Breadcrumb #613

VITTORIA BENZINE

Regina Spektor’s Begin to Hope encapsulates my entire range of feeling. The rich album embodies my varied inner-conflicts and marked my graduation from Disney compilations into the realm of alternative music.

It had been ages since I’d absorbed it in full. Quarantine’s caged animal energy was cresting, and I promised my friends it wouldn’t drive me to break my eighteen months of sobriety. I found myself absentmindedly wondering how I could lie to everyone and drain a dozen IPAs. I like to wallow, but something about this urge’s voracity alerted me it may actually be dangerous. I yearned to sing the pain away. Shuffle brought me to Fidelity, the track that opens Begin to Hope.

Singing it felt so pure, challenging, and lovely that I sang the album straight through. 

My friend Marie and I discovered Fidelity some sunny afternoon in 2006, seated on her bedroom floor for lunch over MTV. Floor meals and MTV were special treats only allowed by cool parents like hers. My own mother wouldn't even let me hang posters on my bedroom walls if they weren’t framed. Marie had a TV in her room and a big black dog named Roxy. Her home's disorder seduced in its coziness. 

It was an era of economic expansion and hyper-sexuality inhospitable to a shy, unibrowed girl trapped in rural Pennsylvania’s middle class with an unhappy young mother who sheltered her from popular culture. When friends’ homes provided escape, I seized the opportunity to study grownup entertainment, longing to live like the girls in Nick Lachey's and Hinder’s music videos. I was at work on this project when Fidelity debuted. 

I'd never heard someone sing in Spektor's quirky inflections. I'd never seen a famous person like Spektor, with curly hair and cherub cheeks like mine. I bought the CD shortly after.

“I never love nobody fully,” Spektor begins. I liked the sound of that at eleven. I learned self-protection at a young age. Music aided this effort.  Any narrative instinct extant in my mind took shape while I spent car rides conjuring music videos in my head.

There were reasons for escape. My parents forgot that a child's development requires more than three square meals and sturdy shoes. My mother loved and taught with reprimands."If I kiss you where it hurts, will you feel better?" Spektor sang, and I caught her eye in the rear-view mirror.

My nerve neutered by mother’s incessant degradation, my burgeoning romantic desires took shape only in fantasy. I had a crush on Blane, the class’s pretty boy. I liked another mop top named Hector, but retreated immediately when he called me creepy. They were passing fancies without weight.

At twelve, I met my Samson. “You are my sweetest downfall, I loved you first,” I still sing, though years have passed since we spoke last. I am always isolating the notes in my love for him. Do I want to hold him or beat him? Kissing and spitting require indiscernible flicks of the tongue. 

“I liked another mop top named Hector, but retreated immediately when he called me creepy.”

Our non-relationship began with a prank call. We took six months to make physical contact, one single hug. Eventually I broke up with him after hearing rumors he'd mocked my cystic acne. His presence had felt like a rumor. What stuck was the unbearable self-loathing.

Two books changed my life at thirteen: a biography of Coco Chanel and a bubblegum iteration of The Secret titled Click: The Girl’s Guide to Getting What You Want. Only through the former could I understand how to make use of the latter; Chanel’s story gave me an actionable path towards the social cache I visualized. 

I leaned into my strangeness, transforming it from weakness to competence. In self-acceptance, I gained an appreciation for earthy truths like Spektor sings in On The Radio, “you reach inside yourself, you take the things you like, and try to love the things you took.” 

Age brought freedom. At fourteen, my mother relinquished control over my life. Confidence brought popularity. In retrospect, I see the battle light and dark waged over my worldview. The happiest times of my life were ruled by a warm authenticity many equate with moral good. The allure of something darker, dominance and success, never stayed far at bay.

All power corrupts, mine exposed a mean streak. The moment I could, I broke hearts for sport. I sucked Blane off and told the school he came quickly. I encouraged Hector to dump his girlfriend for me and left him dry.

Love could still live. At sixteen, Samson back for a nine month relationship of flourishing emotion and full-bodied touches. He became the friend I’d never dared hope for. My goals had evolved towards fashion journalism, and he understood my jokes about Phoebe Philo and Raf Simons. He could mock our classmates with the same incision I’d perfected from years of surviving bullying.

Liberty bred teenaged dirt baggery. My friends and I trampled into our final years of compulsory public education with smashed faces and broken teeth. Drugs and alcohol were social currency at first. Our peers seemed mystified when we showed up to parties visibly drunk. It conveyed a sort of daring.

But for people like us, the act becomes an end in itself. Grace drank an entire fifth of Tanqueray and fell face first out of a Jeep. Guy friends pissed cheap vodka out the second story window. Samson and I made it to the first party where we could have slept next to each other, but Captain Morgan dashed our dreams. I awoke with a throbbing headache and fragmented temper tantrum memories, screaming that he was the reason I drank, screaming that he’d broken me at 12 years old. My compulsive need to capture his entire mind turned our love sour. Samson left when I let him believe that I’d cheated on him. My plastic sedan spent the next year speeding down interstates while I choked out Field Below, “everything must come and go.”

We tried again the following summer. I see our shared fear over impending adulthood. Clinging to each other, I tried to love him alongside the amphetamine addiction I’d adopted to still my alcohol-induced weight gain. Samson’s dad was the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and I was on a full scholarship. Where he spent his first week rushing fraternities at a penthouse suite in Vegas, I learned the difference between a 3.5mm and quarter-inch cord for my work-study job in the Bronx. 

Samson and I texted regularly that first semester of college, but we never spoke on the phone. He made plans to visit New York City and broke them. I emptied my bank account to visit him in LA on Thanksgiving break. We stopped talking.

I refused to confront my unhappiness. Life took the frenetic pace of Hotel Song, misadventures played out in the lobbies of the Ace and Andaz, “cigarettes and lies, I am a child, it’s too soon.” I preferred bars where a bucket of Coronas cost the same as a Press Room cocktail, but glamor brought me closer to the life I imagined Samson leading in my absence. Oscillating between heartbreak and rage, I wanted to assassinate his accomplishments with the sheer force of my own.  

Spite became the lodestar by which I made decisions. I thumped in a manner that still resonates, all Aprés Moi, “I must go on standing, you can’t break that which isn’t yours.” The dull roar of the pain coalesced into a thudding, aggressive backbeat. If I had never loved him, I wouldn’t have withstood the emotional abuse of unpaid internships or the many men who preyed on my blackout body. I wouldn’t have picked myself up from their floors a hundred times over and gone back for more, too stubborn to admit defeat.

I turned 20 Years of Snow and sough a union between my desire to conquer and my humanitarian values. I picked up a boyfriend the way some foster sad-eyed puppies. We clung to each other like two little sailors lost in the city’s squalling streets. We cut lines and tried to commandeer the rudders, crashing into each other. There was no real love left to give, Samson had drained more than my pocketbook. I’d make promises, watching “the words float out like holograms.”

We traded heartbreaks and attempted a jailbreak from the past’s prison. That Time was once my favorite song off Begin To Hope. By 21, it became my reality: long nights lost on Delancey, spirited conversations regarding cigarette brand connotations, two separate ambulance rides for alcohol overdoses. 

I quit drinking at twenty-two out of sheer desperation. One offhand moment, I caught a clarity which intimated I’d end up empty if I continued in that manner. Exhausted, broke, discarded, I took every “are you an alcoholic” quiz Google provided. The results all said I was beyond saving. I fell asleep crying over a knowledge I’d possessed all along.

I relearned the sensation of being alive through books and records and the vegetables in my fridge. I re-routed booze money into skincare and silk skirts. Material things possessed a sumptuousness I’d forgotten, and their simple pleasures thrilled me. I relearned to write, realigned myself with the central impetus that’d spurred my move to the city. I fell in love with strangers on the street, and then I fell in love in with a boy of Samson’s complexion and relapsed for him.

Years of existential suffering had whittled my ability to withstand. The morning that I re-committed to sobriety lacked the softness of my first experience. If losing Samson dimmed my proclivity for light, this was the extinguishing blow. I did not see what love could do but harm. I did not see how I would ever survive, let alone achieve, without fixing my gaze on bald reality.

There could only be me. There could only be writing.

Sentimentality was only allowed under guise of ‘material.’ Every facet of my being faced scrutiny, every area warranted an Edit. I reoriented every atom in my body towards success. When this drive faltered, I leaned on the old spite. Samson fully transitioned to target from lost lover.

The austere remnants read like Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays. I mourned my permanent break from alcohol, but wedged derision into the gaps between myself and those who could drink normally. Sure, they could still drape themselves in sheer fabric and spill secrets over rooftop elixirs, but did they know their outermost boundaries like I did? Could they sit with themselves as I had to? “You can write, but you can’t edit,” my glares would’ve sang if I loosened my vice grip on their vocal chords. 

Technical talent makes a PR agent, emotion denotes a writer by birthright. That lonely winter, recreation lied in locomotion: walking, driving, riding public transportation, exploring new nooks of New York and making sense of all I’d endured. I considered the people I’d touched and those who’d touched me. I found fear united everyone, including Samson, and came to understand his pathological aversion to being straight with me. My preoccupation with him waned when anger subsided. Writing became less an act of proving, and more an act of expressing, “while she sings she make them feel things.” I thought my survival should help others face fear, thought my stature could help with self-assurance, “Lady lights a cigarettes, puffs away no regrets.”

Through spring, my tears watered flowers. Through Summer In The City, those flowers bloomed into a genuine appreciation for diversity of feeling. Sweltering in July heat, I restrained my spite while texting an old friend who’d habitually condescended to me in high school. He let slip that Samson had moved to New York. “I start to miss you baby, sometimes,” my mind whispered. How many summers had I wished for this very thing. I did not unblock Samson’s number. What could happen would only transpire absent my iron will. 

• • •

Breadcrumb #612

JOSH Boardman

Here lies an unimportant man. One of those who spoke of himself as a drifter because one summer he drove all the way from Michigan to Los Angeles in one go. It was better he learned to make a journey without drugs than with them. He vowed to return to Los Angeles. After failing out of the communications program he moved halfway north. The hunting was not bad you couldn’t get lost in the snow. He reenrolled in community college for nursing (his mother compelled him) and bought a Siberian Husky named Rabbit. He met a fine lady and though she wasn’t a knockout (his father said over a snifter of whiskey) she was steady and rustic and strict. The fine lady got pregnant. He was accepted into the nursing program at state college. They had a girl. His wife stopped working while he became a nurse practitioner and his mother was happy and they lost Rabbit. His mother died and a boy was born and then his father. Then he was the oldest man in his family his wife showed wrinkles his children went to highschool and college and he bought a cabin. Bourbonconked by eight o’clock. The man owned a rifle but now he was an old man and never shot a deer or a rabbit or even a pheasant. He died before his wife. She threw a sleepy funeral with heavylidded snapdragons (her favorite) and all the younger generations of his family. His son spoke at the rostrum—my father was the most important man in my life. We ask so much of the dead. He never returned to Los Angeles. Trudging through the snow he deceived himself. He did not miss the warm Venice wind on his back. He did not miss the tideworn pebbles between his toes. He swore he knew joy in his life.

• • •

Breadcrumb #611

DARIA LAVELLE

The storefront is tiny, just the width of its slender green door. 

You’ll have to shuffle sideways through the cramped corridor, like in one of those old railroad apartments, but nothing like that at all. Your back will snag against the unfinished wall and the rest of you will suck in, trying to avoid the baubles, the tinctures, the bell-jars and hourglasses and apothecary canisters and beakers and flasks all glittering down from every inch of the floor-to-ceiling shelves, which will go as far as your eyes can see and then some. 

When you make it through the hall, when you let out the breath you’ll have been holding, you’ll be in a little back room that, every five minutes, will spin wildly about on its chicken legs. 

Each time it stops, a lone window will reveal a new wonder. Sometimes you’ll overlook a great pyramid in Giza. Sometimes, you’ll be on the bank of the Danube in the dark. Sometimes you’ll be staring at a Banksy on a brick wall. Sometimes you’ll be this close to the surface of the moon, craters galore. You could waste time opening the window in front of you and breathing in desert sand or river rocks or Nuts4Nuts or moonbeams, but you’ll only have ten minutes in the place, and you’ll already have spent one shuffling down the long corridor, so tick tock.

Inside the room will be three wise girls, each seated at the foot of a massage chair. The first chair will be copper, the second silver, and the third gold. Each girl’s hair will match the chair she serves, long down to her waist, worn in serpentine braids. They’ll have bangles, too, hundreds of them, up and down the sinew of their arms, the same color as their hair and their chair and the rest of it. And the clothes they’ll wear, red or grey or mustardseed, will glimmer, though the fabrics will be dull and coarse and the back room will have scarcely enough light to make them shine.

You’ll pick a chair and sit down, though sometimes a girl and her chair will pick you.

“They’ll have bangles, too, hundreds of them, up and down the sinew of their arms, the same color as their hair and their chair and the rest of it.”

Each girl has her specialty. Copper for the heart. Silver, the mind. Gold, the soul. 

The girls will offer you a massage, even though they stink at massages and their chairs are just for show. You’ll say you’ll skip the massage, but that you’ll take the Happy Ending Special. 

“Payment up front,” your girl will demand, one hand on her hip, her fingernails tapping. 

You’ll nod and fork over several years of your life.

She’ll tuck them inside the wide sleeve of her red or grey or mustardseed tunic, and nod, and hold out her hands, into which you’ll place your story.

You’ll watch her eyes swing left to right, reading your words, consuming your pages. She’ll read very, very fast; she has infinite practice and she’ll not want to waste any time. You’ll notice the corners of her mouth twitch, and you’ll wonder whether that’s a smile or a frown. You’ll bite your tongue so hard you’ll taste blood. 

“Yes,” she’ll say at very, very long last, “I think we can fit you in.” 

And she’ll beckon you through a door that won’t have been there a moment ago, was perhaps never there and will never be there again, its beaded curtain jangling as it tongues you inside. 

This next room will be darker, smaller, lit by the light of a thousand candles and still too dim to see your own two hands. Your wise girl’s hair will glisten, copper or silver or gold, and that’s how you’ll be able to follow her through this room, into a crumbling passageway, and beyond to a dense forest. You’ll hold your arms out in front of you, grasping at shadows and shoving away brush, as you try not to trip over roots and brambles. 

“I’m Ariadne, by the way,” she’ll say in the dark, her voice pealing like a bell. 

You’ll tell her your name, and she’ll sound unimpressed when she repeats it back to you.

“Where are we going?” you’ll ask in a spell. 

“I’m taking a shortcut,” she’ll reply. 

You’ll walk for what feels like decades. You’ll wonder how much time has passed and remember the hourglasses you saw in the entry, the ones that didn’t seem to move by any gravity you could follow, the sand flowing up instead of down and winding itself into question marks. You’ll be ready to scream right about then, but just as you open your mouth to shout, Ariadne will turn around and press something into your palm.

“It’s ready for you,” she’ll whisper, her words making sparks in the dark, phosphorescent as fireflies. 

“How does it end?” you’ll ask, breathless with equal parts exhaustion and anxiety.

“Oh,” she’ll laugh, “I can’t ruin the surprise!”

“Surprise?” you’ll panic, “It’s not that kind of story.”

She’ll say your name softly then, and put her small, hot hand on your shoulder.

“Does a thread really care what the tapestry looks like?” She’ll ask this as though it is some sort of answer.

And you, not wanting to sound stupid in front of so wise a girl, will mutter something noncommittal like, “I guess not.”

And then a great gong will sound, and Ariadne will vanish into a ball of light, and the dark forest with its thick brush will lift around you like so much smoke. 

You’ll be right back out on the street again but in your hand will be the vial, inside of which will be a curled slip of paper, upon which your perfect ending will be written, the thread distinct from the tapestry, because that’s what you just chose without knowing you were choosing it.

The green door will never be in the same place twice. 

The only way to find it is to follow the white rabbit out from a magician’s dream. You’ll know him by his pocket watch – the casing made of copper, the chain silver, the hands gold – and the sound it makes as it counts down, each tick and tock the beat of a tale-telling heart. He’ll be checking this watch constantly; he’s forever running late. And Destiny hates to be kept waiting.

• • •

Breadcrumb #610

DEIDRE ROBINSON

In the free fall of my nightmare, I never feel free. Only afraid. Afraid that my tall torso would be mere dust in the heaven of someone’s memory. Or that my falling was only failing into the mystery of life. My daughter left me behind. 

It’s my decisions that killed her.

“Ms. Brown, we’re so sorry…” 

Words no parent ever wants to hear. I don’t even know what happened after that. My heart is missing from me. Tu me manques. You are missing from me. I’m sorry. I failed you.

Your casket was charcoal grey. Just like your favorite suit.  You know the one. You got it from the men’s section at Burlington and had it tailored even. You looked great in it, Savannah. I never told you because you made decisions that scared me. I…I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to. 

“You got it from the men’s section at Burlington and had it tailored even.”

Sometimes, it’s the hardest thing for a parent to admit when they’re wrong. All I could remember was my precious little girl who always came home from school with dirt on her red dress with white lace trim and holes in her matching white stockings with red hearts and a missing barrette with one undone braid that only wanted to make Mommy proud. Even all those years ago when you had that note from that girl you were dating, I wanted to believe that it was some other evil influence on you. Not my baby. 

Wasn’t it just the other day when you’d graduated from college? You finished what I could not. Oh, Savannah. You always had more courage than me. I did the best I could with what I knew. You were my blessing. My Savior. I thought if I sent you to church and the best schools and gave you everything that I never had that I’d be wiped clean. Made new. 

Don’t you remember when you went to school and learned that song? You remember the one.

You are my sunshine
My only sunshine
You make me happy
When skies are grey
You’ll never know, dear
How much I love you.
Please don’t take – 

Now all I have is this picture. It’s my favorite one. Mostly because it’s the one I kept near me when you went away to college. It’s the one I most clearly remember. When you were 17 and a senior in high school. You always hated this picture. Remember how you spent all morning working on your hair only to have it rain as we left the house and your hair ended up a big frizzy afro? You cried all the way home because I wouldn’t let you retake your portraits. There was just no way I was spending anymore money. I was hustling to get the money together for that anyway. I didn’t care. I just loved to show off my baby. My little girl.

You used to want to be like Mommy. Remember? You always wanted to sing like me. I even let you use one of my wigs and wear heels and a little bit of lipstick as you’d get one of my Avon hairbrushes and sick your little heart out to Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With it?” I even got you a little jean jacket and skirt set because you wanted to look just like Tina in her video leaned up against the fence wondering about love.

I didn’t understand then. 

I just thought you were a four-year-old mimicking a singer, like you did with Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston. And even Madonna. I didn’t know you were also crying out for me to love you. To love you for you and not what I wanted you to be. 

You know how your grandmother always used to say that we need to follow the greatest commandment of loving one another like Jesus. I thought I was. I never grasped that you were a light. A soul that left behind a trail of light as a breadcrumb for me to remember. To find the way home. Back to love.

It was my decisions that killed her.

And me.

• • •

Breadcrumb #609

LINDSAY KIRK

Lacerations stretch as they breathe
Ancient wounds haunt
As an inhale widens their cage
An exhale weeps
Over a shattered frame

Drawing tangled paths north
Teeth chatter out the seconds
Slowly gaining in sound
What is lost in distance
Milking heat from the coldest stars

Chapped lips form a ghostly whistle
Yet nothing runs close
A ceaseless crunch
As feet become snow
Dancing over the graves of variations before.

• • •