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.