julia lauren @julialaurena - Tumblr Blog

I believe that you met the King of the Forest, Mei, and meeting him is a sign of good luck. My Neighbor Totoro となりのトトロ┃1988

On Meaning

It’s a strange feeling when you’re reading something and by this time you forgot what it was that reminded you, but you look up one of your buddies from when you first got sober. You had a crush on him but everyone said “don’t get into a relationship before you’re a year sober.” So you didn’t do anything. But you very much liked it when you two were at the same meeting and you could see him across the room.

You look on Instagram to see where he’s at now.

No posts since December 2018. And only one new comment since then - a message from someone about how he’s gone now.

There are no other comments about his death.

He left Seattle in 2016 to start a new life in LA. You didn’t keep up. Maybe you saw him once or twice for the holidays and he said he was trying to drink normally. Or he told you about how he relapsed on heroin and how ashamed he was. You can still hear the wobble in his voice when he talked about what his relapsed in motel rooms looked like.

The attempt to drink normally sets the direction to comments on social media profiles about this horrible disease and how we’re all taken too soon.

You do the math. He has been dead almost a year. What was happening in society back in December 2019?

A google search of his obituary only states a date. After a few hours you decide to reach out to one of the posters on his social media pages. The friend replies quickly and says that he relapsed around his birthday. “We think it was suicide.”

When your needle punctured your skin and you found your vein, did you die instantly after you plunged the drugs into your blood stream? For a second did you have a moment of clarity before life drained from your body? The addicts chrysalis. Finally, the release from the push and pull of shame and guilt and needing more more more.

I’m in a cab headed to a dentists appointment. Before I was worried about whether I’d get a panic attack leaving the house. The panic I’ve been experiencing has been painful and incessant. I fear sometimes my heart will give out and I will die in fear.

I’m afraid of dying from fear. I no longer fear dying from alcoholic death.

I’m supposed to wrap this up in some neat little bow. Maybe about chrysalis or fear and my racing heart beat or some tidy note about addiction. Wrap it all up so we can all feel resolution. But instead I’m back at home. The heat is on and the cold drizzle outside reminds me of winters in Seattle when we would laugh under the yellow field lights from Cal Anderson park. When did you stop coming to meetings? Did you have the same ritual you had back in your other relapse? Or was it truly a mistake that you took too much?

You heard when you got sober that the longer you stay, the more bodies you walk over. Your crushes, your old mentors, your friends and acquaintances become cold bodies. You go to bed warm and alone, but sober. There is no meaning. It just is what it is.

deuxniel

Nina Simone by Michael Ochs, 1967

daughtersofhistory

“I am that clumsy human, always loving, loving, loving. And loving. And never leaving.” ― Frida Kahlo

On rearranging

In the first few minutes, hours, and days after The Reveal, I couldn’t stop writing. It’s nothing new for a writer to feel incapable of writing. But how is anyone supposed to create when everything feels extremely insignificant. We’re fighting for justice in the streets and the second wave of a global pandemic will be on us soon. And now, I rearrange my apartment in my quarterly, “let’s change everything.”

Some people get bangs or dye their hair blue. I rearrange my space.

My childhood bedroom had pink wallpaper with stripes of flowers. When I turned 13 I began putting up posters, pieces of paper from inside jokes with friends, and very bad poetry. I made collages and hung up bracelets that no longer closed. And then at 15, I stripped all the adornments and wallpaper and painted it a light green.

I would move my twin bed to one side of the room, or the corner facing the street, or daringly in the middle of the room sometimes. My desk was too heavy to move, but everything else scraped across the floor during the many rearrangements.

I’ve been wanting a real desk and to sit by the window to write and work. Yesterday, I turned my dining gatling table into a counsel and moved my couch away from the window. The area is open now and there’s space by the window. I’m waiting for my desk to arrive, but even now, I sit here and type with Charlotte on the sill and the computer in my lap.

I still haven’t cried. I’ve tried very hard to muster any kind of emotion out of me. I stopped trying and tried to lay in the feelings. Could I name the ones that I feel prodding my ribs, my shoulders, my heart? I wrote them all out. Even with tiny handwriting, I took up seven lines in my morning writing to list what I was experiencing.

My bedroom is in the same arrangement it’s been in for several months. Two nights ago I dreamt that he had died. I don’t think I cried in the dream, or maybe I did. I think I just felt a sudden loss and there was nothing for me to do except reflect for a second and move forward.

The next day I rearranged my living room and kitchen. Maybe soon I will purge cluttered drawers and outdated art to find the space that serves me and my needs. And maybe my need will to be make art on my new desk, with my new computer, in a room that feels new to me. Maybe people cut their hair after a breakup because they’re trying to feel different from whatever they are feeling. To rearrange my space is to figure out how to find my home again when I’ve lost one.

On doing it right

I wrote this for a creative prompt and didn’t share it. I’ve been doing the prompts from Write Play Draw and they have been very helpful both before everything happened and in The Current Time. The prompt was an image of a person on mountain and it brought me back to 2013.

-------

Sometimes you do it all correctly. Tyler, he packed his bags properly and always triple checked his safety equipment. He spent hours learning courses for rock climbing and hiking. I picture him, on the mountain that day. His climbing partner said as soon as the boulder hit him, the life left his body. I used to imagine his face from lit up with intelligence and some mischief to gone. He did everything right and still sometimes things go wrong.

Surgeries are successful and people still die. You teach your children the golden rule and they still push another child on the play ground. You learn about addiction seeing it first hand, and you still take the first drink.

Sometimes it just needs to all go wrong.

I’m laying here. (When ever I think of “I lie here” I think of the poem Love Song by William Carlos Williams, I was supposed to be a writer like him, then things went wrong) I am laying here feeling the tension in my chest and it leaves when I breathe deeply. I had done everything right. I communicated. I read. I worked. I loved. And it needed to go all wrong.

I get in fits of resentments for giving away generously. Time, energy, gifts, love. And then here I am pulled back to why I became generous in the first place.

Here’s a story: a year before Tyler died, he rented a party bus for us to go to wineries on the east side of Seattle. He spent thousands of dollars on food, edibles, costumes. He wanted us to have fun. Whatever he bought for himself, he bought extra for his friends. At the time, I hoarded my resources. When he died I decided to change. To be like him. Give away and not expect anything in return.

He did everything all right. Tyler followed all the protocols and training on the mountain. And still, it seemed to all go wrong.

There’s no moral to this. It’s not like he died and because of that I tried to become a better person. I was a really shitty person, for a very long time. I didn’t climb mountains for a long time. I didn’t double check my work. I didn’t give. I did eventually change when I thought about him on that mountain. But the moral is not he had to die for me to become a better person.

Maybe he did make some mistake there, that day. Maybe I am at fault for the end of a relationship.

“What have I to say to you when we shall meet? I lay here thinking of you.”

I lay here thinking of you.

I wrote my previous post before I really checked back into what was going on in the world. I had to be kind of wrapped up in my own sadness for a bit.

But now I’m back. And It’s better to fight for others. It’s better to get educated. It’s better to listen and learn and act.

After my shock, I needed to take inventory of what I had. And once the blood congealed, I saw that I still have two legs, two arms, a head, a mouth and some ears. To scream and march in solidarity, to listen when I check in on or learn fr, others.

I’m almost embarrassed by my previous post. I was in mourning for something tiny in my own world. All of this, all of this is so much greater. So much more important.

Check in: day 5

There is much happening. Understatement of the century. Precincts burn, bodies protest, black and brown bodies systematically oppressed for four hundred and one years are hopefully getting a voice, and white people are hopefully listening.

It seems insignificant that my world has flipped upside down. It is. There are more important things. But this is my life and my realities and my truths. On the 15th, laid off. On the 24th at 10 PM, discovered my partner was leading a completely double life. The walls of what I thought were true, were in fact, not really walls. The boundaries of fact and fiction were just according to me. (Which now of course, I can use this as a lesson that maybe I don’t know everything about the black and brown experience and racism, so I must do active ally work to learn truths from others)

I don’t know if his family was real. If his apartment was actually owned by him. If his name was really his name. And if all the words of all the stories and all the statements were built with sugar glass.

It’s strange to experience such a betrayal. To have something that I thought was a firm foundation, once everything flipped, it fell away completely. And to experience it all now. In a pandemic. In what is the breaking point of the assault and genocide and terrorism on black and brown bodies. Why am I writing about both right now? Maybe white guilt? Or maybe because both things can become true.

My world can burn and so can the outside world. Both things are real. Both things exist at once. Both things matter to me. Both things make me realize I need to do work. Ally work. Listening work. Relationship work. Self work. Be of service. Be myself.

I’ve been thinking a lot about atomic bombs and war. About flowers and seeds.

When I first learned about this double life and saw on social media that all the dates I thought he was: at his father’s funeral, or visiting a male friend in upstate ny, or going on solo adventures, or quarantining at home alone were not true – in London with her, making an extravagant birthday party for her (for me, he bought me a cookie and at the time, I was grateful, now it is humiliation and offensive), adventuring with her, living with her – I felt absolute shock. I couldn’t breathe and I shook and my mouth went dry. I didn’t know what limbs were missing, what had been cut on me, what was bleeding.

And now, I believe flowers will come. I believe that things were cut and cleared away. One day a bird may drop a seed and the seed may germinate, the roots may grow, the flower might bud, might bloom. It may, it may not. All I can do is have faith in nature.

Things fell away when everything flipped. And what a gift - I don’t think many people get to see the roots of their systems and how strong they are when turned. Or all the new little buds, just below the surface that have been growing all along.

I saw the fires in Minnesota, my old home of four years. Of Atlanta. Of my home now, Brooklyn. And I thought, “god damn, I hope flowers come out of this.”

It’s 11:22 AM. I woke up loving myself, my legs, my anxieties, my recovery, my quirks and faults. I still have work to do. On day 5 and 12 hours, I feel a reprieve from the sadness of betrayal. Growth still takes time and this feeling won't last. Bit by bit, step by step. Hopefully one day, flowers for all of us.

On blogging

I’m embarrassed to write. Do people even blog anymore? On... on... Tumblr? There’s something kind of nice writing on a platform that others might see. Maybe this is why people practice and spray their graffiti tags everywhere, in the hopes that they can put themselves out there for others to stumble upon. But, blogging seems passé. We all do captions now. (Emojis or single words steeped in code and meaning, not a critique in how we express now, it just is what it is). Or maybe a lengthy post, first written in a note to try to get that paragraph breaks Instagram doesn’t easily allow in its caption field. Or maybe, if it’s really serious, a Facebook post.

But Elizabeth said she liked my writing in regards to an Instagram caption.

And it reminded me of what I used to do. Blog.

I remember 2002, 13 years old, writing in Xanga and futzing with HTML hex codes to change the colors on my page. My friends and I copied surveys and filled them out and wrote about the minutiae of middle school. It makes me cringe to see how hard I tried to be cool. I’ve always been afraid of how others perceive me, so of course, blogging back then was a way for me to try to force my narrative. Even though my narrative wasn’t mine - it was all pretending. And then as I grew older, I made private live journals, to write how I felt, what I did, and how I saw things.

And then college - 2007 to 2011. I remember when I happened across Tumblr during an internship in my sophomore year. And I was opened up to this new world of photos and illustrations and gifs. College in itself was one giant art project of mixed media and memories. Here’s the time we ran in the natural lands and wrote poems about it on index cards and photocopied them to make a digital video about the whole damn thing.

Time passed. I didn’t write, or I came back, and I wrote about my travels or breakups or early adulthood or memories from late teenage years and I was just trying to figure it all out because I never knew what it was all about and now Instagram captions are another way for me to dictate my narrative but this time it’s a little more honest. Sometimes, I still try to seem a certain way. At the end of the day, I’m fighting between wanting to make art, wanting to melt into my couch, and wanting to seem more interesting than I really am on Instagram.

I think I’m going to go back to passé because I like it and maybe in a few years everything will come full circle again and I can finally be ahead of the curve and people will see this graffiti.

On Flags

My body is like a desert plant - even when it seems like on the outside its all dried and withered, in my bones there is still the water of creativity. Just when I thought it was gone (seeing the words), it comes back on a cold subway platform.

The POW MIA flag waved in a soft wind, behind it, an inflatable wavy armed man sign for an auto dealership swayed side to side in its standard eccentric dance. The train came. A man on the subway made an announcement that he was selling headphones while another man asked for money for food and came up to every passenger and begged. His eyes were red and hands were out in front of him. Half in prayer half to receive.

There are so many people in New York begging and hustling. Young men performing in unison on moving trains. Most of us learned at an early age to not make eye contact (true children of the 80s and 90s were instilled with lessons from earnest parents) and so we stare at invisible distant points or at our phones. Sometimes the young men will say things like, “Ladies and gentlemen we’re not stealing or doing drugs” during their routines. The POW MIA flag waves on lots and in front of homes, but what about the people who are prisoners of our systems. Of our history. Of our continuation of subjugation. (The white men in Mar-a-Lago are writing tax plans to cut taxes on the wealthy and increase those on students while still attempting to take away health insurance from the poor and lifting a ban from poaching elephants in the ancestral lands of the people who built this country).

We reach the station and the young men exit the cart and go to the next train cart, bringing their portable speaker or their empty hands or their bags of headphones. I look at the distant point on an ad and count the stops in my head till I reach my destination.

Snippits

I had written some posts but the Tumblr app glitched and never posted them. Here are snippets from the past month that I found on my phone.

10.20.17

It’s 645 am on the bus to the city. I put on an old playlist in my Spotify. Something soft post-meditation. Radiohead comes on and I realize it’s been four years since I’ve been able to listen to them. I used to have a strong association with Joel every time I heard them. I remember the day he died Subterranean Home Sick Alien came on at Tyler’s and I fell to the ground sobbing. In Seattle, I couldn’t listen to them - where ever I went I had recollections of Joel or post-Joel.

Riding through the Meadowlands, listening to No Surprises, I pull out my phone and write down records I want to get when I move into my new apartment. They are on the top of the list. The first memory I have is a rainy summer day in Liberty State Park, volunteering at a music festival that they headlined and getting people to sign up to vote. I wore an In Rainbows shirt. (I’ve owned and gotten rid of so much clothing during ‘minimalism purges’ and I miss that shirt) I smile. I go further back to the first time I listened to In Rainbows in my freshman year dorm room and knew at the time that would be a moment that would become a memory.

It’s like two versions of myself to reflect on: jersey and college youth versus the six years in Seattle. Both states are completely different but the constant was the kernel of who I am. And I get to come back to this moment and not dwell on either past.

I think that I will get that record when I move.

10.29.17

My dad saw me off to the bus to New York. I’m wearing a kangaroo costume for Joanna’s Halloween party. Seeing me off was akin to the times he saw me off to school, Seattle, Asia. Another big chapter in my life. The past month and a half have been a novella in between books. It’s been emotional and now my real story finally begins.

11.5.17

It’s been such a transition to settle in. The past few years I’ve been on the move. Between nesting and traveling and longing for something else.

I think I was just longing to be home. My friends in Seattle were my walls and roof and the warm spots of my heart. But I was ready to come back and nest again. And clear away the wreckage of my past. I left the east coast with some relationships I needed to mend and amend.

For a week I slept on the mattress on the floor. Still - an in between. Found a home but not yet settled in.

Yesterday Ben and I picked up lumber at Lowes and spent the morning and afternoon measuring, planning out, and cutting the wood. It was like old times, but better. Comfortable to be around him - a shared history even though the last ten years are missing and sparse timelines of moving, relationships and fragmented stories.

Today we worked from 1 to 7pm on building the bed. He did a great job and it looks amazing. We ate dinner on the platform before we finished the stairs. The stairs took a long time to do and it was very complicated. But he did a great job.

The bed is floating - it’s connected to the wall and floor by three posts.

Laying on it now feels crazy. I can’t believe it’s done and my vision of my room has come to life. There’s still a bit more to do with my room, but I love the bed and I’m so grateful he did it for me. I don’t know how I’ll ever repay him. It’s been two months since I moved back to the east coast and I keep finding little slices of home. In my friends, in my parent's house, and in the new home I’m building. Ups and downs. I’ve cried more in the past two months than I have in a long time (mostly due to politics and world events). I’ve felt so much uncertainty. But for some reason, one step after another, all of this is beginning to feel right.

Views from the 1(6)7 (at New York, New York)

On sunsets

The sunset still feels like an event. When I was traveling, sunsets and sunrises were a time to stop and watch and soak in it. On a beach. On a river front. On a temple. On a remote island. On roofs we stopped and soaked in the sun going up and down and the demarcation of new points of adventure in our day. The sun sets in New Jersey over the meadow lands. Over the flat palisades in a wide swatch of sky, horizon speckled with oak and maple trees, the sun sets. In an air conditioned bus, on my way home from the city, to the suburbs where my home resides in a diverse little community, I watch it go from pale pinks to deep oranges. Evening begins to fall on the suburbs. We get off of the bus one by one and it's quieter here. No tourists with paper bags from global luxury brands residing in buildings that used to be inhabited by artists and outcast of the 60s and 70s. We're here with a purpose to be home. Eat dinner with our families and relax under a dark sky, in the blanketed quiet of our little neighborhoods, in our warmly lit homes. I walk home and the crickets chirp in the humidity. I see the last of the glowing red above the horizon, through the trees, past the park I played in as a child, and I'm ready for this point of my day: the demarcation of light that comes from my heart when I'm with my family.

On flowers and girls

Yesterday flowers blossomed from my ribs.

For over an hour the tattoo artist worked on my right ribs to create a fern wrapped around lilacs, a lotus, sweet peas, and violets.

When I first thought of the tattoo I wanted, I imagined it as an ode to my inner child. The little girl from my past that I want to honor. The girl who didn’t learn how to speak up for herself but was adamant about speaking up for others. I thought of childhood - picking violets in the front lawn; smelling lilacs in Minnesota summers during the liminal phase between adulthood and childhood, post college; the lessons of growing sweet peas which also happens to be the flower of my birth month; the lotus flower which I first learned about when I was young and interested in Buddhism; the fern based on the Maori koru necklace I received at 18.

The single point needle on my bone put me into a trance-like state. I felt like my whole being was all one point. I felt like my body disappeared except for the part of my rib being tattooed. And then I felt like I owned my whole body and was suddenly aware of every sensation.

After it was done, I felt a balance. Like I could stand up more straight. Like my soul was evened out. Like I was honoring both my inner child and the adult I now am.

* * *

Tonight I met a fifteen-year-old girl who is trying to get sober. Daughter to a single parent who is in and out of AA, she’s survived empty refrigerators and an abusive father. I wanted to hold her and keep her safe and feed her and help her take each step. She’s strong and small and endures. My heart hurt knowing her age.

Fifteen and already gone through so much.

Missing a childhood. Friends who are on coke binges and acquaintances with ulterior motives. Just a child. I want her to be ok and to rise above the mud like the lotus. I gave her women’s phone numbers who I admire. I hope that they are the water that can help her grow and one day she too can feel the balance between adult and childhood.

So fresh it still has the plastic is still on. Thank you @taraosprey for an incredible job. This piece is so important to me and I'm so glad I got it done at osprey. Came out better than I could have ever imagined. (Violets, lilacs, sweet peas, and a lotus wrapped in a fern) (at Seattle, Washington)

Friday night, mt rainier from the boat. Shabbat shalom indeed. (at Seattle, Washington)

On packing

Slowly I’m packing up.

I haven’t done this ritual in a long time. Listening to Bon Iver, up too late, visualizing what has to go where and how to sort it all.

On my windowsill, I stare at my little collection of seashells, crystals, and rocks. I wonder whether to keep the seashells from Israel, the bleached coral from a beach in Thailand, the rocks from a desert. Memories from my travels. Do they exist more on my windowsill or more in my mind?

I look at the items I’ve acquired in the past 6 years in Seattle and feel lucky. I have gotten so much and I also have the freedom to give away.

For a while, I got to take and to receive. I have been gifted a house filled with furniture, lamps, kitchenware, fans, clothes. I’ve kept so many of these things for so long - bringing them with me from apartment to apartment. Feeling a strong attachment even though I had gotten them for free. This week I decided that instead of hiring movers to ship my things from Seattle to New York, I’m going to sell and give away all of it.

On my boat trip a few days ago, I fell asleep and dreamed that I had donated my furniture and then found out that children had graffitied all over the antiques. In my dream, I felt anger. I woke up, got off the boat, with my sea legs I walked on the dock to face the sun and meditated on my dream. If I give things away I’m free of them. I cannot burden myself with worries about how it’s taken care of - it’s only things. The sun warmed me up and I felt a freedom. The worry isn’t worth it.

I’m ready to sort through more and decide what to keep, what to give away. (I’m beyond lucky that I have the privilege to have items I can donate) I hope that I remember in the future that material things will never fill me. They will always weigh me down. But so often I forget and carry new things home like a hermit collecting shells it couldn’t possibly carry along its adventure.

It’s been long overdue that I get to do a new start and I’m ready.

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