I have a special treat for you this week. This week on the blog I present you TWO narratives on LOST. The first comes from the fabulous Amye Archer. Amye Archer holds an MFA from Wilkes University. You can find her
at
www.amyearcher.com. Trust me...you NEED to read her work. My writing will follow her piece.
Please consider following the blog and/or leave a comment if you appreciate what you read. Tell me how you interpret LOST. I am always looking for feedback and would welcome yours.
Now...let's get to the writing---------
LOST:
adjective
unable to find one’s way; not knowing one’s whereabouts
-
(of a person) very confused or insecure or in great difficulties
denoting something that has been taken away or cannot be recovered
(of time or an opportunity) not used advantageously; wasted
having perished or been destroyed
(of a game or contest) in which a defeat has been sustained
http://oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/lost
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Amye Archer on LOST
I am six and the lure of a good candy bar pulls me from my
mother's hip and into a story that will follow me forever. How I scream when I turn to find her
gone. How I scream even though she is
three feet away in the next aisle. How I
scream when I think I'm alone. How I
scream.
My parents divorce in a pressure cooker. My mother sleeps on the couch, my father
searches other women for a trace of her.
I am in the garden of their collapsed marriage. It is calm here. My roots stretch out and attach to the wrong
man. We survive the blast.
My husband moves out on a Thursday night. I try not to scream when I notice he's
gone. I attach the prefix "ex"
to my memories of him.
I am 27 and use my last hundred bucks to buy a black
acoustic guitar from a small shop in Wilkes-Barre. I buy a chord book and memorize them all,
minor, major, open, flat. I play a lot
of Tom Petty. My neighbors complain. Then, on a hot fall night a boy teaches me to
play Radiohead's Creep, my favorite song.
He presses my plump fingers down into a bar chord and slides our fused
hands up and down the thick neck. We
make music together. I mistake his
kindness for love.
I walk the streets with Paul Simon in my ears. Trees hang over me like fallen arches. The sidewalks carry me to a new life. I worry they will collapse before I make it
home.
I look at the clock: 2:06 PM. I still have four minutes before I have to
leave to pick my daughters up from school.
Four whole minutes to cry. 2:09
PM: I pool cold water between my hands and splash my red beating face. I drip one drop of Visine in each eye, brush
my teeth, and leave.
There are things I knew for certain two years ago: my
marriage was strong, my kids were happy, I was becoming a writer, I was already
a good mother, my husband was happy.
Now, I don't think any of those are true, they feel like certainties
that belong to someone else and they are hers
and not mine. I feel like I have
somehow shattered, like I am in pieces, like there is nothing but tissue paper
gauzing my insides together.
I write secret letters to my husband. Letters begging him to hang onto me-like I
can anchor us to something bigger. Like
I'm not weightless and floating away. I
fold the notes like footballs and shove them in a drawer. I save the notes for the other side of
this. For the other side of LOST.
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Virginia Grove on LOST
Two wind chimes sound. The bamboo chime
taps out the soft sound of hollow raindrops while the aluminum chime sings
Amazing Grace. I start to hum and then sing, beginning with the ascending
perfect fourth--A-MA. I continue, changing gears...Do, Re, Me, Fa, ... sing the
Do-Fa fourth, before returning to the -zing grace.
How sweet the sound...
I'm reminded of music theory class, wedged into the wooden desks
at Marywood as an undergrad music therapy major, a book bag full of music
theory, percussion methods, and vocal performance texts, practice books for
piano and bassoon, and all the other things I carried...
I decided I'd major in music therapy when I was in eighth grade.
To combine my love of music and helping others seemed the only appropriate way
I could pay forward what music had given me. Music was, and will forever be, my
first love. As I grew, music was my loyal friend, confidant, and greatest
source of comfort and I saturated myself in it from elementary school through
high school and into my days as an undergrad. In elementary school, I sang in
my church choir, the French Choir, started on clarinet, and tried out for
handbells (I didn't make the group-- my right hand didn't ring bells well, my
left hand--my non-dominant hand--was the best bell ringer that side of
Philadelphia). In middle school, I continued on clarinet and in school and
church choir. I took private vocal and instrumental lessons. I played clarinet
and started on bassoon in high school, playing whichever was most appropriate
in marching band, concert band, orchestra, and wind ensemble. I continued
singing in 'homeroom chorus' an abbreviated opportunity choir set up for those
who couldn't fit any other aspect of the vocal program into their schedules.
And then I applied to and auditioned at a handful of schools where I could
major in music therapy with bassoon as my primary instrument. For as much as I
loved playing and singing in a group though, the greatest joy surrounded solitary
music. Alone in a car, singing to whatever was playing, I was happy. With my
Walkman attached to my pocket and my headphones on, I was happy. Listening to
my blue and white stereo in my blue and white bedroom while pressing play and
record to tape my favorite songs off the radio, I was happy. I was happy
practicing my clarinet or bassoon, particularly when no one was home.
Experimenting with chords and rhythm on my white guitar or my keyboard, I was
happy.
There isn't music I don't like, save for the heavy, violent,
angry music my good friend refers to as the 'Kill your mother, kill your
father, put the dog in the oven-----ahhhhhhh' music. I could do without most of
that music (though, believe me, there are days). I went through phases of
addictions to pop music, classical music, a long phase of a deep, deep love of
show tunes, Christian music, country music, and nearly everything on the
spectrum. Like other forms of creative expression, when I could connect with
the vibration of and the story in and behind the music, the music, my friend,
spoke for me and...my story...
I once was lost...
Moving away from home to go to college was disorienting. In the
spin of that period of time, I eventually dropped out of the music program
(frustrated with the narrow focus of the department), started as an English
major (realizing how much I missed the intricacies of language) and then,
incapable of going to classes post 9/11, was 'let go' from the college. Rather
than withdrawing from classes for fear that I would need to go home a failure,
I simply stopped going and took failing grades where only 'A's belonged. I
started work as a telemarketer, a poor choice for someone who dislikes the
phone as much as I did...and still do. I eventually lost that job. I left my
desk to head to the bathroom one morning or afternoon and completely lost track
of time and myself. After that, I'd ride to work with Kim, who would work while
I'd stay in the car, terrified, for the length of her workday. I don't recall
how long this went on. I started a new job a period of time after that, one
where I would have done editing work. When, after training, I was told I had a
beautiful speaking voice and was going to be put on the phones instead, I set
up my desk as though I'd continue on, and right before lunch packed all of my
things in my bag, called Kim, went to lunch, and never went back. Not long
after that, I started as a temporary employee at Prudential and was hired on as
a full-time employee less than a year later. And I'm still there...10+ years,
home owners, car owners, four academic degrees (three my own and one Kim's),
and two major health challenges (one my own and one Kim's), and one pretty
fabulous wedding later.
During that first attempt at an undergrad degree, I tried hard
to fix myself. I talked with the school counselor (she only wanted to talk
about my family and all I wanted was help getting to class), attempted to find
someone to talk to outside of the school when the school counselor didn't help
(and couldn't afford to pay that one, or the next one, or the next one), and
took various medications my mother had from the drug reps in an effort to gain
some kind of emotional stability and to lose weight (because obviously, I'd be
happier if I wasn't also fat).
My senses changed during that period of
time. Smells were paralyzing. Sound--particularly repetitive sound-- turned
more maddening than I'd ever remembered it being. Anything along the scale of
physical contact was risky. Even my vision was impacted to the degree that I'd
lose my sight entirely for periods of time. And so, I drew and painted and
wrote and read and listened to music and used everything I had in my backpack
in an effort feel less lost.
I could never sustain ‘less lost’ (just as I haven't been able
to sustain weight loss). If anything, I felt more lost. I ended up in the
emergency room a handful of times (and can think of one additional time I
should have) for overdosing on prescription or OTC medication. The lone
remaining Xanax sample pack I'd taken from my mother's grab bag of drugs and
missed taking in the one attempt, was confiscated from the purple foot locker
in my dorm room and attached to my file in the school nurse's office. I wanted
so desperately to fall the rest of the way into lost...to blend into the world
as part of it, but to be indistinguishable and untouchable and to, in every
possible way, extinguish expectation. So I worked to push away from people I
loved or who loved me. I stopped writing and drawing and reading and worked to
stay still...very still...still and quiet. I wanted to be overlooked, ignored,
and abandoned entirely so that everything made sense and the tension and
conflict between home and away, between caring and not caring, between school
and no school, between fat and thin, between safety and danger, between what
some people led me to believe and what others wanted me to believe, between
dead and alive, stopped. In the tension and conflict I self-imposed an
expectation to equalize or diffuse--to level off-- to harmonize-- and when I
couldn't, when I failed to create conditions where other people were OK and couldn't
make myself OK, the degree of self-loathing was impenetrable and the words I
spoke to myself could have killed me if only I'd spoken them at myself in an
even harsher way.
There's a very distinct line between wanting to die and wanting
to kill yourself. Wanting to die requires lining up circumstances in a way that
the desired result can be produced. Wanting to kill yourself required a
strength I didn't--and don't--have. There is a wise truth in recognizing not
everyone wishes to live out a life sentence.
I should be dead many times over, more times than anyone knows,
and figuring out what to do with that and then, if you figure out what
to do figuring out how to do what you've figured out, creates a pressure
and a tension that feels all too similar. Thoughts can change so quickly but
feelings, once you can get them, take you where they will. I am still too much
in my head with my thoughts while I try to figure out how to invite and manage
feeling. So I remove and remove and remove-- I fall into the cradle of the arts
and I rest.
If I could have captured that Ginny-- boxed her, framed her,
painted her--I would have sat her up somewhere, like an Elf on the Shelf, and
told her sit and wait it out. I'd have told her sometimes you won't find someone
who can fix what hurts because sometimes you need to be lost in the hurt until
you heal yourself. I'd have told her to try to feel less stupid and needy and
small and unworthy when wanting to reach out for help or after having reached
out for help because she wasn't stupid or needy or small or unworthy...rather,
she was hurt. I'd have told her I understood how difficult it could be to
believe me and that it mattered that she didn't, but that if she could pretend
like she did--like she could pretend herself into other worlds worlds away from
where she was lost...worlds where the wretch like her could be saved...she'd
find out she was OK.
Ginny wanted to be back on her bed at Mom-Mom's house, curled up
in her pjs on the blanket, curling her toes around the bumps and pulls on the
bedspread, with a tiny copy of Black Beauty in her lap. She wanted her head on
the rust-colored, satin pillowcase. She wanted to smell wet grass in the
backyard and honeybuns baking in the oven. That Ginny wanted to get to classes
and prove she could be successful. But she just felt lost and alone because, in
so many ways, she was.
But now am...
found? Yes and no. I'm not that person anymore. I'm not not
that person anymore. I've grown beyond her and yet she comes along. Most times,
she is harmony when I am melody. Other times, she is the dissonant melody and I
am left trying to harmonize.
Right now, today, her song is too long and
too intense and the sensations her music brings are unnerving.
Right now, today, I'm just trying to remove
myself from sensation unlike sensation I've felt before.
I'm dissonant trying to resolve.
