Looking For A Saviour
(Tori, Elizabeth, Jeanette, and
Sylvia, on love without boundaries)
A Portuguese boy who loved me gave me “Little
Earthquakes” as a gift – okay, maybe he lent it to me and I didn’t give it
back. In those days I thought nothing of
keeping borrowed things, I had a collection of sweaters from boys and books and
CDs that had been lent to me but never returned. People drifted in and out of my life back
then as I needed them, or didn’t.
“I've been looking for a savior in these
dirty streets
Looking
for a savior beneath these dirty sheets
I've
been rising up my hands
Drive
another nail in
Got
enough guilt to start
My own
religion”
The
album has stayed with me much longer than the Portuguese boy – to tell the truth, I don’t even remember his
name. I remember leading him on and
rejecting him, I remember avoiding his calls after. I wanted him to want me, but it was just a
game, and any man who made it easy wasn’t worth my time.
Tori
Amos was like me – a preacher’s daughter, conflicted between her love for her
father and her loss of faith. Winter can still make me cry, thinking
of my father, when I hear it. Precious Things spoke of the small town
school I grew up in, suffocated in, ran from as fast as I could. The first time I heard Crucify it resonated bells in me.
The album was the soundtrack of turning 18, and was all my longings and self-destruction
contained in melody and poetry. Tori
reminded me esthetically of the girl
with the long red-gold spiral curls in my English class, the one whose smile
made my belly flip-flop. I sat behind
her and dreamed of those curls wrapped in my fingers, her lips on my neck.
“I want
someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as
strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will
destroy and be destroyed by me.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
I loved
back then like it was epic battle, I was endlessly falling off cliffs, crashing
into barricades, like I was Juliet and Ophelia and Desdemona and every tragic
angelic archetype that heroically was consumed and destroyed. I loved like sex was the answer to prayer,
and I thought every man who wanted me was either target practice or a secret
assassin. I loved like I was Jesus in the
garden, praying for another path. And I always loved the ones most incapable of
loving me back, or most likely to treat me as a temporary convenience, a
confidante, or an escape hatch, but
never their miracle.
One lover gave me a copy of “Oranges are Not
the Only Fruit” after I gave him the money to take a bus to Toronto to chase
down the girl he loved for years but never told. We spent afternoons together on my lunch
breaks, warming the Winnipeg winter with our sweat and desperation. I was drawn to his brooding darkness, and he
to my willingness to let us just lingering together.
“You’re not the kind of girl a boy brings
home to his mom,” He told me one winter day, explaining why, after fucking me,
he still pined for the girl in Toronto.
“O my dear, O my dear, drink a little milk, lie down and rest
a little. I will comfort you. I can carry love like Saint Christopher. It is
heavy, but I can carry it.”
-Elizabeth
Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
When I was nineteen, I met Robin, and she was like the girl with
the spiral curls, all sunlight and air
and golden. We sang Sarah
McLachlan and Tori Amos together, and dropped acid and danced naked in the
rain. But we both ended up hooking up
with father-figure men because we were looking for saviors to take care of us
instead of looking for the
beauty in one another’s kiss. I had no idea how to love without sacrifice,
without worship and betrayal.
I
read “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept” for film/lit class the same
week I was dumped by a
man with whom I was temporarily obsessed, he was sex and whiskey and candle wax
fantasy and he knew he could never love a girl like me. The book echoed my fractured ego, the beauty and
the horror of being utterly consumed and abandoned. I read the book religiously on buses going to
and from school, while continuing to be the willing plaything of older men who couldn't love me while still
somehow believing one of them might save me from myself.
“All
night your moth-breath
Flickers
among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far
sea moves in my ear.”
- Sylvia Plath, Morning Song
The
girl with the spiral curls ran off and joined a circus in Mexico. Robin left for Guatemala with her Jesus-man
and I drifted from one self-destructive relationship to the next until I ended up pregnant and alone. But see it was motherhood, not a man, who
saved me, finally. As a mother, I
realized I needed to stop floundering like a Shakespearean ingenue. I needed to transform from girl victim to
warrior mother. And with her I learned
to love in a way that was nurturing, both to her and myself. I
rescued myself to the West Coast and I started writing again, and we grew together.
I
still love secretly like I’m sugar-crashing but I claim my own stake in my
heart now. My lover of thirteen years is
kind, and although he is, of course, another father figure, after I turn 40 the
age gap shrinks and we cuddle like a married couple, with no
hierarchy. I still write poetry about
longing to be kissed by sunlight and I still listen to Tori from time to
time. But I’m tempered now – motherhood
has tied my feet to the ground and no man’s darkness can uproot the depth of
love I have for my child.
When at 17, I see her scream
and rage at a boy who wants to keep her caged, my heart cracks and I hold her
tight, remembering. And I tell her she
is better than that; she doesn’t need to be saved, and I pray she will, in
time, believe me.
Leslie
Stark is a playwright, poet, performer, dancer, mother, high
school teacher, and small business owner/hoopmaker (Serenity Hoops). She has a
BA in Drama (U of Manitoba) and an MFA in Creative Writing (UBC), as well as a
BEd (UBC). She serves on two local arts boards (Vice President of Touchstone
Theatre and Treasurer for Vancouver Poetry House) and in 2014, started her own
performing arts collective, the “Elegant Ladies Collective.” She has produced 3
Fringe Festival plays with the Elegant Ladies and a Cabaret night as well. The
Elegant Ladies specialize in intimate, interdisciplinary, site-specific works
of performance. She is also on the Slamapalooza Spoken Word Poetry team (2015
and 2016), dances with Polymer Dance, and sings in a band (the Appetizers). She
is a member of the Wet Ink Collective, and her writing has been published in Geist, Kiss Machine, Fugue and Chameleon.
photo of Sylvia Plath
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