The Return of the Timeline 2008-2009

Breaking up is never easy. Perhaps that's why I avoid relationships these days. Losing love is so painful. But then again, I have a dog, and I realize the implications of that as it concerns my future happiness. All that to say, I returned to Memphis after spending almost a full year in England and Europe, and I got on with things after the required mourning period.

Despite a brief bout of dizziness brought on by the immensity of the American road and driving again, it wasn't long before I moved into an epic apartment with my best friend, slid back into teaching Intensive English to international students, and found a posse of summer fun friends to idle away the hours in the thick southern heat.

I also went to as many shows at the Hi-Tone that I could fit into my schedule: Lord T. and Eloise (to be covered in champagne), Jack Oblivion and the Tennessee Tearjerkers, Harlan T. Bobo, and everyone's favorite Memphis band: Snowglobe. It was the tail end of my golden age of Memphis music.

I rode my bike to the farmer's market on South Main, drank beers in the upper brothel rooms at Earnestine and Hazel's, and played trivia at The Young Avenue Deli. I walked everywhere, rarely left the "Parkways," as the midtowners put it, even explored, in detail, the ancient forest in Overton Park that some would destroy completely for more parking. I was what I always wanted to be, but I was still antsy....never content.

It was the first summer I didn't spend overseas in a few years, so I soaked it up. Whenever I found myself longing for the connection to the rest of the world, the glorious blend of cultures, I stepped out of myself while I taught at Intensive English and looked at each of my students, pictures of the world themselves, sharing in a common language. It felt like home.

I went camping with friends from the neighborhood and graduate school, spelunking and skinny dipping in the Cumberland Mountains. We ate pot brownies in a cave, and I drank bourbon from a flask and felt it warm with my heartbeat. Then I sat in the middle of the cave and giggled so much I couldn't stand up. In my dreams that night, everything was pink.

Homecoming 2008

I somehow lost a ton of weight from walking and cooking for myself, being too busy to eat or think. I managed to show up at my ten year high school reunion with a bangin bod, and I wore a dress I bought at Old Navy for five dollars with a pair of white Converse. I was underdressed, but still me, so it was fine. People don't tend to judge me as harshly as I assume that they do, as harshly as I judge myself.

What good is an epic apartment without epic parties? My best friend and I threw a party for her birthday, found out we had a knack for it, and threw a few more gorgeous get-togethers of like-minded individuals, recyclers, Obama voters, volunteers, gorgeous artists packed onto our 6x6 balcony like sardines. The cops came once because the volume of conversation exceeded what the neighbors could handle. It was a weekend, so they just told us to move the party inside.

The guy I was tryina hang out with at the time was giving me a little bit of a run around. That was my first mistake. Sometimes a girl has to learn the hard way that a guy is a butt. He had everyone guessing, our group of friends wandering what he was doing with three different girls, all smart enough to know better. And despite all the warnings that always come from people that mean well, I won, and I followed him all the way to a small town in Georgia to learn my lesson.

That, my friends, is how I found Georgia and began to dig in the earth again, digging and scratching, uncovering the next chapter, what it felt like to be physically strong as my mind began questioning things it never had before.

My return to Memphis was a good time, a whirlwind, but good. I kept a decent log of it starting here. Be warned, though. It begins as a day by day recovery from heartbreak. Just how it is.

Nina Simone is an American, and So Am I (Part I)

This woman. 

The first Nina Simone album I ever heard, I procured from an ex-boyfriend’s computer. I just made a little copy (because it’s the future) and saved it to my external hard drive which held five whole gigs and was roughly the size of a hardback book...way back in 2007.

I had never heard of Nina Simone until I met Liam, “my English boyfriend,” so I assumed she was English as well, for a moment. I had been living with him, first in Manchester and later in London over the course of a year with a brief completion and defense of a Master’s thesis thrown in the mix. I’m fancy. At the time I procured his music, we were broken up, but (like good masochists) sharing a space until my visa ran out. Torture.  

I arrived home to a Memphis that I could not remember without him. He, too, had spent some time across the pond with me in my apartment on Linden in Midtown, before it was out of my price range. I finished my Master’s degree while he “secretly” worked at a Sushi place. Thus, when I returned home without him, I was home, but I was constantly in the shadow of our past. It was hard because it was a lovely past.

However, it didn’t take me long to busy myself with teaching and performing, and by the time I turned 29, in 2008, I was quite the lady about town. In my humble opinion.

Ask any woman how much she weighed at any given time in her life, and she will more than likely be able to tell you, without hesitation, her exact weight, size, and shape. At least, I can. I always kind of felt like that was the message the world was trying to tell me, that I had a specific outward standard to meet. Hell, I also assumed there was a specific inward standard of which I consistently fell short.

When I turned 29, I weighed about 120, and wore a size four. The last time I hit those numbers, was in 1992, when I turned 13.

How did I do it? I was “too busy to eat,” but I still managed to go on long, “city” walks with my ipod tucked in my back pocket. I missed walking quickly through the narrow streets of London, climbing the escalators out of the underground two steps at a time, moving with purpose through the veins of one of the biggest cities in the world.

This time, I power walked through the heat of the southern American summer, refusing to drive anywhere that wasn’t absolutely necessary. No one does this in Memphis. Still.

Since I had been in Europe during one of their coldest summers the previous year, I missed the oppression of the heat on the Mississippi Delta, if you can believe that. I walked, sometimes in the morning, but more often at dusk, and I reveled in my own sweat from the slow heat of the late summer. I relished it. It healed me.

I put Liam’s music on the iPod that he bought me for my 27th birthday, and I listened to it on my long walks. There was a lot. Every album from The Smiths. Every Wilco Album. The New Pornographers. The Chemical Brothers. The Knife. The Stone Roses. And Nina Simone. To name a few in a series of non-sentences just to enrage my grammar-nazi friends (Relax. I am one of you. I just like doing things I’m not “supposed to do.” I’m not selling heroin to poor people, so can I just have this one?)

The first time I heard Nina Simone’s voice, I felt a little embarrassed for her, not because I thought it was an ugly voice, but because it struck me as something out of the ordinary. I grew up in a world where the extraordinary were encouraged to embrace the ordinary, lest they fall into temptation and be lost forever. Over the years, I have come to believe that in order to embrace the part of myself that is truly remarkable, I have to be vulnerable, sometimes to an excruciating degree, a bit like Nina Simone's voice.

One summer, I directed a live-action “music video” to the (not) hit song “Flip City” from the soundtrack to Ghostbusters II. I also starred in it. I convinced a bunch of girls to let me choreograph performance art depicting the rise of the ghosts at the hand of Vigo the Carpathian, and we performed it in the talent show at CHURCH CAMP. I should have had “uncomfortably vulnerable” down pat.

The transcendent voice of Nina Simone bled emotion. She did not fit into the status quo, but, as I have observed things, black women rarely do. She was so angry, and she was so sad, and it was all so familiar.

So I listened, and I walked, and I tried a little more to open up and accept life as it came.

Until next time:

And also

The Blues is Just a Cicada in Your Beer

The sound of the singing cicadas begins in the morning and grows stronger and louder as the summer sun reaches it's place, first in the noon sky, and finally again as it reaches the horizon in the west. It doesn't matter where I am when I hear them, their song instantly takes me back to Memphis.

It took a while for me to understand how it felt to have a nationality, but it took me no time at all to know what it felt like to come from a place. I realized where I was from, and the part it would play in my life, the first time I crossed the bridge over the Mississippi River into Arkansas. I sat up on my knees in the back seat of my parents' car and watched the skyline rise and fall as we disappeared into the west. 

When I left for the first time to live in another place, all I could think of was the river and the Mississippi Delta, the slow gate of the inhabitants of area code 901, the bitter idealism, the weeping of the music, and the mysticism on every street corner. 

Memphis took me in, although she was not my birth home. She raised me and sent me on my way. When I came back to her, broken and lost, she took me in, put me back together, and made me see who I was, maybe for the first time in my life. 

It was most certainly the people that colored my life in the bluff city, but we were all under the spell of her dark magic. 

A few days ago the Cicadas in Chicago stopped singing; however, they are still present. I see their shells lying along the grass in small, neatly trimmed lawns. They leave them, their old selves, behind as they continue to migrate.

Go back in time and find the shells I have left behind, those I continually leave in my wake. I don't know why, but I keep moving, running once I've found it too difficult to keep singing.

When I returned home to Memphis after learning to teach English in Europe, meeting Liam, falling in love with the world outside my home, the Cicadas were in full force, flinging their bodies into violent flights, and singing at the top of their...lungs(?).

One found its way into my beer at a house party in midtown. I was drinking someone's home brew. It was sweet and malty. Not the Cicada, the beer. The Cicada leapt from the shadows and into my beer. Just as quickly as its body landed in my beverage, it had flung itself out and on to the next Solo cup. I kept drinking the beer. My friends made that beer, which means they put their passion into it.

The times when the Blues have come into my life have seemed like little lifetimes within themselves. I feel like I'm walking down a dark tunnel, tense and certain with a twinge of doubt that the light will appear...eventually? The darkness always seems relentless, like the song of the Cicadas.

I know that it isn't. I know that life is difficult, that it doesn't really get better or easier. But I also know that I can handle it because I am stronger than even I realize...or will probably ever admit to myself. It's easier to make friends when I'm weak than it is to keep them. I can chase everyone I know away in a matter of minutes when that particular bad dream shows its face (The Blues...stay with me, guys). The ones that don't run are infinitely amazing to me. The ones that stay with me and hold my hand when I am THE WORST at holding hands, those are the people I hope I never lose.

I know I can't keep flinging my body from one beer to the next; thus, as I continue my travels, I have stopped running home. I would love to return more than I can say, but I will never rise from the ashes if I keep packing them up and dragging them to Memphis with me. I know that phoenix metaphor is pretty dramatic, and I'm a little embarrassed about it, but it sounds kinda cool too, and I don't want to be afraid of the overly sentimental if it gets the point across...or just...like...affects someone.

I'm in a tough spot right now, but I'm not alone, and despite my urge to continue to run, I've got to stay here and finish this beer. I'm pretty sure my friends made it, which means...

Oh, HI!