things. And even if someone could forge it, they could never forge her personality, her essence, her spirit, her -- the things that all who knew her fell in love with.

Brittney was one of the very few people who was capable of being encouraging in writing. Sometimes her birthday cards to me were the only source of encouragement I would get for that entire year. This words-of-affirmation person had to scrape together all the encouragement she could, and sometimes it was contained only in the left-handed script of this one dear friend.

How could I know that my grandfather would only give me two gifts in the entire twenty-three years he knew me? Yes, I will never play with that stuffed bear, but my grandfather was a hardened, bitter man who rarely showed approval, let alone affection. That bear showed me what his gruff voice and distant actions never managed to do. I would rather remember that than simply replay the fading memory of his critical voice over and over in my head.

Memories fade. And these people meant far too much to me for me to justify callously tossing aside the things that remind me of them and their huge, huge impacts on my life. And because I never know which bright young life will disappear next, I can't afford to lose any of those memories. I learned when M died that just because something is statistically improbable (losing TWO best friends at age 22 in three years?), DOES NOT mean it's impossible. Especially if it's something bad. You know, like losing SEVEN people to death in four years; all but one under the age of 27. What's to say there won't be an eighth? Statistically, there should have been no more deaths in my life after Brittney for a good fifteen years, save maybe my grandfather due to his age and health. Yet there were five more in 1,461 days. Improbable, you say -- but it happened. It happened in real life, in my life. You truly never know. You can 'be positive' and 'not think about it now' and believe in the health and wealth of your friends all you want, but you truly. never. know. Nobody escapes the death of the ones they love the most. Nobody. (Except the ones who die young.)

(Side note: I am literally not even joking, iTunes just started playing Memories Fade by Tears For Fears. I did not plan this, and I am not making this up. I just started playing TFF and I had completely forgotten that song even existed.)

This room has been my safe haven through a lot of things, when there was no-one to talk to and no-one to go to. The golden light, amplified by the pink walls, seemed to bring a modicum of hope even on the darkest days of suicidal depression. The lone incandescent bulb that hung from the 2x10s that made up the upper floor above me lit the way to many a late-night story idea -- the spaceships that allowed me to travel through time and space, away from the pain of whatever situation I was in.

To not have even the option of spending a day alone in this room again -- it steals the breath from my chest. This room was one of my few constants in a world that insisted on dying away around me. It was always there, even after Brittney died and M died. It was my sanctuary when the world was against me (and let's be honest, it still is in many ways). I feel untethered without it, but it is time...
Another goodbye. It never gets easier.

Thank you, big pink room with the tree-dappled southern sunlight and the desks lining the walls, for all the good times and for sheltering me through all the bad times. Thank you for all the memories. Thank you for the safety and protection and inspiration you provided. I'll miss you something awful.