On September 12th, the Indiana Daily Student published a guest column by yours truly, something I’ve been promising to write for well over a year now. You should read it at the IDS website, but in short, I dropped out of music school, spent years putting myself back together, and just as I felt strong enough to confront the past, I found that I had tempted fate with my belief that nothing could destroy me like that again. I like to think of it as a B-side to a larger story; this is the tragedy that was unfolding behind the curtain, behind the tragedy you already knew.
I’ve been really into poems about Eurydice lately — Eurydice, so close to the open mouth of Hell, already feeling the sun on her face, only to be damned for all time by stupid fucking softboy Orpheus. The majority of 2021 was that moment for me, my last gasp of Earth’s air. And then I met him, just as summer turned to fall. I’ve referenced the Eurydice myth in some notes app poetry, comparing the campus of my alma mater to Hell, a music practice building to a morgue, my time there illustrated as a dream, a past life, an afterlife, a separate reality altogether.
I really wanted to write a longer piece and have it published in a larger publication — there is just so, so much to be said, and I know my story could be of wide interest, not just local. It was difficult to come up with such a condensed version of the events, especially because I still have incredibly complicated feelings about the whole affair. I might spend the rest of my life trying to explain it. An old friend told me every artist tells just one story. If that’s true, this must be mine: sin unpunished, innocence lost, cosmic opportunities handed to the woefully human, how blind we can be in our desire, how it leads us to ruin, how our actions ripple through time and how, just as we think the dust has settled, the wind blows in just the right (or wrong) way and it all kicks up again.
The column was well-received and highly circulated. It was a great act of resistance and liberation, a long-awaited milestone I should be proud of myself for finally reaching. But at night, when I’m tired and alone, I am still left with the trauma and grief that necessitated it. I am acting in accordance with what I feel must now be done, but God, none of this had to happen at all. How am I supposed to feel proud of myself for talking about something that completely eviscerated me? I never asked to be a survivor. I never wanted to overcome. I thought I already had. Why again? Will there be more?
There’s also still a small part of me that wishes I could be friends with these people, my ex included. Within me there is an unhealed teenage girl who just wants to be part of the hang but can’t, because she’s a problem. She won’t fall in line, won’t partake in her own dehumanization, the fee every girl must pay to enter the boys’ club. I think my relationship was partially an attempt to make peace with that wound, an opportunity to realize these boys aren’t all that bad. I was so sure this boy was the rare kind who would never come to collect on that debt. Now all I’ve done in the time since is pay and pay and pay.
In the summer of 2021, I was looking forward to going into that new academic year as my last year in Bloomington. I could move away and not have to think about this place or these people ever again. I could crawl out of Hell at last. There would be loose ends, sure, but now that I’ve found where those ends lead I wish so badly I hadn’t been there that gorgeous July day slipping into night, looking at the little LCD screen, operating a camera at a music festival as a favor to a friend. I met him at the end of August. We watched a movie on Labor Day — how poetic that this column could be published in September. Now it’s almost October and I’m remembering everything. And it’ll be New Year’s Eve again so soon, and another year of remembering.
One of the major changes my editor suggested was to cut some lines about the guilt that has consumed me all this time, so as not to make the reader think I actually did anything wrong. And it’s true, I haven’t done anything I should feel guilty about, but when tragedy strikes we always look for ways we could have prevented it. If only I’d left the house later. If only I’d stayed home. If only I hadn’t fallen in love.
I’m not a cool, mysterious person who’s hard to get and easy to lose. I have always let love disarm me completely. And it’s not because I’ve always trusted that my lover wouldn’t destroy me — it’s because I didn’t care if they did. I’m horrified at myself and my capacity to endure cruelty. Did I know from the beginning he was going to hurt me? I’d like to think it began honestly enough, but staying was undeniably an act of self-harm.
Is justice, like love, something that we can’t predict or know the source of? Justice now seems more nebulous and slow-moving to me than it used to. There is surely much more on the horizon to be revealed. One of the uses of writing this column was to add to a collection of stories about this institution, so that those who are where I once was can look back and have this mountain of evidence behind them. I hope it does just that. The previous, slightly smaller mountain did so much for me.
I’ve yet to make much sense of any of this, but I know this much: Our suffering isn’t beautiful, but our survival is, and talking about my suffering was the only way I was going to save my own life. I don’t know what’s next. I don’t really know what to do now. But I’m going to start with keeping myself alive and continuing to tell the story.
P.S. Here’s a playlist, because ironically I spend more time curating playlists about the things I want to write about than actually writing them. Let’s hope I get around to turning my anguish into art someday.