Looking back, the wasteland I grew up in isn't quite so unbeautiful.
The warm sheath of summer in my mind is wrapping me in soft arms and pastel colors each morning this week. Although it's only the end of January and perhaps just the head of my mountainous health trouble, something in me has been set free for the first time since I had my reading with Chris Dufresne. My throat hurts, I keep hacking from my chest like a ninety-year old lady, I'm drained and pasty pale, and my heart keeps trying to gallop over beats in my chest for no obvious reason, yes. All things that are very prominent in my life, jutting out like a sore thumb and tugging out from within me fears of early death. But I'm gaining a bit of healthy weight, understanding the problem in my body more and more, and went new job hunting this weekend. And I'm innately needing the summer again. This place I sit in my life is gray, and I'm gravely worried about the rock that's hit my health. But my yearning for summer is so deep and dark it almost eats me alive when I smell the warm roots of summer in the light of the sun mixed with ice and pollution outside. Even though almost I'm frozen with lethargy and the sense that the fun in my life has all been had and done with, it sparks me warmly to life somewhere deep inside to see the snow melting and a new sun shining outside. There is sun on my skin and beginning outline the standstill of my life some way, somehow. I hadn't known that even the first layer of me could be melted anymore, and I'm pleasantly shocked to feel the faraway warmth of impending spring ease like butter into my frozen pale sheet of skin. The call of spring is heavy and forlorn, and it reminds of me of so many seasons past.
The photographer I worked with in Princeton two weeks ago asked me if there was anywhere grungy and delipidated around my area to take pictures in next time, since he's looking to do a more artistic shoot with me next time. I laughed out loud because Avenel is the lost land of grunge to me even if I have lived here most of my life. I thought of the train station at sunset, where the sky stretches out lost and wide, casting a strangely peaceful orange light over all the dirt and waste we're engulfed in below, a sea of lost souls molten together by darkness and grime even if we do have meaningful lives...even those of us who do fully plan on escaping this hole. And then this idea popped like white silk out of my mind, this picture of myself in a long white vintage dress with dark make-up beneath the angry fire blaze of the sun on the tracks. I could imagine I would feel softly molten like lava in that scene, expressing in one frozen moment what it feels like to be me at twenty-three and living here. I know the idea is chliche and I'm actually really shocked the photogroaher wants to come to Avenel, but the bittersweet picture of shooting photos here stung me profoundly. The ivory smooth contrast of the white dress would be the part of me- the majority of me- that has outgrown New Jersey altogether, and the pollution swirling in the gray behind me would represent to me how stuck and lost and truly..well, molten I feel here- like volanic waste swirling in faded circles around the same old place where everything is eroded and new. I want to glow like wild fire and holy lights against the cold gray wasteland my life feels like right now.
Then I remembered that the tracks are right near the prison and we all know dead bodies turn up there at night sometimes. I was IMing with Amanda at the time- we tentatively made up because she said a very sincere sorry and is coming here in March with Jason (in spring just like I'd known inside they'd be here back when we had those empty plans December). It's on my home turf so I'm really excited to see them and finally meet Amanda. Anyway, I told her about my idea and how it wouldn't work after all because the place wasn't safe and this photographer is rather small, and Amanda asked me if there was a lake anywhere. I was about to scoff jokingly at her for imagining a lake in Avenel, but then a picture of the bay at Sewaren filled my mind with a bright idea. The bay in the next town over is flanked by an eerie backround of factories and their smoking flames, but against the crystal clarity of the water everything behind it somehow looks older and faded, as if dreamed in from a faraway time. It reminds me of visions I've had all my life of some dark city with futuristic pollution, politicians with evil motives, and a strange, almost mechanical beauty at night...or the times when my parents would drive me over the bridge into New York City when I was just a scared speck of a kid in awe of the vast darkness of the night, recongnizing somehow the lights of the city and longing to be among even the darkest parts with a gruesome, agonizing ache that seemed to come supernaturally from thin air. Strange as it sounds, when I was an innocent child, thoughts of crime and dirt and polluted layers in old cities would warm my heart in and wrap me in a familiar, fuzzy embrace. I can't help but see these things when I go to certain places like the lake in Sewaren or make love to certain people, especially Blair..or even just when someone reaches a certain deep place inside of me through touch or words or silently holding my hand through the ages like he has.
I sent the photographer a message that I'd like to do the shoot in Sewaren, and I hope he goes for my white dress/black eyeliner idea even though we're in the middle of winter. There are also these really ancient, huge houses there that glimmer like the carefree sparkle of the bay during summers past, and I'd be willing to bet it'd be hard for anyone's heart not to ache with the antique beauty of it all. Lately I've been yearning to share and appreciate all kinds of beauty, asking my girl friends to come with me on these shoots and the ones who'd like to model to join the modeling website I just got on. I hate bounds and constrictions lately, espeically the ones of this old town. But sometimes I don't hate them, because they contain a kind of old wooden beauty as they wisp away behind me while I begin to lay down the very first foundations for the new life I want to live. I do hate these mostrous, frosty claws of midwinter more than I have other years, though. I feel ready to blow this place and move on even though I know I'm not quite there physically or spiritually yet. I've still got bones to pick and peaces to make in this grunge land before I can be on my way. I don't, however, want to move until I can afford almost yearly trips back. And that says something.
The photographer I worked with in Princeton two weeks ago asked me if there was anywhere grungy and delipidated around my area to take pictures in next time, since he's looking to do a more artistic shoot with me next time. I laughed out loud because Avenel is the lost land of grunge to me even if I have lived here most of my life. I thought of the train station at sunset, where the sky stretches out lost and wide, casting a strangely peaceful orange light over all the dirt and waste we're engulfed in below, a sea of lost souls molten together by darkness and grime even if we do have meaningful lives...even those of us who do fully plan on escaping this hole. And then this idea popped like white silk out of my mind, this picture of myself in a long white vintage dress with dark make-up beneath the angry fire blaze of the sun on the tracks. I could imagine I would feel softly molten like lava in that scene, expressing in one frozen moment what it feels like to be me at twenty-three and living here. I know the idea is chliche and I'm actually really shocked the photogroaher wants to come to Avenel, but the bittersweet picture of shooting photos here stung me profoundly. The ivory smooth contrast of the white dress would be the part of me- the majority of me- that has outgrown New Jersey altogether, and the pollution swirling in the gray behind me would represent to me how stuck and lost and truly..well, molten I feel here- like volanic waste swirling in faded circles around the same old place where everything is eroded and new. I want to glow like wild fire and holy lights against the cold gray wasteland my life feels like right now.
Then I remembered that the tracks are right near the prison and we all know dead bodies turn up there at night sometimes. I was IMing with Amanda at the time- we tentatively made up because she said a very sincere sorry and is coming here in March with Jason (in spring just like I'd known inside they'd be here back when we had those empty plans December). It's on my home turf so I'm really excited to see them and finally meet Amanda. Anyway, I told her about my idea and how it wouldn't work after all because the place wasn't safe and this photographer is rather small, and Amanda asked me if there was a lake anywhere. I was about to scoff jokingly at her for imagining a lake in Avenel, but then a picture of the bay at Sewaren filled my mind with a bright idea. The bay in the next town over is flanked by an eerie backround of factories and their smoking flames, but against the crystal clarity of the water everything behind it somehow looks older and faded, as if dreamed in from a faraway time. It reminds me of visions I've had all my life of some dark city with futuristic pollution, politicians with evil motives, and a strange, almost mechanical beauty at night...or the times when my parents would drive me over the bridge into New York City when I was just a scared speck of a kid in awe of the vast darkness of the night, recongnizing somehow the lights of the city and longing to be among even the darkest parts with a gruesome, agonizing ache that seemed to come supernaturally from thin air. Strange as it sounds, when I was an innocent child, thoughts of crime and dirt and polluted layers in old cities would warm my heart in and wrap me in a familiar, fuzzy embrace. I can't help but see these things when I go to certain places like the lake in Sewaren or make love to certain people, especially Blair..or even just when someone reaches a certain deep place inside of me through touch or words or silently holding my hand through the ages like he has.
I sent the photographer a message that I'd like to do the shoot in Sewaren, and I hope he goes for my white dress/black eyeliner idea even though we're in the middle of winter. There are also these really ancient, huge houses there that glimmer like the carefree sparkle of the bay during summers past, and I'd be willing to bet it'd be hard for anyone's heart not to ache with the antique beauty of it all. Lately I've been yearning to share and appreciate all kinds of beauty, asking my girl friends to come with me on these shoots and the ones who'd like to model to join the modeling website I just got on. I hate bounds and constrictions lately, espeically the ones of this old town. But sometimes I don't hate them, because they contain a kind of old wooden beauty as they wisp away behind me while I begin to lay down the very first foundations for the new life I want to live. I do hate these mostrous, frosty claws of midwinter more than I have other years, though. I feel ready to blow this place and move on even though I know I'm not quite there physically or spiritually yet. I've still got bones to pick and peaces to make in this grunge land before I can be on my way. I don't, however, want to move until I can afford almost yearly trips back. And that says something.