Apple pies and abandoned journals

I’m blogging again.  I’ve decided.  So here it is.

It was a little over two years ago that my life hit one of its bottom points: my job was gone, my father had died, my boyfriend had left me; and alone and desperate in my half-boxed-up rental house in Olympia I huddled in a blanket at 3 AM and started to write.  I started to write for the first time in years, crafting these little time capsule blog posts, putting them out into the ether on myspace because for god’s sake the pain had to go somewhere.

I was surprised then how many people ended up reading those and commenting.  I’ve also been surprised at how many people, even two years and change later, mention those blog posts and ask when I’m going to write more.  There was a time in my life when I wrote for pages every day, especially when I was 21, living in London and only owned what I could carry on a plane the week after 9/11 in two beat up suit cases.  I curled up against the radiator in my tiny closet of a flat at London Bridge Station and wrote.  I sat on the Tube and on trains to Scotland and wrote.  I rode random double decker buses to strange places around the city and wrote.  I sat in misty parks and wrote.  I perched in coffee shops and wrote.  I got a degree in English.  I worked as a journalist in New Orleans.  I dreamed of being one of those sickeningly precocious novelists that won the Pulitzer Prize by the age of 24.  What a brat.

Looking back, I wonder if I would have stuck with it even if the hurricane hadn’t swept in and killed so much of my life and habits and joy.  I did ballet until I was 12 before switching my interest fully into music.  I was one of those kids who could not stop creating.  I wrote plays.  I wrote songs.  I made clothes and costumes and jewelry.  I ran into my third grade teacher at my grandfather’s funeral a few years back, and when she asked what I was doing with my life and I told her I was running a bellydance and circus company, she rolled her eyes and said, “Well, that figures.”  If, godforbidknockonwood, I woke up tomorrow and couldn’t dance anymore, I would find some sort of creative thing to do: costume design, music again, writing a novel from my wheelchair, something.  But I picked writing to pursue as a profession because for a while I dutifully believed my parents’ fears that while artistic endeavors were great as extra-curricular activities, it was Really Not A Good Idea To Actually Do Them For A Living For Real.  When I got to college, I grudgingly took a look at communications and marketing classes because, according to an article my mother read, my writing abilities would be utilized well there.  After about a semester of that, I gave up on the notion that I would ever be happy doing something sensible with my life and declared my English major.  I would be a writer, because I was good at it.  But even that was a compromise.  I really wanted to be a musician, but figured I could placate the naysayers in my family and my life with writing because it was the most academic of all my interests.  This was long before I even discovered eating fire.

Yesterday was a rainy Sunday.  I spent a lot of the day in bed recovering from a lot of things: a massive birthday party we’d thrown for several circus performers and staff the night before, performing a couple times through the week, still a bit of post-partum from the Midsummer Night’s Cirque premiere and continued prep for the reprise.  It was gray and dark outside, and my room was clean for a change and my bed was cozy, so I snatched an opportunity to close and lock my door for a few hours, catch up on internet fluff and finish a book I’d been sporadically attempting to read.  My old lover “M” from the London days popped up and started chatting for the first time in a while as he rode the bus home to Cambridge.  And after typing for a couple hours, he picked up the phone and actually called me for the first time in years.  He’s not changed at all.  He claims my southern accent has come back.  At one point during our catching up he reminded me of these homemade-from-scratch apple pies I used to make in the shared kitchen of my dorm when we were dating.  I’d forgotten completely about them.  They got to be so notorious that I used to open my door in the morning and find bags of apples resting against the doorstop; a hint to make a pie out of them, filling the 15-story building with the smell of them, sending the British kids running to our kitchen hoping to grab a slice.  “Do you still make them?” M asked.  “Actually, babe,” I said, “I haven’t made one since I left England.”

When I leave a place, especially if there are tears and regret involved, I often leave bits and pieces of myself and my interests behind me.  When I left London, I never made another apple pie.  When I left college, I didn’t play music for six years.  I often tell people that when Katrina hit New Orleans, I lost my love of cooking, my love of gardening and my motivation for writing.  But if I were to be honest with myself, I think I left my writing behind in that bed by the radiator, in the Tube stops, in M’s flat where we got into a lot of trouble.  When I returned to the states, my journals were left mostly empty after several false starts.  When I graduated and moved in with Toby, he left me at home in a student slums hellhole he’d found so that I could write my first novel.  I had nothing to say.  I choked up with the fear that I couldn’t be clever enough.  I made clothes.  I wandered around New Orleans.  I eventually landed a freelance job with Gambit Weekly, and at least I could write features and blurbs.  But I was pigeonholing myself in the wrong art form, putting all my eggs in what I thought was the most respectable basket.  And, of course, it all dried up on my fingertips.

I’ve been having a lot of conversations with my roommate and dance partner, Asharah, about the way our brains and bodies work.  Asharah is a fellow chronic overachiever, who went to an ivy league school and balanced a marriage, an international dance career and an analyst government job before she threw over her job and left her husband and ended up sharing what amounts to a a two bedroom headquarters for a strange little alternative circus in South Carolina with me.  Go figure.  Asharah is in her head a lot and very visual.  I inhabit my body very snugly and am very tactile.  My muscle memory and retention is much stronger than my intellectual memory and retention.  When Asharah listens to music, she sees colors and patterns.  When I listen to music, I’m analyzing melodies physically by air playing flute keys.  When Asharah choreographs in her head, she sees it on a headless dancer outside of herself.  When I choreograph in my head, I imagine what my muscles and bones will feel like as I execute movements.  Both of us have been hypnotized to various degrees by a friend of ours, and while Asharah had a very vivid visualization while she was under, I can’t see the damned hallway Fred keeps instructing me to see, and he couldn’t get me to leave my body for anything.  A lot of this dialogue springs from a conversation we had after a funeral we attended earlier in the week; we were sharing our wishes for what we wanted to happen after we died.  Asharah doesn’t feel much connection to her body and would rather be cremated.  I feel too much connection to my body and want to be buried in an ecofriendly way where some semblance and form of my body is retained, and sad little nerd girls can come to my grave, preferably under a dramatic willow tree, and preferably at midnight or later, to leave pennies, wine and other offerings in the style of Marie Laveaux.  So as can be expected when you stick two nerd girl artists in a house together and make them run their bellydance businesses from laptops on the same kitchen table, we’ve been expounding on our different approaches and how they affect our lives and our dancing for about a week.  We go through a lot of tea during our philosophizing, it turns out.  So as I sit here at 2 AM with a teacup at my right elbow and nutella at my left, thinking about the death grip my consciousness has on my broken and screwed up body, it rather makes sense that I ended up happiest expressing myself physically through dance and music, instead of rattling around in my neurotic head all day via pen and paper.

Last night Asharah ended up free dancing in the dance room all night and I’m up at 2 AM writing 2000 words about how I didn’t really want to be a writer after all.  We’re nothing if not stubborn.

Why am I doing this?  Because the other night at 4 in the morning I had this crazy idea that I needed to write a book at some point about some of the crazy shit I’ve learned, and this seems like good practice.  Because I’d like to give my brain some exercise.  Because I’ve been reading in bits and pieces and fits and starts when I hit those brick walls when I just can’t be a cirque-oholic anymore, and reading others’ work makes me miss the puzzle and joy of crafting pieces that shine (this isn’t one of them.  This is more of a brain dump.  But it’s a start).  Because I’ve had several people tell me lately that I’m working too hard and I need to take more time for me, and this might be a way to do it.  And because I’m falling into the small town trap where everyone knows me as The Bellydancer and I’m hoping in some perverse way to actually show the sometimes messy and neurotic girl behind the curtain.  And because if I take on a writing exercise in public, I’m much more likely to keep it going due to peer pressure and public shaming.  If you’re reading this, and you don’t mind, please endeavor to keep me on track.

And so I try to get familiar with the pen again.  And for the hell of it, I may try making an apple pie.