Stay Golden

Artwork by Tyler Spangler

This author I like writes down her stories, her essays, cuts them up, and rearranges them on the walls of her apartment, and I’m obsessed with the idea of that. With the pieces. I’d do it too if I thought I’d be able to stop the cutting once it started.

Sometimes the vain woman in me imagines an armchair and an interviewer asking me questions, wanting my answers or the naivety I can pass off as them. Sometimes I’m the interviewer and the catch is that my interviews never leave the room—they’re just for my own curiosity, my own loneliness—and I’m asking about self-perception. What movie scene can you envision yourself in? I can see myself in that one Bond movie—there is a girl and she’s on the shower floor fully dressed and crying. I can feel the wet dress becoming a casing of sorts: a chrysalis or a cage. I can see myself in The Apartment too, reaching for a broken mirror and saying “I like it that way,” though I have my own reasons for that. A lot of them have to do with honesty, others with Kintsugi—the Japanese art form of mending pottery with gold. Translated, Kintsugi means “golden joinery.”

In The Outsiders, a dying boy tells his friend to stay gold and I’m realizing I haven’t felt gold in a while. Last night I was paraylzed again with fear: there is a third option to fight-or-flight that no one really talks about and that is freeze. The doorknob was shaking violently in a dream that didn’t feel like one. My head voice was calm and gently (like herbal tea) said that if I just open the window a bit, the alarm will trigger, and the demons will run. I didn’t move. Oh, but I wanted to.

I’m awake now, more or less, and I’m trying to remember how to breathe. How to close my eyes and untangle my ribs, inflate. How to float. But sometimes the air gets trapped in us and I’m learning to live with that. It really is okay to not be okay—it’s unavoidable, really, our humanity. Why do we hate ourselves for it? Why do you hate yourself? I was so confused as a child. I thought the monster under the bed was me, that I was evil somehow. I thought that the abuse I experienced was my fault. A boy called me broken once, only he said it like a bad thing. I’ve never understood that, even now. I don’t think the word “broken” is dirty: that word is the only one I feel describes the pain I’ve felt. It’s as though people think “broken” means defective, inferior...but it doesn’t. All of my pieces are still here, they’ve just been rearranged. I am whole. I’m just also hurting. And that’s okay.

This is a place of golden joinery. A place of misfit toys. We’ve all been shattered, really—the point is, we’re no lesser for it. I spent seven hours on my living room floor once, cutting pictures I’d printed from Pinterest and rearranging them. The collage is on my wall now and it is giant. Messy and strong, I love it, deeply. There’s a picture of Marlborns, flowers bursting from the carton. A bra strap. There’s a girl on a train, flowers with eyes, a hand with a moon in its palm. Towards the center is a painting of Jesus, only his face is John Lennon’s, below that a black hole with the instructions to wonderland pointing to its depth. Shining, the words “wacko” and “honey” and “you are here.” I used to think I couldn’t openly hurt, that anything resembling discomfort would translate into weakness or ungratefulness. I was terrified of people seeing me as a damsel, and eventually, of people seeing me at all. Looking back, I think I needed someone to tell me this—you can cry and still be a warrior—so I am writing it, here, for you, now.

Today, I sit on my couch. The sun is coming through the window and warming my toes, which are always painted black, specifically. The world is burning and I’m desperately afraid for it. I’m drinking a pineapple smoothie. I’m breaking out and I’m upset about it. I’m procrastinating writing a research paper and I’m not upset about it. And I’m breathing, in and out, as slowly as I can. Maybe I haven’t felt gold in a while. I am golden just the same. You are, too.