VARIOUS STORMS & SAINTS

A life willfully lived began taking its toll on me before I was ready for realization or reckoning. Because of good luck and a winsome naivety I once thought myself invincible, free. I could do whatever I wanted and get whatever I wanted and go wherever I wanted; obstacles were a nonfactor.

(And to be clear: all these little lucks were dropped like parcels into my lap. I never was a particularly hard worker and it was definitely not elbow grease and blood that got me what I wanted. I skated by on serendipity because my half-trying was as good as or better than other people’s all:

I paid half-attention in school and got straight As.

I practiced half as much before soccer tryouts and ended up starting keeper on the school and the city team.

I squished in last-minute to study abroad and spent a term in England.

I lucked into an apartment in Berkeley for five hundred a month.

I was handed a dream job in Europe on a silver platter, and the plane ticket was free.

I grew accustomed to easy. I was, I thought with pleasure and relief, one of those people who lives a great life, full of adventure, with no consequences or shame or pain. Not a dramatic person or a confrontational one, I was bound to coast along without conflict and die happy, blemish-free and blameless.

I came to learn damage when I failed to recognize a pressure before it sunk me.

• • •

My best friend, visiting from England; me, with a day off. We were camped out at Philz in Berkeley – she working on a piece about a strange garden, me on a story about Pricus, the sea-goat. It was perfectly serene, the coffee shop babble around me a cushioned murmur. It was how I imagined my life as a famous author would be, one day: clipping away at my laptop, sucking on a pen and brushing crumbs of artisan pastry from my notebook in a bougie cafe in a vibrant town with my brilliant friends.

Both of us finished our coffee at the same time; I ordered a second round and brought our mugs back to the table.

First sip, second cup and my world dissolved.

Me, fearless, suddenly saw untrustworthy black shadows everywhere. I felt drugged; the sun was too bright. We walked home and I tried to nap but my heart hammered hard and kept me up. I couldn’t finish the coffee but couldn’t bear to waste the money so I brought it home and put it in the refrigerator and never drank it.

I would wake up in the middle of the night with my spine tingling and my bowels cold. Spiders were everywhere that summer and I had bites all over my legs. My mind was a tempest, my eyes carouseled. I was buried underneath the pressures of moving (to Berlin), learning (German), working (the most meaningful job I had ever had), my best friend (staying with me for a month), my other best friend (cold-shouldering me for longer).

I could starve the anxiety away, for a time, but a single calorie revved my brain up once more. I could only watch old Disney classics (and Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, that artful, awful world comfortingly more gruesome than my own), could only read children’s literature, could only drink chamomile tea. I considered postponing my relocation to Germany, but got medicated instead and went through with the move, under the encouragement of everyone who loved me.

• • •

The air in Berlin was full of cigarette smoke and kebab spit and slush. I was only there five months. Most days I would careen down the office stairwell at 4 o’clock, blasting Florence + the Machine’s What Kind of Man and wishing horrible things on my dictatorly boss. He wanted twelve hour workdays; he wanted no free time. My friend offered to visit from Birmingham, where she was going to university. My boss said that she would have to occupy herself, because I would be working.

“Isn’t this your baby?” he’d ask me, about his startup, his dream. “Your baby, don’t you want it to thrive?”

It was not my baby. I did not sign up for this birth.

One day I went to a cafe in Kreuzberg and ordered a flat white. The walls were bleach-clean and so were the tables and chairs. The only decoration I can remember is magazines – a slew of them, neatly packed in baskets on the walls, neatly stacked on tabletops. I drank my flat white, had a panic attack, walked home, and thought quite seriously about finding a bridge and throwing myself off of it.

My boss and I had a fight when I said I wanted to leave. He locked us in a closet and demanded I pay him back for the flight that brought me there, and for the first month’s rent for my flat. I walked out, came back later to leave my key and take my things. They were hidden in a closet only the other startup leasing the space was allowed to use. My notebook was in a kitchen cabinet. (I have always been good at finding things.)

By the end I was living lonely in a beautiful flat in Spandau – the last stop plus a bus ride before Berlin fell away into pastoral farmlands and copses. My refrigerator stopped working immediately, but that was okay because there was a Penny across the street that sold bread for 75c, chocolate for €1, brie for €2, and wine for €3. I read Gone with the Wind in three sittings and watched Gravity Falls in German every day at 6 o’clock. I ghostwrote a terrible romance novel and got paid €400 even though the client hated it.

There was an old folk’s home on the next lot over. There were small neighborhoods of small houses to the rear of the building and, beyond that, woods and fields. It was spring and there were wild chives growing everywhere. I swore to pick some, to bring wine and hummus and crackers and have a picnic, but never did.

I flew home in late May.

• • •

My mother and I never got along. We were emotional in different ways, ways that clashed, and while I was growing up we couldn’t stand each other.

I moved into my parents’ basement for a few months. I had a good job, but spent more money on wine than I should have. More than once I recall pouring half a bottle down the laundry room sink in the morning, vowing that that was it, done, over. Then on my way home from work I would borrow my dad’s truck and drive it to the library, muster up a good cry, scream-sing Florence’s Ship To Wreck or Delilah, and stop at the liquor store for a bottle of cabernet. It was cathartic but exhausting. I related to most songs on How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful because they were angry, full of rage and remorse and self-loathing, aggressive, puncturing, and grandiose. Florence Welch, keeper of my emotions, my own personal God, had troubles that mirrored mine.

Still: it was some time before I recognized the gravitas of Various Storms & Saints.

• • •

Another move would mend things. Bring my luck back, return me to equilibrium.

I went back to Berkeley.

Things started soft but not smooth: spots of unease and angst were still tender. The bruises reformed quickly. I had started a part-time job for extra cash and fell to crushing precipitously hard on one of my managers, and my long-suspected homosexuality was confirmed. The close friend who had been part of the pit that was my anxiety had also come out as bi and had a gleaming circle of queer friends I was eager to meet, but she stalwartly refused to acknowledge my return, dampening my enthusiasm for the whole endeavor. I wallowed and wept and got drunk every night with the friend who was housing me in her upper apartment. She was splitting from her husband and we were encouraging one another’s bad behavior.

I acquired tickets to Sufjan Stevens, Marina & the Diamonds, and Florence + the Machine. The shows were a Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday in October. I went with Cold-Shoulder Friend.

Before Florence she came to my apartment. We drank Zinfandel and did puzzles. We walked to the Greek, stood five feet from the stage. Discussed Florence, all in white, barefoot, as a witch – a moon-witch, a wonder. When the chords came for Third Eye my knees gave and I stooped to touch the ground. People asked if I was okay.

“She’s fine,” Cold-Shoulder said, “she’s fine, she’s just being dramatic.”

On the walk home she apologized and I apologized. Neither of us understood the force that so strained us that winter; both of us dismissed it as out of our control. We hugged. She walked to her house, which used to be mine; I walked to my apartment two streets away.

• • •

I moved in with a coworker, and quickly turned my room into an alter. Sticks, leaves, ugly little succulents, crystals and rocks and snails’ shells, Christmas lights, a Van Gogh painting I’d found on the sidewalk. Tarot cards I never learned to read. Wine bottles with attractive labels. A massive gold reading chair I would lounge in every night after yoga, drinking wine and listening to sad records and passing out.

My life was regimented (wake up, bike to work, skive off at work, bike home, do yoga, write, get drunk, make dinner, read, sleep), and yet I felt empty, unfulfilled. As if I had irreversibly messed something up.

I tried to find joy again, find peace. Contentment. I would get pizza delivered and cry watching shitty Netflix shows. I would go to the movies alone, sneaking in snacks and cans of IPA, cruising from one showing to the next on a single matinee ballot. I would buy concert tickets and go alone – though once I lied and told my crush a friend had bailed on me so I had an extra, if she wanted to come. (She did.) I would go out to bars and put a thousand beers on my AmEx. One night I fell in love with a Master's student who talked beautiful philosophy to me; we held hands under the bar and I brought him home but only so far as the yard. I left my bike on the sidewalk.

My roommate thought I was an alcoholic and tried to give me an ultimatum, printed on work paper. Her Maine Coon hissed at me all the time and she never cleaned his litterbox. She had recently gone vegan and liked to watch hour-long YouTube videos of pigs and cows screaming. I signed her agreement anyway.

• • •

I never took mental health days growing up. My mom was always sicker than me, no matter how truly horrendous I felt, so I was sent to school regardless of my ailment: stomachache, a mini-flu, lack of sleep, a whizzing mind.

I woke up one day in Berkeley and decided to take a day off. My brain was in shambles: I could not repair it with self-discipline because mine only stretched so far; I could not seem to fix it by packing up and moving because escaping myself was clearly impossible.

I stayed home and cleaned.

Scrubbed orange sludge from the shower, swept cat hair from the kitchen floor, dusted every shelf and knickknack in the living room, organized until my body throbbed. My roommate never cleaned and she had a tendency to put compostables in a paper bag on the floor beside the trash can. It sogged through with putrid vegetable juices and rot so that when you went to pick it up the bag would break and the ooze would spill over the kitchen floor. There were maggots in the garbage can. Everywhere you stepped cat litter seeded the soles of your feet.

I had put my How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful record on. The fury of it fueled me to clean harder.

While I was down scrubbing the grout between the foul kitchen tiles, Various Storms & Saints began to play, and I began to cry.

And I’m in the throes of it, somewhere in the belly of the beast

But you took your toll on me, so I gave myself over willingly

Oh, you got a hold on me

I don’t know how I don’t just stand outside and scream

I am teaching myself how to be free

I cried hard for my life, destruction I had done to it. I was feeling such suppression, such utter listlessness and woe, such loss of purpose, and Florence Welch was expressing all of that – not in her usual howling, breaching, cosmic bellow, but softly, slightly, ever-so-gentle. I felt enraptured and captured, broken and mending, lost and found.

I know it seems like forever, I know it seems like an age

But one day this will be over: I swear it’s not so far away!

With a flayed toothbrush in one hand, the fluorescent bulb of a grotty, empty fishtank beaming down on me, my forehead pressed to the stinking carpet, unheeding, I wailed and heaved. I thanked Florence profusely. It felt like religion.

Eventually I got up and vacuumed the rug.

• • •

Various Storms & Saints is a promise.

This song is faith and hope and a panorama of the future you’ve been suffering for, changing for, living for. Countless times my life has changed; countless times I have felt a comprehensive end to ambition; and countless times I have put this song on and remembered that this moment, this string of sufferings, is not my life. These struggles are not the end. The bad luck and bad decisions and hurt and loss, all the things I’ve had to do that I did not want to are not the doom to which I am bound.

Where I am going may seem ages away, but Florence swears it’s not, and I always believe her. If you could just forgive yourself, she says. I haven’t yet, but I will, when I can. Until then, until that, I will keep being tempted by stars, I will keep tearing down monuments of my memory that hold me back, and holding heart that, one day, this will be over, and I will be free.