who the fuck is eloise-hypatia? (audio)
an overview of my life: from abused fundamentalist christian to proclaimer of the teenage girl music gospel (thanks to taylor cecelia brook, my intellectual lover, for the inspo behind this title)
I’ll be the boy of your dreams if you want me to be
Update!!!! I am housed again!!!
hello!!!
call me eloise (they/she)!
I was evicted from my home after coming out as nonbinary, but I have recovered!!!
Approved for an apartment 11/8!!!
So:
welcome to my substack, snowflakeangelbutterfly!
Have I passed numerology yet?
Giles?? Proud of me?? ❤️
here is a podcast you can check out! plus an audio thingy i did you might enjoy!
with
:Queer Safe Spaces, Being Our Most Authentic Selves, and Boomer Americanism.
an editorial of sorts on my own:
boomers: the boxes are real to them
another editorial of sorts on my own (with audio added):
plus a proclamation of the gospel, my love for claire, and many other beings:
:
anyway:
i came out as non-binary in july and faced rejection from the people who were closest to me, but over time i discovered i was surrounded — and always had been — by people who loved me. i just needed to break free and go to them!
breaking free from my haters:
you're never fucking muting me again (an open letter)
“he didn’t even know you came out: he muted you years ago.”
overcoming my father:
Why has my dad Keith Jelinek been tracking me? Observations (updated 1:19 pm est 11/5/2024): A pattern of experiences causes me to wonder what my dad has been up to since 2020: he’s been putting trackers in my things, and the cars
“the following was written when i was in a state of extreme fear, for which i received voluntary mental health services over the course of 9 days at forest view hospital. my records have been mailed to my wife and lawyer. for the latest, listen to the audio recording.
i see now: my dad isn’t necessarily a criminal mastermind. i’ve met so many people all across michigan dealing with the same psychopathic parents who have rejected them for their “behavior” after they came out.”
“a friend helped me see tonight:
i have made it seem as if i have encountered only ignorant people and hatred.
in truth i have been fixated on and obsessed with my enemies,
at the cost of appreciating the people who have loved me over the years.
here is my love for you encapsulated:
it wasn’t just music.
it was all of you.”
but what about my life up to now???
fortunately i have covered much of it in my blog!
here i will break everything down into several phases:
🩷childhood with its emotional, physical, and religious traumas (physical not shown);
🩷fundamentalist christian upbringing;
🩷atheist phase and its succession with witchcraft;
🩷friendship and its importance;
🩷travel and its importance;
🩷music and its importance;
🩷how sexy i think claire elizabeth cottrill is (sexiest woman alive)
childhood and its after-shocks
overview
i faced emotional, physical, and religious abuse from my parents.
as a result of fear i’d burn in hell if i did not purify myself,
i passed through a phase of being a fundamentalist evangelical.
then, in early adulthood, came a phase of fanatical atheism.
finally, i embraced myself as a witch.
neglect / indoctrination into christian nationalism / emotional and physical trauma
my middle school memoir (salvation chronicles prologue)
i thought maybe her rejection was because of the white stuff in my hair.
while falling asleep at night, i used my fingernails to violently dig through layers of hardened hair. deep beneath a brown surface speckled with white dots, a nearly impenetrable monstrosity had buried chunks of hair beneath one another, gluing individual strands together. i had to repeatedly liberate each individual thread from this soggy marshland. i carefully scraped the flaky, moist, viscous goo off of each of them, until at last i could feel the damaged, soft texture of the hair itself.
on rare occasions, i was able to drill my nails all the way through several layers of rock-like hair clusters. then i would finally touch my sensitive, buried scalp. it was tender and bloody. sometimes it felt like soft wet gunk. usually, it was the first time in many years that this particular portion of my scalp had any contact with the air.
at least a few times, when I was 11 in sixth grade and sitting at my desk in class, i diligently emancipated various strands of hair. as the english teacher droned on about some boring novel, i collected the white crispy residue into a neat pile beside my books and notebook.
my parents certainly seemed to think so.
whenever i donned dark colors, my shoulders were covered in snowy debris. my parents would tell me how disgusting i looked but i wasn’t sure what to do about it.
i was ordered repeatedly into the shower.
there, i deployed increasingly powerful versions of head & shoulders against the white menace. sometimes, i scrubbed so hard that i’d find little blotches of blood on my fingers. each time, however, there were still so many white flakes floating out of my hair that my parents accused me of not having really tried.
for years i struggled with this issue and eventually i thought the white stuff was simply a part of me. i was ugly, i thought. i am a disgusting freak. and i picked it out of my hair in class for all to see because when i did, there was a satisfying rush: yes, look at me, look at what a repulsive creature i am.
once my dad ordered me into a bathing suit. with me in the shower, he tried to wash my hair, getting his fists in there. i hated it and he totally failed.
finally, after many years of reprimanding me for how embarrassing i looked whenever they had to show me to their friends, my mom took me to a dermatologist.
the dermatologist explained that a yeast had infected my hair.
only a potent anti-fungal ointment could cure this particularly severe case.
in the meantime, i continued attending the youth group. i scouted my surroundings for christian girls who might accept me, constantly admiring their accessories and hair colors and clothing. usually, however, i was confined to a church-run small group of other boys. we met weekly at a youth minister’s house.
in his living room, this man taught us about america’s christian heritage. he said this heritage was under attack by liberals who claim america is not a christian nation.
“well, let’s see what the founding fathers have to say about that,” he suggested.
we watched a documentary which explained that all the founding fathers were devoted to incorporating god and/or christianity into our system of government. this nation was always meant to be a godly and christian one.
“they will tell you something different in the public school,” he said. “but it’s a lie. until i saw this documentary, i didn’t quite realize just how great of a lie it was. we are the greatest nation on earth, but we lose that as soon as we forsake the lord.”
i interrupted him. i hated this man: just looking at his face made me want to get violent. i told the group that i wouldn’t be so sure about america’s greatness.
my heart was thumping.
i prophesied the coming franco-british invasion.
“britain and france,” i explained, “are way more powerful than america will ever be. teamed up, they will destroy us all. it’s only a matter of time.”
the others laughed at me. “america is the greatest country in the world,” they said.
“you are fools,” i said. “america is weak. our navy in particular sucks.”
my grandpa had told me god would send me to hell for calling people fools. i called people fools often. it felt as if i might as well seal the deal, take out the wondering.
i was patient. they hadn’t yet read my novel about the coming invasion.
i was currently working on a battle scene during which the united british and french armies were pushing into michigan.
“i’m going to be a british soldier one day,” i said.
“you should fight for your own country,” said my youth minister, looking concerned.
“britain is my country,” i said. “did you know that i am descended from king arthur?”
my dad had always told me i was descended from king arthur and i could feel that heritage in my bones.
a friend of mine argued adamantly with me at school about this topic.
“america is the greatest nation to ever exist,” he told me. “we will always be the most powerful.”
“no, we won’t be,” i said, recalling my shifting fortunes in age of empires 2. i actually knew a lot about world history because i played so many video games set in the ancient world and i sometimes read my joan of arc book, maybe 2 pages a day.
“all empires eventually fall, including this one,” i announced. “this nation will be completely and totally destroyed.” i waved my hand through the air. “you see all these houses? just wait until the franco-british army arrives.”
“i don’t think that’s true,” my friend said. he was getting angry. “we have — ”
“our army sucks dude,” i interrupted. “britain and france already have better armies.”
“that’s bullshit,” he said. he was raising his voice. “how can you know that?”
“i’ve read about it on the internet,” i said. “well, we have a better army. britain has a better navy. that’s just a fact. but france has the better army than both.”
he plugged his ears. “america will always be the best country in the world.” he shouted it again: “we are the greatest country in the world.”
“look at reality dude,” i said, shrugging. “america’s days are numbered.”
“within the broader youth group, we were repeatedly warned about the struggles we would encounter to maintain our faith at public school.
“school can be really, really hard guys,” our youth minister told us in a room at the church. “especially science class. in high school, when they start presenting their evidence for evolution, it’ll just be really hard. we laugh about it now, saying they just believe monkeys turned into people. but the devil is very deceitful, and they’re going to give you a more complicated explanation than that. they’re going to give you what they claim as evidence. you have to remember it’s all a lie. remember they cannot explain the huge gaps in the fossil record. they can’t explain where life came from to begin with. and how could something as astonishingly complex as the human eye just evolve? the whole theory of evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. keep your faith in god. you are not an animal. don’t forget that.”
an evil song had even come out in 1999.
this song proclaimed that we are nothing but mammals and so we should bang each other like the animals do on tv. convincing us we were animals in biology class was part of a larger liberal-feminist-atheistic-scientific project to make us think we were free to do whatever we wanted without god’s approval.
in high school, the youth minister said, they would really start teaching us a more liberal version of sex education.
girls may seduce us, trying to touch our penises and stuff like that.
but we could not allow the school to convince us that there were “safe” ways to have sex before marriage. vrginity was sacred, and we must protect it.
our bodies were sacred temples for the lord. premarital sex defiles this temple. we must reject the temptations of science and the flesh. science, by convincing us we are animals, encourages sexual behavior which the lord has not sanctioned.
“you know i love sex,” the pastor used to say to the congregation at the megachurch, always getting a chuckle from across the enormous audience. “sex is a great gift from the lord. we are not against sex between a man and wife. we love sex here.”
he paced back and forth on the stage before thousands.
“raise your hand if you love sex!” some people did so and cheered. “see,” he went on, smiling broadly and raising his hands into the air, “we love sex here.”
religious trauma
my choice at 16: stop masturbating or burn in hell (salvation chronicles 1)
i have so many memories of being in the car with my mom where she told me about hell. i was in sixth grade and i was failing almost all of my classes. my teachers hated me: i didn’t see the purpose behind school, and all i wanted to do was disappear into my notebooks where i wrote my stories or into my headphones with my girl music.
but as much as i wanted to focus on other things, my mom was constantly reminding me that i could burn in hell forever if i wasn’t careful.
“jesus could come back at any moment,” my mom said.
when we least expect him to return, jesus will return, and all the signs suggested that he would return very soon.
“everyone who is a christian will just disappear,” she said. “pilots will just vanish out of planes. the planes will crash and all the passengers will die. drivers will just poof out of cars and crash into pedestrians in the street.”
obviously i wanted to know: will i disappear with the christians? how can i know?
“only god can know what’s in your heart,” she often told me.
the world in which i would be left behind was a terrifying one. my mom told me that there would be these demons who were hybrids between locusts and lions. people would be in such agony from how these demons tortured them that they would run to the tops of buildings and jump off to their deaths. but god would ensure they stayed alive no matter how many stories up they dove from. she told me how these people would be twitching around on the ground while the demons gruesomely tortured them, and i saw myself in the future: plummeting from a building into locusts.
*****
how could i be saved? i was never sure.
so many times i had asked jesus into my heart. so many times i told jesus he was my lord and savior. but my mom said that if we are really saved, the holy spirit works upon our hearts to nurture real change. this is how we know we are saved, she said: we feel the holy spirit working inside us. we will know this by our fruits, our deeds, and also by our thoughts, our feelings, and our desires. are they bad? are they good?
could i feel the holy spirit working inside me? at 12, i was instructed to analyze this question, and i knew the salvation of my soul depended on the answer.
the analysis was a short one. despite asking many times for the holy spirit to come into my heart, it was clear i was still a bad person.
a couple years later, my parents threatened to have “men come in the night,” take me out of my bed, and lock me up in a military school. “you’re grades just aren’t good enough,” they liked to say once they looked into the school. so at night i would lay in bed and cry. i imagined myself being tortured by demons and i would ask god: please change me, please make me a good person, please don’t let me go to hell.
my mom said that this time of the demons, the climax of a seven year period during which a man promising peace (the antichrist, who some in my community believed to be the un secretary general kofi annan for opposing the iraq war) would rule over the world as a ruthless dictator. this time would be called the tribulation.
but what, i asked my mom, would happen after the tribulation?
after the tribulation, there would be a great battle where god would destroy all his enemies.
“every knee will bow,” my mom said. “every knee will bow!” she adamantly pointed her finger in the air.
after the battle, all of us would be rounded up in front of god for the final judgment.
“god will open up the book of life,” my mom said to me when i was in sixth grade. “and anyone whose name is not in the book of life, he will throw into the lake of fire. they will burn there forever and ever, and they will never stop feeling pain.”
the fire would never fully consume them. there would always be something left of them to burn.
“why won’t they die?” i asked.
“god won’t let them die,” she said. “they have new bodies that keep them alive.”
i asked my mom how i could know that my name was in the book of life.
“only god can know what’s in your heart,” she said.
i asked her if she and my dad would be sad when i was burning in hell.
she told me of course she would be devastated if i was burning in the lake of fire and she never saw me again. “but god tells us,” she said, “that he will wipe every tear from our eyes.”
the warnings seemed to escalate when my behavior at school and home worsened.
they told me at church how much jesus loved me, but they also told me to think about all the people in my life who weren’t christians. all of them were going to burn in hell. they asked me to share the names of people in my life to whom i would “testify.” and i tried to spread the word to some of my friends, but mostly i was terrified for myself.
as i wrote in my post about lucy dacus and overcoming religious trauma,
as early as 10 years old, i used to sit and wonder: am i the antichrist? i imagined god throwing me down into the deep dark abyss described in revelation. i would fall and fall and fall forever. thinking about it, i would sit there, paralyzed with utter terror. people wondered, “why doesn’t this kid do his homework?” and i wondered, “don’t these people realize if they don’t do something they’re all going to burn in hell?”
sometimes at night when i was trying to fall asleep, i imagined that i was in the lake of fire. i saw my parents and jesus up on the top of a cliff looking down at me and all the other souls who were screaming in agony and pleading for mercy. then i would see jesus and my parents turn their backs and walk away: i saw this in my nightmares.
would god have mercy on me?
i asked my mom about abraham and isaac. god had stopped abraham from killing isaac at the last moment, but the story still haunted me. i knew god liked to test the loyalty of his followers. i asked my mom, “would you also kill me if god told you to?”
she hesitated and i pressed her. finally she admitted that she would.
what choice do we have when issued one of god’s commandments?
****
toward the end of middle school, i was inspired by this terrifying ride at disney world to create my own scary experience for my little sister. i moved about her room in the dark ruffling things up, trying to make myself sound like an alien.
she screamed obviously, then ran to my parents who woke up from their beds.
in the living room, my mom shouted at me while my sister cried in her arms,
“there is only one explanation for this kind of evil! there is a demon in you!” she pointed her finger adamantly in the air. “this is demonic! you hear me? demonic!”
i went to my room and spent the rest of the night imagining the fires of hell.
a few months later i went to a sleepover in my friend’s basement and we played truth or dare. i told him i wanted to go down on him and he let me. we both got completely naked. i loved running my hands all over his body. we were all over one another with our lips and hands, but we never kissed. kissing felt too intimate and we were sinning already. i knew it was dirty while i touched him, but his skin made me feel so good.
what kind of a person was i, i wondered the next day, to do something so awful?
i never talked to that boy again.
the holy spirit was not inside me. i was wicked and depraved.
i spent hours on the internet watching youtube videos about the existence of hell. there was a recording from some russian geologist who had drilled down so deep that they actually captured audio of the souls screaming in hell.
i used to just sit and listen to them scream. for hours and hours each saturday.
one night in tenth grade my friends asked me to come join them in someone’s basement to hang out. it would have been a 20 minute walk. i didn’t go.
i spent the whole night listening to those people screaming.
forever and ever and ever, i thought. i knew my destiny was to burn for eternity.
the only question was: what does it mean, forever? what will it be like?
i spent hours wondering, “will there be any way to relieve the pain?”
i even asked my mother. “is there any way the souls in hell will just get used to the torture over time?”
“no,” she said with a firm shake of her head. “absolutely not.”
*****
one day when i was suspended for fighting, i wondered, “am i the antichrist?”
the antichrist wouldn’t go to the lake of fire. the antichrist would fall down forever and ever and ever into an infinite dark abyss.
i asked my mom, “could the antichrist choose not to be the antichrist?”
“no,” she said, shaking her head firmly, “the antichrist has no choice. it is god’s plan.””
i just needed to change my thoughts so they would stop being sexual.
but i could not change my thoughts. at a certain point i would start reading the bible the moment i had an erection, hoping that the living waters of the holy spirit would make it go away, but only one thing would ever make it go away.
sometimes i walked around with scissors, just wondering what i could do with them.
if your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. it is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. and if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. (matthew 5:29-30)
by the end of the first week of the program, i had masturbated 8 times and my mentor kicked me out of the course.
“your heart is not ready yet for this,” he told me. and i knew it was true.
then i knew so deeply that i was evil and depraved and wicked and hopeless.
but the fear of hell kept me going. every night those old images and sounds came flooding back to me, keeping me up in my bed: the souls screaming deep down under the earth, the antichrist falling forever and ever into the blackness of the abyss, the people jumping from buildings only to be tortured alive by demons, my parents turning their backs on me, the flames in the lake of fire scorching me for billions and billions and billions of years.
i always thought about this: eternity. eternity in hell captivated me and defined my entire worldview. i tried and tried and tried to understand: what will it be like, being tortured, burning, screaming in agony, forever?
“it will never end,” my mom had sometimes said. “never. they will scream and scream and scream and no one will save them. the bible says the fire will never be quenched.”
how could i fix my thoughts and feelings?
reading the bible fed pure thoughts and feelings to my mind, and by this point i was reading the bible for 5 or 6 hours a day during my spring break of sophomore year. but what about the sources of my impure thoughts and feelings? who gave me these?
i remembered what my pastor had told me when i’d started dating an atheist several months before (the relationship did not go well). he said i coudn’t date an atheist.
do not be yoked together with unbelievers. for what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? or what fellowship can light have with darkness? (2 corinthians 6:14)
my friends, i realized. they are the problem. they joke about sex. they hook up with each other. they speak openly about their sexual desires. they say they are christians, but when i look at their behavior, it is clear the holy spirit does not work in them.
you will know them by their fruit (matthew 7:16)
i told all my friends that they were no longer my friends.
“i need to purify myself for the lord,” i told them. “all of you are going to hell.”
they pleaded with me to change my mind. they thought i was joking.
but i didn’t see them for several more months.
atheist phase and its succession by witchcraft
“You’re being very… chill about this,” I say cautiously. “Considering you’re a passionate atheist and everything, you’re accepting the notion of a spirit demon very… gracefully.”
….
“The thing about being an atheist is I don’t have a problem with belief. I just don’t like religion.”
“So witchcraft is fine, but God is not.”
“Sort of, yeah,” Fiona says. “I can accept that you accidentally summoned a demon to take away your best friend, but I can’t accept the concept of original sin.”(Caroline O’Donoghue, All Our Hidden Gifts)
I cannot say I regret being an extremist atheist to the same extent that I regret being a fundamentalist Christian.
I doubt I can even say I regret my fundamentalist atheism at all, since it was a necessary stage toward freeing my mind from the infantilizing effects which Evangelical Christianity has upon the brain. But even if my atheism functioned as an effective antidote to the fears of Hell and sex which many clerics are still striving to inject into the minds of children, and even if my godlessness helped me purge myself the most perverted aspects of Christian morality, the stridency of radical atheism still restricted my experiences in new ways which I am now overcoming.
All atheism signifies is the outright denial that God or gods exist. In that sense, I think Fiona’s definition might be a little too unfocused, as she credits her atheism to a distaste for religion and does not mention God at all. Even so, as I was reading All Our Hidden Gifts, this particular passage about atheism and witchcraft halted my progress. She gets it, I thought. This is what I’ve been telling people for a few years now, only to receive some of the most puzzled and even concerned expressions from the many materialists within my social circle.
Yes, I am an atheist, I try to explain, but I try to find it easy to believe in spirits, both good and evil ones. I like the idea of believing in witchcraft, tarot, astrology, and the summoning of demons. I suppose I lack the respect most atheists seem to have for the scientific method as the final word on truth. Then again, this isn’t really about truth. It’s about exploring other ideas for the sake of their aesthetic appeal, although I want to believe so strongly that: yes, I end up believing.
but this story is more complicated than that!
i was so fucking depressed and sad and miserable, my entire adult life, until i came out as non-binary and changed my behavior (lol) in july of this year.
you know what saved me, seriously?
you know what brought me out of my misery?
so much!
but here, for biographical purposes, i’ll highlight:
travel!
music!
& friends!
friends
#13: Yearnings for the Past in Freiburg and Elsewhere
When I revisit the sacred settings of an emotional attachment to another human being, I usually have the eerie sense that some version of the person is still there. A fragment of their light which they left behind. A piece of their soul which has its own essence and prowls about. I have a crippling apprehension that the past is still somehow happening, over and over again, on the surface of the Earth where I am standing. If only I could find a way while I am there to genuinely live it again.
I try to reach through the decades and immerse myself in the extinct. If all the exact sensations and circumstances of some vanquished moment can somehow be reenacted, then maybe I can flood my soul with the same feelings and perceptions as I had back then. Those impressions, those sensations, they are there in the sacred place. Ghostly chunks of them floating in the air, eager to be reunited. It can all be reassembled into something like what was, as if the past were happening again.
But this exacting method of spell-casting is not without its challenges. What is required is to provide the body with precisely the same shades of light, the same temperatures internally and externally, the same sounds of running water, the same colors of sky and grass and street, the same thoughts and mentalities which captivated the old mind, the same objects which may now be sitting in a garbage dump somewhere.
Difficult as it sounds, perhaps if I merely reassembled some portion of it… then, by concentrating on that past moment with all my strength, it could happen again. All I would need are a few pieces from the wreckage, combined with my imagination.
Once on a driveway, in an attempt to cast this spell, I absorbed the spectral vestiges of another time. The light from the sun, shining in my face, possessed all the same properties as it had before. The scent of the lawn and the sound of the water running from the hose were both the same. My mentality and worldview from that time were restored. Everything I had learned in the previous fifteen years was forgotten, all my experiences forfeit, and I was once again the person I had been.
Then a faint body of light, which could hardly be perceived, was beside me on my parents’ driveway. This was the astral corpse of my past self, I hoped. In a flash of revelation, it felt like my soul had somehow fused with that long-confined carcass. Or maybe I was temporarily possessed by the spiritual remains themselves. It was a possession which I eagerly welcomed, for it was the method by which I could truly re-experienced the past. And I did relive it all just as it was, but it only lasted a second.
I tried to do it again. Upon which I suffered the painful realization that it was all just a delusional product of my imagination. I could never get back to the past. The grim-faced scientists, with their calculations and their supposed laws of nature, were standing in my way, urging me to abandon my instincts and emotions in favor of reason and logic. “Don’t listen to that part of yourself,” they urged. “We believe in experiments now. We abide by the findings of carefully crafted regression analyses.”
“I will never listen to you,” my heart must have told them. “I will never again so callously shackle the poetic thinking of magic with the gruesome chains of reason and logic. Instead I will craft spells to enter the astral plane. Because in that sacred space lingers the corpse of the person I used to be and the corpses of the friends I had.”
But then I was just standing there on the driveway like any other person. “I’m normal,” I told myself. “I’m not weird at all. I’m just a normal guy standing in a driveway. All my thoughts are ordinary and nothing to be alarmed about.”
I persist in my attempts to roll back the effects of scientific brainwashing. I strive to reactivate the emotional and animalistic inclinations of my intellect. I do not like what the scientists have been telling me. I do not like the way they have taught me to think about the world in a rigidly materialist way. “Be gone,” I tell them, “with your computerized statistical models and coldly calculated clinical trials.” I feel like maybe reality could be different, and I suggest so even in the face of their dismissive mockery. Maybe I can send my soul into the past and experience everything exactly the same way again. I want to believe this. I once tried it elsewhere, too. In Germany.
I was blessed with the fortune of spending my junior year of college studying in Freiburg, Germany. Twelve months after that experience ended, I launched a months-long backpacking trip with a visit to the city I had wanted for so long to call home.
Having arrived from Iceland that morning, I got off the train in Freiburg. I thought back to the first time I’d arrived here as a 20-year-old almost two years before.
Back then, I had nearly twelve months ahead of me across the ocean, the longest I’d ever been away from home. I remembered the rush of excitement of arriving and checking in with the program director at the station. Then I recalled getting onto one of Freiburg’s street cars and taking it to my new bedroom in a student-housing unit. I remembered arriving there, surveying the kitchen I would share with 7 students from Germany and elsewhere. Then I had gone into my room, which was furnished with a twin bed, a desk, and a closet. Suddenly, I was alone in there, with completely white walls and sheets and no Internet or phone. I began unpacking, only to find a note which my dad had slipped into my things. I read it on my new bed. I cried because I already missed him.
But soon I was surrounded by blossoming friendships. These happy connections then swiftly transformed that alien city into a place which I liked to call home.
So when revisiting that forge of so many cherished relationships, I didn’t need anyone to greet me or give me directions. I took the street car to my old dormitory complex, Stusie. And there I met John, another American from my program who would be hosting me for a couple days. Unlike me, he and some other people from our program had stayed in Germany for another year. One of them had even permanently transferred and would be earning her degree here instead of her American university.
Stusie sits right beside an artificial lake. Around it are strung paths, trees, and great spaces of green grass on which to sit. On the afternoon I arrived for my visit, we sat on a grassy hill overlooking the lake. We drank with some of the American students who were there that year. I don’t remember any of their faces or names. Because the whole time I was thinking about my own close friends who weren’t here anymore.
When they were here, we sat by the lake at night. We brought two-euro bottles of Macedonian wine from the nearby Penny market. The produce there was sometimes so bad you could stick your finger right through the peel of an orange. But I really only ate chocolate muesli and frozen pizza anyway. Plus, the wine was cheap and satisfying. We would sometimes each drink straight from our own bottle.
I remembered the daytime picnics we used to have here. Drinking Rothaus beer from small kegs. Eating strawberries and blueberries from Tupperware. Making out after midnight in a concealed patch of nearby trees. I thought about how several of the others went swimming many times in the lake while I kept my distance from the water; I was too afraid to put my bathing suit on in front of other people. I recalled one of the first times I got high, right here in this grass at the sun was setting.
Pieces of my old companions were still here. Their astral corpses were jumping from the dock into the water, splashing and laughing. Fragments of light from their spirits were around me among the dazzlingly green plants. They incessantly rushed about beneath the tree branches. I would connect with them somehow. I needed to be here with them again, my beloved companions of old. Not with these weirdo new people.
I still had my tiny 2008 Nokia phone, with a recently-refilled ALDI sim card. This had been my mobile telecommunications technology when I lived here. I called the German numbers of some American friends who weren’t here with me anymore. On their voicemail recordings, I listened sorrowfully to the soothing impressions their vocal cords had left behind. I played back the voice messages they left for me that year. I read their old texts.
It brought my soul so much closer to the shadows cast by the the rapidly decaying residue of their loving light. Filling me with remorse and sadness. Yet some of these specters kept ample distance. These resided in the the dark places which I could have shared with them… but didn’t. Like the water right there in front of me. The water in which I never swam with them. If only I could have another chance.
I left a voice message on one of their numbers. I sent a text to another. “I’m a lunatic,” I thought. “Imagine what they would think of you if they knew about this.”
But maybe if I just kept calling and texting, I’d recreate the conditions necessary for my soul to transport back in time. I’d attain more than just the fragments of light left behind. I’d be with them again right here in this special place.
My spirit would be with them at this lake again. This time I would jump into the water with them, unafraid to be in a bathing suit. And we’d always have that together. Instead of nostalgia, I would feel everything just the same like I felt it back then, as if it were still happening. But it would be even better. Because the mistakes of the past would be corrected and rectified by the happy pleasures of a hopeless delusion.
I called and called, texted and texted. I walked alone into the stress. I strolled in isolation on the shores of the lake, struggling to concentrate my mind on the hidden reality of their light’s lingering presence. I squinted hard in my attempts to make out the outlines of astral corpses around me. But the more strenuously I reached my arms into the air, the more vigorously I strove to touch the leftovers of their souls with my fingertips, so all the more painful it was to finally concede failure.
I thought also of alternative futures. Different present realities. Should I have transferred to Freiburg for the rest of my degree, like one of my professors here had suggested? He had recruited me for an upcoming class he was teaching about the European Union. His face was smeared with disappointment when I told him I was returning to America. But I knew this would not have solved the current dilemma.
The closest friends I made in Freiburg were gone, and they wouldn’t be here if I had stayed. They would just be really far away. It was them I really missed. Not the city, not the park, not the two-Euro wine. But the specific and peculiar way in which I’d experienced it with them. On its own, this place seemed to mean nothing. Everything here just had a special meaning to me because of the people with whom I shared it.
Without them, it was like being in an abandoned house haunted by the spectral presence of the dead. I felt some attachment to the place itself, but it was not the kind with which I wanted to linger. It was a connection that scared me, that made me want to run away. Sitting with it, I dwelled depressingly on the irreversible forward-march of time, on the impossibility of ever getting back what has already happened.
Of course, these people weren’t dead. They were in America, where I saw them often and where we shared all these memories. But it wouldn’t always be that way, would it? I shuddered at the thought that some of them might one day fade out of my life, something that did indeed happen. Even if they didn’t, though, something about what we were here was dead. No matter how often I called their old cell phones, I could not send my soul back to that time when this city and our friendships had coincided.
It was not Freiburg which mattered. It was the specific combination of place, time, and relationships. And all of that had blended into a separate entity, a different universal whole, which I would never know again. Because it was replaced now by a new universe, a new whole, a new present entity in which I was doomed to move, but which would also one day recede into the past, revoked forever by the gods. Even they probably couldn’t give it back to me, and why would they even care if they could?
Even if we were all to come back to Freiburg at the same time, there would be a barrier preventing me from transforming my memories into a present reality. The truth of what we are today prevents the full realization of what we were yesterday. The circumstances are lost; they cannot be reassembled.
Soon it was dark. My host and I were wandering the streets of the old town. Which is actually a new town, since it had to be rebuilt after the war. We revisited my favorite places. The banks of the river where me and my friends used to eat takeout pizza from a box. It’s a famous box, found all over Europe, which has a painting of George Clooney working a pizza oven. We went back to the bar, Schlappen, where we had spent many sloppy nights leaning in for photos and throwing arms over one another. We ate at the döner kebab shops where I once took a fifth of my meals. We sat on Augustinerplatz at night, where we used to drink with the other students on the steps. We sat up in the beer gardens which overlook the city from the tops of mountainous slopes. There, we drank Hefeweizen in the sunlight beneath the trees’ shimmering green leaves. I remembered the trails we hiked in the surrounding Black Forest hills, the serene layers of which we beheld rolling out beyond the stark edges of the city.
Though I greatly enjoyed these reenactments, they also flooded me with a remorseful yearning which I could not keep at bay. Not because I couldn’t continue sitting within the sparkling greenery of these beer gardens every day. Rather, it was because I was taking in these dazzling views without the people who had made them so special.
The night before leaving, I tripped in one of the Bächle. These are gutter-like drainage systems that collect and move water around town. Freiburg folklore has it that if you trip in one, you are destined to marry a Freiburger. It had never happened to me before, and it seemed like a perfect final moment in the city.
But I didn’t want a future here. Because Freiburg on its own, as a raw physical space, was not special to me. And I didn’t want a present in Freiburg either, because all I had here were the hauntings of spiritual remains. All I wanted in Freiburg was the past.
The next day, I left Freiburg for Munich. I admitted that I could never again have the exact confluence of relationships, mentalities, and extreme youth which had made Freiburg so special. I tried to be at peace with the past’s limited existence inside my inevitably weakening memories.
#17: Friends, Novels, and FOMO as a Way of Life
I woke up on the floor of my friend’s apartment. Last I remembered, we had all gotten back sometime after 10 o’clock from a minor league soccer game followed by dinner and drinks. I said I just needed to rest for a bit. Then I collapsed on the floor. Now, as I looked around in the dark, everyone around me was asleep on air mattresses that hadn’t been there before.
Panic and regret overtook me as I contemplated the hours of fun I had missed out on. After all, this was the last night of our annual reunion, a special occasion when the five of us came together from all over the country for communion and debauchery. Had I taken too many gummies? (ugh, so typical) Had I finished one too many cocktails at the restaurant? (definitely) Couldn’t I have had a cup of coffee or run around in circles or something instead of lying down on the floor?
Completely infuriated by the failure of my biological constitution to resist this pathetic need to sleep, I stood up and went to the kitchen. There I poured myself a glass of water. I noticed an empty pizza box. Pizza! They ate pizza without me! I can’t believe it! I tried to convince myself the pizza must be from the previous night. No way did they eat pizza without me! No! Way!
I looked at the clock: 3 AM. I wondered how long ago they had gone to sleep. My mind raced with images of the fun times and silly conversations I had missed out on. And now two of them would be leaving for the airport in the morning, the reunion finally concluded without any clear date set for the next time.
Maybe there was some way I could do all of this over. Perhaps I could wake everyone up and demand they all hang out with me. No, God no. Don’t do that! Anything but that! Maybe I could… build a… time machine? Transport myself into a parallel universe where I drank coffee instead of lying down on the floor? But as I looked at them passed out around the living room while chugging my water, I conceded sorrowfully that my endeavors were doomed before I had even tried. There was no way to correct my dire failure. I would have to live with this tragedy for the rest of my life.
The moments I missed had already slipped away, never to occur again. If only I had woken up earlier! After just a little nap! I went over to the air mattress and forced my friend to move over so I could sleep somewhere not on the floor.
Then it took me nearly an hour to fall back asleep as an overwhelming disgust for the weakness of my fragile flesh overtook me. Falling asleep early, missing out on late-night comradery. This was a sin I had committed against myself, and there appeared no path to forgiveness. I was in a debt to my own soul which I could never repay.
The next day they told me of their night. They had played a few rounds of a game we invented in which we threw a sticky ball (procured as an arcade prize) from the living room into the kitchen, assigning points depending on which portion of the microwave or oven it hit. One of them had advanced in the tournament by default, since I had passed out on the floor. I had never won this tournament. And now I had lost my opportunity! I would be a loser forever. Apparently they had been quite loud, and yet I had not woken up at all. Yes, reader, it’s true: such is the catastrophe of my nature.
Then, after the game, they had sat around watching something on the television…. All while I slept right there on the floor amidst them.
“You should’ve woken me up,” I accused.
“You were passed out dude,” one of them said, laughing. “You were not waking up.”
“But check this out Drew,” another one of them said. (FYI, reader: I hate this name, and no one else but them is allowed to call me Drew). “We got pizza too.”
“No you did not!”
“Yes we did dude,” he said. “Look!” He fiddled with his phone.
“No!” I walked over to the pizza where my friend was standing triumphantly. “This is from the other night! You did not get pizza without me!”
On his screen, he showed me the receipt in his e-mail. He held it right in my face. The evidence was clear now. I could no longer deny the truth of this horror which had terrorized me in the night. At last I had to concede that my nightmares had been realized; the monsters had emerged into the world from the tortured recesses of my imagination. I would have to live forever with the awful truth that my friends really ate pizza without me.
“We ate pizza without you, Drew,” my friend said, sarcastically sinister as he looked into my eyes.
Soon two of them left to catch their flights. It was all over, just like that. I settled in to watch a few episodes of Bar Rescue with the three who remained. On the TV, the crazed yet competent consultant screamed at bar managers to get their shit together and fire their kids. Never again, I vowed to myself, will I miss out like that!
If you can believe it, I discovered that one of my companions had willingly gone to bed before everyone else was asleep. Baffled, I asked her a few questions about this, disbelief and awe overtaking me at the idea that someone could do such a thing.
Supposedly she went to bed because she was tired. Didn’t she feel guilty? Apparently not. Apparently she did not condemn herself as a reprobate for falling asleep.
Always having striven to be the last person standing, I tried for a moment to appreciate this alternative way of life, even going so far as imagining it for myself. I tried to tell myself, it’s okay Andrew, it’s okay you fell asleep, you were tired! Everyone gets tired! But then I instinctively recoiled at the concept. It was as if I was walking to confession feeling overwhelmed by guilt for my many vile sins. But then some little atheist shit was there in my face telling me that nothing is right and nothing is wrong, that God is dead and therefore all is permitted. No, I would never concede that I had done nothing wrong! Voluntarily going to sleep while everyone else was having fun watching TV and eating pizza?! How could someone truly be at peace after having done such a thing?
But everyone else hadn’t been up having fun, had they? No, because I had gone to sleep first. It was the one thing I always strove to avoid at every gathering, ever since…. But no, that is too painful. It is too debilitating to recall the other time I fell asleep extremely high on a couch and then they ate pizza without me! And yet, despite all my determination, it had happened again. Has the universe ever known such a weak man?
I soothed myself with other thoughts. Before he had gone to the airport, I told one of them that I couldn’t believe I had slept through them watching TV.
“But you were here,” he said. “We were watching and you were right there.” He gestured to the portion of the floor where I had been asleep.
I imagined myself there, sleeping deeply and securely on the ground while a group of my closest friends sat around me. And I tried to make that the way I would remember all this. Yet I mostly failed to believe I had really been there. It was just like when I read books too fast. Just like when I may as well have missed a whole scene.
Many years ago, I called my friend in a panic about this grave existential matter.
“I think I read all these books too fast,” I told him. “I mean, I got these books for Christmas and now I’ve already read them. What kind of person does that?”
“It’s fine dude,” he said.
“But I didn’t savor them,” I insisted. “I read them so fast, I don’t know if I really experienced them. Is that not disrespectful to the gift-giver?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, like, I didn’t savor them is what I mean,” I said. “I didn’t really appreciate them. And now I’ve just finished them all, just like that. I can’t even remember everything in them! It’s like for some chapters I wasn’t even there!”
“Books are forever though,” he said.
This stupefied me. Slowly a realization emerged somewhere inside my anxious soul.
“Hello?” he asked.
“I never thought of that before,” I repeated, although I felt it then very deeply and even ecstatically in my tormented soul. “Books are forever. Wow.”
“Yep,” he said, chuckling. “Uh, listen though, it’s getting really late. I have to get going.”
“Okay, see you,” I said.
I realized it was after 11 o’clock. I made a pot of coffee, then consumed it all by 2 am. I stayed up until sunrise contemplating my books.
I had spent so much time agonizing over whether I was really savoring my experiences. Ever since what my other friend had told me when we were in Bruges, Belgium with a group of others. We had been walking around through the surreally beautiful old town with its many canals curving like streets through breathtaking Gothic architecture. I was snapping photos inside the cathedral on my pocket-sized Canon digital camera. I noticed that my friend had not taken any pictures the whole time we’d been in Bruges. Once we were back outside the cathedral, I asked him about it.
He told me he didn’t take pictures because it can take you out of the experience. It’s better to just soak it in and really be present in the environment. It was a conversation that would come back to me once the smartphone age commenced and I noticed people living out their entire travel experience seemingly through the screen on their phone. I came to realize that I was sometimes doing the same, snapping hundreds of pictures, anxiously questioning the whole time whether I was really even experiencing this or whether I may as well just be looking at it in a virtual environment. Whether I may as well have fallen asleep and only seen it all in some weird computer-simulated dream world. Yet sometimes I still could not stop taking pictures to post on the Internet.
But even before that, the conversation with my friend about cameras intensified my tendency to condemn myself for inadequately savoring my experiences. Every time I see a new place, every time I am taking in some incredible view in a distant land I may never visit again, I force myself to linger there longer than necessary. It is terrifying to me to think that the present is just fading away around my fingers, that I need to experience it now or never. Sometimes this is such a distracting thought that it undermines my ability to savor the present at all. While my anxiety ruthlessly captivates me, I miss the whole scene.
Inevitably, the present washes away and becomes the past, never to be resurrected. Just like it did when I fell asleep at the reunion. Just like it did when I walked through that cathedral in Bruges frantically taking the pictures which, almost 14 years later, I’ve hardly ever even looked at.
But books. Books are forever, aren’t they? Before my friend informed me of this on the phone that night, I had only very rarely reread a book. It seemed to me that there were so many books and so little time. All I could do was strive constantly to read them all, experience them all. If I finished a book and hadn’t savored it adequately, it was just like anything else which had happened and could not be repeated. I had squandered my chance to truly enjoy the book, the experience of it fading away into the past.
hmmmm…
maybe my problem up to now was i overanalyzed everything i had???
travel
i have been to 59 countries!
and several were crucial for transforming me into the person i am today.
i haven’t written about nearly enough, but here are some important moments!
#14: The Internet Transformed Me From Traveler to Tourist
Above: Stradun, main street in Dubrovnik
While we were walking down Dubrovnik’s central artery, I unexpectedly spotted two acquaintances who were studying with me in Freiburg, Germany, where I was attending university that year. I had just run into them in a hostel in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. It was an experience to be repeated throughout my many travels in the Balkans: recognizing the same backpackers repeatedly in different locations on a common, well-trodden circuit around the former Yugoslavia.
The four of us wound up spending much of the day together. We explored the walls, went on a guided tour of the city, hung out in coffee shops, and walked along the wintery edges of the sparkling and chilly Adriatic Sea. We saw the bullet holes which the Serbs had left behind in the 90s, a surreal reminder that this Mediterranean paradise had recently been in a war zone.
We told my Freiburg acquaintances about the living conditions in the room we were renting from the old ladies. This sparked great amusement and laughter from two boys who were far more well-traveled at that point than were either of us. These, I thought, were the true gatekeepers who would need to permit me to rest my head in the divine bosom of His Holiness St. Christopher, anointing me as a traveler at last.
“We just walked to the old town and found a hostel,” they said.
After a day or two in Dubrovnik, the four of us spontaneously decided to head to Kotor, Montenegro on a bus together. Once there, we followed the maps from our Lonely Planet guidebooks until we found a hostel that was adequately cheap and minimally comfortable. We walked around the old town and hiked up toward spectacular views over the fjord. My Freiburg acquaintances told us scary stories about overnight train robberies in Eastern Europe, including an occasion where one of them was a victim. They gave me advice for what to do and where to stay once I reached Bosnia, where I’d finally be on my own again.
While the four of us sat in a cafe in Kotor, we realized that no one in our lives even knew what country we were in right now. We didn’t have smartphones, and our cheap cell phones would have incurred heavy charges here. We had already gone several days without any active link to the Internet, indeed without utilizing any channel of communication to the outside world at all. Except for the Californian, who in Dubrovnik was always trying to connect his Macbook Pro to the WiFi of various restaurants. His efforts were an ill omen of the dark future to come, when the Internet would prevent us from ever again feeling as far away as we did that day. But once we were in Kotor, waxing lyrical about our isolation, even he joined us in refraining from sending home any updates. Thus he too could partake in the happiness of no one knowing what country we were in. I had not even planned on going to Montenegro at all. I had intended to go straight to Bosnia from Dubrovnik. I relished this spontaneity.
Of course, I was aware that I seemed to have deviated from my initial project of traveling alone and self-directed. Being with people I already knew from Freiburg, taking their advice, following in their footsteps - it seemed like a knock-off. I wanted to be exclusively with strangers. I wanted to make new friends with other travelers. Fortunately, I was on my own again after Kotor, from which I went by bus to Bosnia.
Above: Kotor, Montenegro
A year and a half later, on an overland trip from Germany to Armenia, I was determined to maintain a higher level of independence than I had possessed in those early days. To be sure, I often was alone on the road the first time. But I wanted this new trip to involve being entirely self-directed and truly separated from home for months, not simply days or weeks. Meeting someone in the morning and then sharing a private room with them in the evening would ideally be a very ordinary experience throughout my trip, and it was. My independent and solo arrival at every hostel would be a new opportunity to make a new group of friends. I would be far away, I resolved, from everyone I knew, immersed only in my immediate environments and without any distractions that might pull my consciousness outside of these. Without a smartphone, that turned out to be extremely easy. And I enjoyed the knowledge on certain days that no one in America even knew what country I was in.
Arriving in Ljubljana, Slovenia in the summer of 2010, I introduced myself quickly to the first people I encountered in the hostel. The four of us - two solo travelers and one couple - then spent the day together exploring the city and sharing meals. I would repeat this process countless times in the destinations to come. I loved waking up every few days in a new bed, surrounded by new people and a new group of friends, in a new city or a new country, eventually even on a new continent. Putting myself in these situations where I needed to be open to new social experiences and new relationships was a central part of why I was so eager to travel alone. It was like I was a completely different person when I was on the road - extroverted and confident with strangers, easily making new friends wherever I went.
Each of those groups felt so important and close, and yet each of them dissolved forever. But every time it was worth it, even if only for the sake of the memories we would always share. Sometimes I think about these people who are out there. I’ve lost touch with nearly all of them. These were mostly friendships of a particular moment, intense when they existed yet finding no ground once the surreal reality of a shared isolation so far away from home had dissolved. Still, I take solace in the fact that, if somehow I ran into them, we’d still share something. And if I never see them again, even then we’ll always share something, something special and sacred. A wondrous bond with another human being is precious no matter how long it lasts.
Above: Ljubljana, Slovenia
#25: Full Moon Party in Cappadocia
We walked to one of the local ranches so we could ride horses on the trails through the valleys. As for how we used these horses, I am sure my readers will be shocked to discover that I personally lack the necessary skills and mindsets for mounted combat, let alone to even trot. My stint within the storied traditions of Cappadocian equestrianism was therefore limited to sitting happily on my sweet and gentle horsey while the gentle and friendly creature, thankfully far away from any battlefields, walked majestically through the extraordinary hills. Ahead of me and behind me were my similarly skilled friends from the hostel, save for the one who had experience with these wonderful beasts. As we passed through the stunning scenery, each of us celebrated the miracle of Creation which surrounded us.
Above: Me on a horsey, clearly prepared for intense mounted combat
And now, on what was likely to be our final night together, we proceeded higher by car into the mountains, gaining distance with every second from the nearest population center in the valley below. For a while, looking through the window, I could see the glow of human settlements at various locations in the distance. But over time, the lights from the towns sprinkled between the hilltops and cliffs grew ever fainter. Instead, the same glances out the windows revealed only the sides of massive rock formations, each blocking out any light which might reach us from the villages they concealed. Soon, however, we were rejoined with something like civilization. Our car pulled up into the secluded hilltop clearing, flanked on all sides by towers of fairy-chimney rock that obscured most views of the moon.
Above: A local man watches the sunset over Cappadocia
We got out of the vehicle and assessed the somewhat crowded scene before making our way into its center. Young Turkish men rode up on horseback from all directions, and a makeshift stable formed off to the side. Several additional sedans arrived, usually driven by local men but overflowing with mixed-gender backpackers. I assumed the drivers picked these backpackers up, like us, at other hostels and restaurants in the small towns sprinkled around Cappadocia. As we gathered around the growing bonfire, a few men set up a makeshift bar where they sold cheap Turkish beers. Curious about the degree to which a woman’s liberties were tolerated here in what was a relatively conservative part of Turkey, I strained to catch a glimpse of even a minimally feminine presence. And there was, I dimly remember, one woman working for a bit at the bar. But otherwise, the only Turks here were men.
“So I take it,” another backpacker from my car said to the young Turkish man who had driven us, “that the Full Moon Festival isn’t just once per year.”
The Turk laughed. “No, we come here to party all the time,” he said with a happy smile. And then he gestured to the stunning white glow of the beautiful moon, almost fully visible between two rock towers. “We just want to party,” he said with a shrug.
For the next few hours, while periodically buying another beer from the Turks who had set up a bar near the trunk of their car, I shifted between conversations with a group of backpackers from North America, Europe, and Australia. I sat by the fire for a while while an increasingly intoxicated Australian guy told me about all the Turkish women he had apparently banged on the Aegean coast. As for the Turkish men who organized all this, they mostly only came into my vicinity when an American or European woman was with me. But this was frequent enough that their attraction to the flesh of exotic foreigners often fueled a continuous intercultural exchange.
Granted, it was an intercourse that became incoherent as the night advanced. The drinking was heavy and some simply lost command over language. Vibrant abilities to communicate about complex topics dwindled away, replaced by the linguistic ineptitude of a happy intoxication. But my closest companions and I had no more than four or five pilsners. So, eventually, we were an island of tipsy sobriety, seated on the ground at the outer edges of the light from the bonfire. We huddled close together, talking about our travel plans and everything we had done together that week. I knew I was probably leaving Cappadocia the next day, but I didn’t know where I would go.
“Why don’t you come to Ankara?” one of my hostel friends asked. He and a Dutch guy, also part of our little group, were heading together for Turkey’s capital the next day. There, they’d be staying in the apartment of some Turkish art students whom they had met through Couchsurfing. “I’m sure you could crash with them too.”
As I imagined the journeys to come, the fire’s maintenance fell off and it weakened. Turkish men jumped with laughter through the flames. The great moon initiated its exit from the sky, the faintest sunlight began to creep up from the ground in the distance, and local men started to remount their horses and gallop off into the dark.
Above: The fire at the Full Moon Party; on the left, a drunk man jumps over the flames
#27: Plunging into the Kurdish Regions of Southeast Turkey
Above: Inside the central mosque in Van. Turkey
Once I returned to Van’s city center, I was still haunted by the thought of the two dozen centuries which had come and gone while that declaration in cuneiform remained. But I was quickly brought back into the present world around me when I found myself wandering around in a beautiful tea garden complete with fountains, flowers, and greenery. Servers walked around with trays of Kurdish tea in the region’s traditional transparent tea glass, offering them to anyone who was sitting on the benches. A group of Kurdish men sitting together spotted me and called me over to them. I approached immediately, and soon we were sitting together in a semi-circle of stone benches beneath a ceiling of brightly colored flora. The server, called by one of my hosts, quickly returned. I gratefully took a hot glass of tea from the tray. I tried to pay him, but he held up a stern hand in refusal.
It soon became clear that none of my new companions spoke even a single word of English. Nevertheless, they had a Turkish to English dictionary which they periodically consulted. Our conversation proceeded through a combination of individual words, markings on the map in my guidebook to describe my travels, and elaborate physical gestures bordering on charades or dances. Soon I made them understand what I had seen so far and what was still to come. Through a combination of primitive and printed communication, they learned about my family, the state of Michigan, and my welcome love for Kurdistan. They told me about their wives and children and the smaller towns around Van where several of them had grown up.
It was only when it came to religion that I lied. This question was asked to me as often in Turkey as “where are you from?” I found that every time I answered it truthfully with “no religion,” my startling words sparked vigorous attempts at my salvation. So I had gotten into the habit of telling people I was a Christian. This declaration, by placing me firmly among the People of the Book, or at least by removing my free agent status, almost never resulted in the dreaded onslaughts of Muslim proselytization which I now strove to avoid. Today, however, although my answer seemed to prevent any attempt to convert me, my new friends decided they wanted to take me with them for the prayers at sunset. After teaching me a game involving trying to slap my wrist with a belt before I could move my hand away, they led me to the central square where the main mosque in town was.
Above: Swimming at Akdamar Island, Lake Van, Turkey
Although I’d sometimes gone inside other mosques during worship, this time I waited patiently in the square outside. Under the shade of a tree, I listened with pleasure to the call to prayer. Its sound had become familiar by now. I had never ceased to savor Allah’s praises when I found myself listening to the beauty of those divinely inspired Arabic verses. I loved especially when I was walking around town, relaxed by a cool evening breeze, and the serene sounds of religion floated musically through the air. It felt that way then, too, while I waited for my new friends to finish their sacred duty.
When the prayer ended, a large crowd emerged from the mosque’s great doors and poured back out into the square. Once we were gathered, my friends invited me to join them inside so I could take a look around, and they even introduced me to the imam. They seemed to tell him that I was an American tourist. Unfortunately, he spoke no more English than I did Turkish or Kurdish, but we both smiled graciously and shook hands. He and the others walked with me along the mosque’s interior walls, happily pointing out elements of its decor with eager and inviting tones. I thanked the imam as best as I could for his hospitality, and he was just able to ask me how I was enjoying Van. I told him I loved it, and he smiled. “Welcome,” he said.
When we walked back out into the fading light, my new friends used finger gestures to indicate a desire to eat. They brought me with them to a stand near the mosque. There they ordered numerous kebabs and Coca-Colas, at which point they invited me to one of their homes. This surprised me, as I had expected to eat with them outside and then walk back to my hotel alone. After briefly imagining what the State Department might say about this new development, I got into a car with a few of them. We drove down the road a while, and then we parked on a secluded street.
Soon I was with them in the large space of a semi-basement. There was a group of about ten of us here, and I watched nervously while one of them tightly closed all the blinds to the windows. Then another started setting newspapers down in the middle of the room. Others scrambled in the kitchen, grabbing cups for the Coca-Cola and plates for the vegetables which they cut up as a side dish. Then we were all sitting in a circle on the floor around the newspapers, eating our kebabs and drinking soda and laughing about nothing. I stayed there for the next three or four hours. There was hardly a moment of silence as we continued using English-Turkish dictionaries to ease communication by speaking with one another in individual words. And there were more resources here, too, specifically pens and pieces of paper and a much larger map of Turkey, all of which assisted in our laborious but joyful communications. We even played several games with rules I was never totally certain about. When it was nearly midnight, a couple of them drove me back to my hotel. There, they asked if I wanted to meet the next day for dinner, and I agreed to see them in the evening.
On that second encounter, there were only four or five of them, and we went to an Internet cafe before sitting down to a meal. Using Google translate on clunky desktops running Windows 98, we were able to take out conversation into the realm of complete sentences. Our haphazard dictionaries, slowly expanding on the papers we carried with us, soon had enough words on them for our conversations in general to become much more effective. At dinner in a restaurant, we began to discuss my plans to leave for Diyarbakir the next morning.
Concerned, they asked me if I had yet visited Akdamar Island on Lake Van. I hadn’t. Although it was one of the top sights in the region, with a tenth-century Armenian church built by an Armenian king who was a vassal of the Abbasid caliphs, the ferry to reach it was a 40-minute drive down the highway. I had seen pictures on the Internet of the church, the island, and the lake, all of it surrounded by mountains and including clear views of Mt. Ararat on the horizon. But I had not been able to find an affordable way to get there. Then they told me they could pick me up early at my hotel, drive me out to the pier for Akdamar, take the ferry with me to the island, have a picnic with me there, and then have me back to the pier in time to catch a bus with onward service to Diyarbakir. I agreed immediately, at which point they went with me to the offices of the bus company just before it closed. The pier for Akdamar was not a routine stop for the bus I would be taking, but my Kurdish friends were able to arrange with the bus people that it would stop there to pick me up in the early afternoon on its way to Diyarbakir. At around eleven at night, they finally dropped me off back at my hotel. We agreed to meet outside the lobby at six in the morning.
The four of them picked me up in the early morning right after I checked out. We swung by a small grocery store to grab an assortment of fruits, snacks, meats, and cheeses. Piling back into the car, where they insisted that I take shotgun, we drove together to Akdamar while blasting Kurdish music from the sedan’s speakers. It was a stunning drive partly along the shores of the lake, and soon we were out on a ferry together just as they promised. They took a few pictures of me on the boat with the Turkish flag behind me on the bow, and we were sure to have a few other Turkish and Kurdish tourists snap some group shots.
Above: The view from the ferry in Lake Van, Turkey
We wandered around on the island for a couple of hours. We gathered along its shores where a few of them took a dive into the water to swim, something I characteristically but politely declined to do. A variety of treats and a few bottles of Coca-Cola were spread out on a blanket which we cast onto the grass near a stupendous viewpoint. From where we ate, we could see the tenth-century Armenian church on one of the island’s various hilltops; Mt. Ararat and the waters of Lake Van glimmered behind it. After we ate and savored the beauty before us, my new friends led me into the ruins of that abandoned Armenian church. Standing by what seemed like an altar, they asked me with genuine curiosity how Christian worship functioned. I tried to explain that I was from a different Christian tradition and that I knew very little about Armenian Christianity. But this proved difficult to communicate, especially when the whole time I just kept thinking guiltily about how I had lied to them about my religion.
After the special morning we spent together, we took the ferry back to the pier. They waited with me on the side of the road for my bus to come. One of them had been given the cell phone number of the driver, whom he called a couple times. Finally we spotted the bus approaching from the distance. Sadness swept over us as the inevitable end of our unexpected connection drew nigh. Each of my new friends took turns hugging me tightly, imploring me to return to Turkey one day. I felt overwhelmed with happiness for what brief moments we shared together, gratitude for their hospitality, and sorrow for our menacing separation. The emotions hit hard and suddenly, as if I didn’t quite realize how much they meant to me until my bus to Diyarbakir was pulling over on the side of the road. I prepared to say goodbye forever.
After a final exchange of hugs, my closest friend in the group took his fingers to the dust on the car’s glass. He wrote “Andrew” inside the shape of a heart. “We love you,” he told me, his eyes lightly glistening. “I love you too,” I said. Then I was alone in a seat by the window, waving farewell to them until they dropped out of sight. In five hours, I would arrive after dark at the Kurdish cultural capital of Diyarbakir.
music
but even after all these adventures, i still needed music,
and i have highlighted two artists in particular who saved me, but so many did.
here are some extracts from how i found salvation in music.
phoebe bridgers and the music that blossomed my queerness (retrospective diary: 2021-2024)
i am living in brooklyn where i have almost no friends, lockdown is still chugging along, i teach online so i have insane amounts of free time:
and i spend hours upon hours walking in prospect park listening to phoebe.
phoebe’s music and lyrics give me this sense that i am not in the world anymore.
i am inside of myself: i am me, beneath the fabricated layers, but:
what does that mean?
whenever i hear this line as i walk through the snow, i face the reality of my past: i have always been depressed and i have routinely contemplated suicide. i have this sense that no matter what i do, i will always be sad. sadness seems intrinsic to my being. what am i sad about? there is this emptiness inside of me, this sense i am not me: but why? i actually hate myself even more for not simply appreciating what i have.
i have this sense i will never find fulfillment, and i hate that, because i love the people in my life, i love the things i have done in my life, i love the books i read and the music i listen to: there is so much in my life that so often makes me happy: yet even then i feel empty, like i’m nothing, and the emptiness is filled with sadness.
sadness feels like my foundation.
when i feel happy, i know my happiness will just melt into the sad foundation.
when i am with W, i feel like i am not myself.
i feel like i must construct myself into someone only he could want.
sometimes i convince myself that this is only because i am anxious and i hate myself and i project that hate onto others. my self-hatred leaves me confused: i never know when my skepticism is valid, i never know when i can and can’t “trust my own gut,” the best advice my dad ever gave me.
i want to follow my dad’s advice and trust my gut: this person does not know you.
we start going to more shows together: haim, a few smaller acts.
and i realize:
when i am with him at these shows, i cannot fully experience the art.
when i loosen up, he thinks i’m weird. he communicates: you are a man, you are old.
i am always repressing myself around him, even when it comes to art we share.
i want to tell him: i am not a man and i am not old:
i am a butterfly.
i am a goddess.
listening to phoebe makes me feel that way.
almost every day i draw the high priestess. sometimes i draw the hermit.
i am alone: i am afraid, but i am constantly immersed in art, constantly reading, constantly writing. i am struggling to see beneath the surface of things.
i know the surface is not real, but i do not yet know what lies beneath.
i only use my buffy the vampire slayer deck.
i have a massive buffy poster on my wall.
like me W is obsessed with buffy but we never talk about tara.
tara is the high priestess: for so many months i have felt this affinity for tara.
tara is a witch; tara is willow’s lover; tara’s family taught her that she is a demon.
i sink down into my girl music: this is the means by which i go beneath the surface.
i walk through prospect park while listening to an interview in which phoebe bridgers says she considers herself to be a hedge witch. i wonder: could i be a hedge witch?
i am on the floor and i am here alone.
clairo is playing first and i am dancing in the rain. the drizzle is pouring down on me: everyone around me is dancing and singing: people look at me and smile.
something has been holding me back from embracing my obsession with clairo.
but nothing is now, and neither is anything when boygenius comes on.
W is not here and i am on the fucking floor.
just six months later, i write the following of the experience:
“never in my life, not even as an adolescent, have i had that kind of spiritual experience at a concert. wearing my phoebe bridgers astrology t-shirt and showing off my ghost tattoo (a reference to stranger in the alps), i was on the floor with the teens, hanging out in the back with the elder emos, and i was singing, dancing, screaming along to the lyrics. i sang, swayed, and smiled more at that show than at any show in my life. my phone stayed in my pocket on “do not disturb,” and i only looked at the screen three or four times. i didn’t take a single picture.
the performance absorbed me until i was falling in love with the same songs all over again. when lucy dacus was singing “true blue,” my soul disintegrated into little heart emojis that bounced around in my chest. and when phoebe bridgers played “revolution o” and “a letter to an old poet,” i was floating.
the energy, the joy, the love in the crowd for this beautiful music swept me into raptures. the sound of thousands of people singing along to the same songs i’d mostly listened to alone for so many hours made me feel like we were all there to praise, worship, commune. the music, sometimes with queer and satanic undertones, was giving us the kind of meaning that no organized religion ever could. true, at 16 i was baptized in the name of the father, the son, and the holy ghost, but boygenius was the holy trinity that made me know what it really means to be born again.
at that show, i adored music more than ever. i was connecting with art in a way i never had before; surges of happiness and love rushed through me relentlessly until i was screeching “I WANNA BE EMACIATED” with all the fans around me while the boys (that’s their group gender) performed “me & my dog.””
the boys always say they have a “group gender.”
and the boys always make me think, “gender is nothing.”
but i follow the thought no further: i cannot yet fully see myself, only cracks of light.
it was clairo who brought out that light and made me fall madly in love with her.
clairo, buddhism, nyc, and queerhood (retrospective diary: 2019-2024)
i am so fucking hot for you claire.
you are so fucking sexy.
holy fucking shit.
this is the story of how i came to be madly in love with claire,
who constantly distracts me,
(not on purpose; i’ve never heard from her),
from my main writing priorities (actually her music inspires these; whenever i listen to her music, she is whispering directions to me):
proclaiming the gospel —
6 in 1 (new recording 12): the people/ trees/lakes/ mountains that loved me; & also my instagram love letter to claire elizabeth cottrill (plus: updated with writing from archives: john carlisle iii)
being the tumblr girl of your worst fucking nightmares —
butterfly rising #3: fuck israel, fuck the new york times, fuck fundamentalist "christianity", and FREE PALESTINE (audio!)
and of course, helping other become goddesses:
release the Goddess within: 10 strategies
Oh hello my dear Eloise! I'm so so so fucking glad you are not longer homeless 👏👏👏 keep kicking ass and taking names sisters fren!