Dear Artist

A creative narrative letter from a girl writing to a musician who helped her get through an illness.

Dear Artist,

            I want to talk you about my residue.

            Residue: the remaining part after something is removed.

   I was gone, removed, until I stumbled upon your song "Warranted Queen"--liked it, downloaded it, and added it to my playlist labeled "Me" (songs I like just for me). Thank you (you don't know me) but your song was my savior, and you allowed me to reappear as residue after a lost self; sudsy, unmanageable, but there.

These past few weeks (out of no where), my life-carnival self-built a new unwinnable game: I had a terrible reaction to my medication. My doctor and I are still trying to sort through more possible, underlying problems, but without my medication I’m not mentally treated. With my medication I fall apart physically, so the game is this: be attractive or intelligent. You choose. Unwinnable, a f*****g carnival game.

It started on a normal day, actually better than normal, a good day. I was driving with a car full of friends, we were still positively maudlin from leftover weekend adventures--crying from laughing about boys we met, and boys we didn’t want to meet, how much we just love each other (we have since college). I dropped them off (thank goodness) because right after that, I felt it. Something serious took ahold of my body, so I pulled over and breathed. Get over it I said to myself it’s going to be okay. My body seized. Imagine such: the vessel you belong to not belonging to you. Unwinnable. It was the first of about five.

I convulsed, cried, and vomited (graphic I apologize), but graphic is our bodies, unowned. You were a graphic baby, you’ll be a graphic elder, and you’ll have babies and care for elders in graphic masses of biological impulses. Love is measured by the amount of vomit involved. I called 911.

I’m 24, quarter-life (who knows), my body rejected itself, graphically. I had no say (a grotesque, unwarranted queen)--hardly royalty, but me.

Nothing anyone said helped, not their fault, all inhabitants of my crashed-in world were apart of the dirty team, trying to reassure me I still looked beautiful: I only believed my sick mirror reflection. My hair fell out. I spent money on this new game life presented me, bought more rings to throw on greased-up bottles, but not my fault, nothing stuck, not my fault, I lost. Laughable failures without choice, but I just had to get that large fluffy stuffed animal (my hair, my life, my normalcy).

People don’t know how to respond to that, and I don’t want to hear anything, so we get along just fine, but you spoke to me, unbidden, and that’s the best kind of feeling: “alright”.

I couldn’t fill up a gas tank without caused anxiety about convulsing, which caused a convulsion--the circle of messed-up fickleness. I just wanted to win a large animal for a cold head, and that's a metaphor, I don't know what I was trying to win, nothing: I was just trying to be.

My rings were tossed. The fluffy prize was lost. As a pale, sun-shunned recluse, I coiled in front of my laptop to hide, but my dad found me.

"Just walk," he said, "when you start walking, out of instinct, the human body will go for miles." 

He's smart like that, a go-getter seizing fucked up life (different than my fucked up life seizing me)... I walked, but slumped. Piled thoughts trailed behind, too close for comfort. I found my "Me" playlist, and alphabetically, you premiered before the rest playing “Warranted Queen.” Just when I thought I was wiped, completely sponged from living, you seeped out the filmy coating that is me, a residue creating traction over greased-up bottles--prize-winning, my fluffy animal.

I speak to a star beyond my reach, but you sang about love, not the perfect or everlasting kind, but a hope-filled maybe, equally special in unknown and known, an alright kind; a love put on repeat, for every walk and every mile, a leftover love that rebuilds. Your song helped me walk again. If disaster is known, the unknown must be greater, a balancing out… an alright.

With a falling apart body, you alerted me to working ears, last-functioning parts refound my legs, and we formed a search party to find my hair, to find my sanity, and we (all of me) walked on together, out of human instinct, for miles: scraped up residue rolled into a ball of a body, gunk heavy enough to hold.

For a follow-up, I went to my doctor's office this afternoon. There was a 12-year-old girl, dressed in hurt, you know the Hot-Topic display window, f**k you get out of my face, smile-frowned kind of hurt. She had pink hair and face piercings that were pierced with more piercings, on top of more piercings, and together, we waited on couches, pierced: the combined residue of our sick culture.

Thin and gaunt, the girl just about blew away each time the fan-head swung her way, and I held my breath to not add air. I wanted to say it’s alright. Just like you say. Out of shyness I didn’t, I should have, but you (the musician) says the things we can’t. You did it for me.

I got it, her smile. Fake. Mine was too.

“It’s great you’re smiling,” people would always observe of me, like witnessing an eclipse: new sun before moon, so I smiled more (a less astronomical event). Maybe sometimes I just didn’t want to, my inept mouth laid straight, but people couldn’t handle that. “Smile,” they’d say. I smiled for miles, on my walks, but liked my gooey guts: all I had left after a molted, mutant exterior. If I really smiled, they’d know it, feel it, and wouldn’t need to ask for it. 

"Cassandra?" The nurse called the young girl over first.

Accompanying my doctor, a woman who replaced Cassandra sat on her same dented couch cushion, the still-warm spot she strategically chose. Her mother, I presumed from similar sad-souled temperament, was concerned. "Much thinner than the last time, huh?" She asked my doctor.

“Yes.” My doctor was sullen, but obliged to me too, “I’ll be right with you,” he said.

“Take your time.” I couldn’t be an added worry, they weren’t the pulled-out hairs in my brush, and I’m not the pounds she can’t gain. Who needs to say sorry? Who needs to curtsey and bow their ways out of losing the lottery? 

My doctor ran back down the hall, and the mother and I sat, in silence, the fan blew and radio played. She was playing the same carnival game, a bunch of tries with little reward, clowns laugh at us, and we fear them.

Earlier that day my whole head of hair wormed down my shower drain, despoiled, my world went with it. I supported myself over the faucet as I wept (silently). Drained with problems: who could love me like this? I saw molded cracks in the tiles, even though I cleaned them two days ago, and thought of possible growth. I thought about residue. That could me too... 

“Just walk,” my dad encouraged.

I walked to the beauty store. I showed the clerk my head, and she gasped. I’m not a Ripley’s Believe it or Not shock-worthy episode… I left to go hide again. For all the times I said I had a bad hair day in the mirror, I apologized to my past self.

This sounds minimal and trite, but on my way back into hiding, a boy landscaping said “hi” to me, ditched his half-smoked cigarette to give me attention, and sought out mine in return with a whert-whirl whistle. Sleazy, scummy, a grease product of his own using, he smelled bad, but I took his presence in.

I had a baseball-cap on, but he saw my face. A casual cat-call to a passing-by girl, meaningless, but he had no idea how much it meant to me… still cat-callable.

What’s this chick’s problem?

My teary eyes of thankfulness were not what he was used to. 

I put in each side of my ear-bud headphones and played “Warranted Queen”--it’s alright. I sang with you and you never knew.

At our waiting room gathering, the girl’s mother and I sat. I watched as her right knee shook uncontrollably. Tired-eyed, she rested her face floor-bound, bowing to the fate of her daughter.

Crash something broke. Me, the desk-receptionist, and the mother all perked up with a groundhog-peep-up stance. The mother stood, but didn’t move, she didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t blame her. I just wanted to hold up a sign it's okay to be lost.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, and looked at me. 

“It’s alright,” I said, but not like you say it. 

I could handle the wait, loud noises, and uncomfortable silences. I could handle hair loss and seizures. S**t happens, no need to apologize for the fucked-upness of life, but we always do. Some games are rigged, but we only blame ourselves for losing them. 

Warranted means justified, deserved, a queen who deserves to be one. 

The mother took action and ran to where the crash took place. “She threw her picture out the window!”

I started to cry, a wept waterfall I didn’t want to let loose, but I felt it coming the whole time. Oblivious to what they were talking about--the picture--but I imagined it to be an intervention technique for her anorexia. A “this is you when you were healthy” photo that she blasted through the windowpane's glass shield, breaking the bottles she was suppose to toss rings on: a sure way to lose everything forever. I wept for such an idea. If someone showed a" before" picture of me right now, I’d do the same--chuck it. We’re stuck in our bodies, in sickness and in health, ‘til death do us part.

“Hey, I’m sorry, are you okay?” My doctor came back in to check on me.

“Yes.” I hated their sorry’s, I was sorry.

Screaming, the girl threw a fit in the next room. She jumped out the broken window, an acrobatic sick-o I slightly respected. She found a cracked escape, and ran, for miles. I saw her from the waiting room window: an unfree, freed pink rabbit in a narrow field, but she won’t get far, she’ll get hunted. She was a game player breaking through barriers to collect her deserved money, but that wasn’t how the world worked: life has rules, games have rules, and life's a f*****g game.

Her mother bolted back into the waiting room, and silently watched her daughter run away.

I couldn’t leave this mother, not without a solution, but I couldn’t talk with the hardly felt trust of my own words. I practiced anti-human interaction for too long, unfit to console. Plus I was about to seize (the lovely, new side of me), but we were partners in this game, her daughter stole our money.

I know when I'm about to seize. My senses heighten, I can hear the mouse scurrying in the corner of the wall, I can see a hue of green you could never color, I smell the bar of my soap used that morning. I go foggy. My pupils dilate, and and I take in Earth, it sounds tranquil, but I know it leads to a loss of all control. So for a second, I do enjoy it, for all those who've called it panic, I get euphoric before I have a seizure, right before my bodily functions give out... I breathe, because I know the moment after will be be sensory hell.

            The radio played top-40’s tunes, a standard doctor's waiting room FM station. Songs played about getting drunk and grinding on women… no hope, but out of sheer cheesiness the song came on. You are getting famous, you were on the radio while we prayed.

The mother sat, and I saw her same jittering knee start to move differently, with rhythm rather than no accord, it was fitfully paired with the beat. She needed her song, her leg danced, and I admired and adored her dancing leg. I knew this was a woman who couldn’t dance often, maudlin only off the drinks of her sick child, she didn’t have any social outlet. Her fanny pack confirmed so.

You're job is important, and remember that: you sang a song worth a thousand feelings.

A fomented moment.

To the same rhythm, we tapped our feet, without word, we both needed to hear “It's alright…”

In my mind, we broke out and danced in a scene from a box-office hit movie: joined-together, me (choreographer), her (lead vocalist), her sick daughter (lead guitar), the flustered doctor (in on the drum set), the confused receptionist (back-up vocals), and the nurse (on the keyboard)--tasteless and cringe-worthy, but what doesn’t kill you, makes you…

“Hey… hey?” the nurse called.

I spaced out, shook my head out of daydream-mode, and said, “Yeah?”

“Ready?”

I went with her, gave a nod to the emotionally-bankrupt mother, and she nodded back. That was all we needed from each other. It’s alright.

I walked into an exam room, the fusillade of fighting and crying was the backdrop to my visit.

My doctor rushes in, ruffled and out of breathe. “What brings you in today?”

F**k, I thought, hair-loss, seizures, fucked-upness oh my, but I stated my condition calmly and quietly, like it was alright, because it was.

If I could speak to me at that girl’s age now, I’d say, “You’re a warranted queen without knowing. After the age of twelve, you will go to high school. You will experiment with weed and drinking, think you’ll meet a boy, but you don't. In college, you’ll experiment with other drugs, not know what to do, but be your best looking, thinking your meeting guys, but you’re not meeting them either. After college, you’ll meet the guy. The one who really makes you self-deplete, but you never really met him either. And soon, at 24, you’ll be prescribed a legal drug, and it will make you sick. You will be less attractive (still got that pretty face), bald, hardly able to function, but that’s when it’ll be alright. It is alright. You will meet yourself, see you were a queen the whole time, a ruler of your own body, and the branded lips meant to tell you it’s alright, well you’ll meet them too: they’re on you. They have been on the body you think rejects you, but it doesn’t, because you’re still alive holding such lips, your chin is under their rule, high: the only person you need to meet is you. Now go walk. For miles. You’ll know what that means later. It’s alright. Life has carnival games, but sometimes losing them is the only way to just walk away. To walk for miles. If you lose you, there will always be residue.“

I walked with my eyes closed, listened to you, and I found me (residue in cracks of bleached tiles). Funny thing about walking with eyes closed, haphazard, you walk without being concerned of thinness: thin hair, thin minds, thin bodies... the world with eyes closed is thick with foliage.

So I wrote you this small story, apologies for length, I went on a tangent. It may seem a lot about me, but I would have never written a word if wasn’t for you and your song, in a playlist labeled “Me” you’ll always be. So thank you, for making me smile, you never asked for it, but it’s given (the best kind of smile). I am healthier, stronger, almost back to normal, and I want to thank you for your ghosted aid.

Love,

Me