I found this album in a used bookstore when I was 13. You can't even imagine what it meant to me to find it in all its gorgeous, blooded, sexual irreverence: Tori Amos nursing the pig on the Southern Gothic cover with the dead chickens and shotgun. I'd never seen anything like it. It's funny, the first time I listened to Boys for Pele, I thought it was like "votes for Regan," like the boys for rooting for Pele. I didn't know it was about feeding the boys to the volcano goddess. I was a flat-chested little girl then, barely a teenager and had hardly kissed any boys. I worshipped them accordingly.
Later, when I figured the line out, I was a little older and much angrier. It seemed like an excellent idea to me. There's something freeing to that as a person who has scraped and served men from the beginning - from competing from my absent father's attention, to the hateful "Christian" men with their hands sliding up my thighs in my girlhood school-church, to the wet cardboard boys that made up my college dating experience. I don't know what I'm saying with this, because even still, I love men. Masculinity has always attracted me in a half-jealous, but half-hungry way. Still, this isn't a post about desire. I feel empty of it in my current iteration: unwanted, unloved, unlovable, untouchable - nothing soft and feminine, but nothing either of the hard masculine energy that is also a part of my identity. I feel like nothing.
*
Rather than Boys for Pele, I wake up every morning to the same stupid song in my head, like a person actually going crazy. In fact, it's the eurodance/pop hit from 1994 Real McCoy - Another Night.
Another night, another dream, but always you
It's like a vision of love that seems to be true
Another night, another dream, but always you
In the night, I dream of love so true
I think this is a great example of me losing my mind. The poppy dance beat and the high-pitched lyrics are a screeching contrast to my actual feelings of sorrow, abandonment, misery, and emptiness, and the lyrics are apt only in that I dream obsessively and vividly these days, and when I wake, I am more alone than I have ever been.
*
Speaking of alone - there's no one to talk to. How marvelous it is to see the hollow, echoing silences of the casual friends who have written me off, or worse, the ones who know and clearly want to write me off but are squeaking along, every day receding a little further back. Those same ones who have slept in my house, eaten food I cooked them, come to me in their own crises with their failures and loves, their moments, their needs, their hungers, their mistakes, but now find me just a little bit disquieting because I'm not what they assumed. And what was it they assumed I was? Have I ever been more than a collection of assumptions, a paper doll? I was always afraid of being that to the people in my friend group and wider life, and now it seems obviously true. Has anyone else ever seen me like a full person?
*
Oh, I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. I'm getting stale and ugly already. My body is disintegrating. I feel it every day. I don't think it helps that I spend the nights alone crying or trying to drink myself to unconsciousness. I don't know how to move forward. I don't even know how to write this in a way that someone won't somehow find and misconstrue, even if I really think this old thing might be the one good anonymous place to put shit like this. It feels like I have no space to feel or say anything.
