In This Body: Showing Voice
“She was up there on stage showing us what societies standards really meant: jack fucking shit.”
Our monthly column "In This Body" is comprised of true stories about sex, gender, the body, and love, written by Fiona George, for NAILED.
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I wrote this while rolling, at two in the morning after coming home from a show. I wrote this in the bar next to my work, where I know all the bartenders, before I blacked out. I wrote this because I was having an anxiety attack and it was write something or check myself into the psych ward somewhere. I wrote this stoned on the train traveling from one side of the city to the other.
This is the long rambling story I tell when I am high, and forget the point before I end.
This is how I do it. People ask me how I write such personal stuff, how I put so much of myself into it when I know any small corner of the world could see it. I do it because I don’t know if I could survive if I did not put ink on the page. I write it because I took molly. Because I am wasted, or on my way. Because I am at the end of my rope and this is how I save myself from suicide.
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I am getting ready for the show, the clear gelatin capsule of white powder sits on my dresser between doll heads and a broken chunk of pavement I found and will not let go of. I’d cut my bangs, just that day. I have been feeling impulsive. I cut them because I was going to a show, and I wanted to wear my hair up because the last time I was in a mosh pit with my hair worn down, it tangled into a single furry mat from getting caught between leather jackets. And I hated the way my hair looked up, so I cut bangs.
I wore grey tights, black cowboy boots, a high-waisted pleather short skirt, and a cream and lavender lace lingerie top over my bra. I am telling you this because I want you to understand how good this outfit would have looked with my 80s, wide sleeved, cropped leather jacket.
I lost that jacket one night at a bar when I got blackout drunk. I think it was stolen. The bar never found it.
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My phone was in the pocket of the leather jacket, I think. I was very drunk, but I lost my phone the same night so I assume my phone was in the pocket. I was very drunk because I was making a friend. Making a friend and I didn’t see that night, when I met her, how quick and close we’d become.
We talked about our favorite authors, about our relationships, about having a three-way, we talked about a lot of things but I was very drunk and I only remember those three. She gave me a ride home, and when I woke up I didn’t remember, but I hoped my jacket and phone were in her car, but they weren’t.
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I know I write too much about being messed up on something, about taking molly or drinking too much or just getting good old fashioned high on weed. And it’s because I get messed up on something too often. Once I showed up to class tripping on acid, because sometimes it’s less scary than being sober. I feel grounded. At one with something inside myself that is only a ghost when I am sober.
This ghost that speaks without second thought, over-thought. This ghost who is happy without questioning how I got that way or why, only enjoys it. This ghost that belongs to the world and all its sentences. This ghost: me in some other, perfect world.
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She gave me a ride home the night we met and I was blackout drunk, and five months later I cut my bangs the day after she cut hers before I went to a show rolling on molly. We don’t know when we meet people what they will mean to us or who they will be. We can get blackout drunk with a woman we just met, and feel that spark of connection. But we don’t know that we will be texting them into the night months later just glad to have that friend who wants to talk to you.
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The front-woman in the band that night inspired. She is a big girl with purple hair, punk as fuck, screaming lyrics of anger and lust. Things girls ‘ought not to feel. She is what every girl I knew in middle, high school needed. She was raging beauty at the microphone. She was up there on stage showing us what societies standards really meant: jack fucking shit.
She was up there showing voice.
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I didn’t have my perfect 80’s leather jacket, but I had one gel capsule of molly, I had my bangs. I had friends the I’d met while blacking out in bars, the friends I had from holding the same job long enough, the friends I had at the tips of my fingers on my phone, the friends I have known since I was too young to remember, the friends behind me in the mosh pit while the physicality pushed me right up to the stage.
And I had knowing. That I would come home, on that night or another. I would be rolling, home at two in the morning. I would be blacking out at the bar with my notebook spread, covered in ink, in front of me. I would be stoned on my way from Gresham to Beaverton on the train with my laptop out. I would be ready to die, want to stop existing.
And I knew those times would come and I knew I’d write. Write something like that rambling story I’ll tell you when I’m high, and I’ll forget the point before I get to the end. I can feel my own voice I have to show.
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Read the previous "In This Body": here.
Header image courtesy of Zak Smith. To see a gallery of his art, go here.