soliloquy prayer.

vintage silverware set from the united kingdom, novosibirsk, russia shot by lissmas, clover ring by jeweller lèa nabaïs. bais.

❝ i’ll be your girl. — the decemberists. ┊i’m your man. — lana del rey. ❞

i’m nine, maybe twelve, and on the floor of my sister’s room, which is the closest you get to heaven as the youngest sister of three.

Or maybe I’m sprawled on the bed, belly-down, face up, hands pressed to the cherry wood bars of her bedframe, skin spilling fat and young through the gaps as I gaze down at her. She’s scrolling idly through Tumblr, home from university, and drifting from her laptop is the dark croon of one Elizabeth Woolridge Grant, her voice all twisted up by the tinny interference of the Dell speakers, extolling about how she tastes like Pepsi Cola—except my sister lays an elegant finger on the volume controls just a second before and keeps me innocent for just a minute longer.

In my head, the room is never the same, and even in reality, it staunchly differs. The wood floor beneath my navy-socked feet was once plush cream carpet, stained with remnants of various cosmetic paraphernalia. I remember that carpet so well, its pockets of melded fabric, the way we used to rush and cover it before my mom could see the damage; it was the worst sin to be messy then, and it makes me laugh.

I can recall sitting in front of the body-length mirror vividly, propped mockingly against one corner of the room, that endless stretch of glass cradled with pale, spindly pinewood hands. We never did get it set properly, hung up on the wall. I’d spend hours staring at myself, crouching low and feeling my body sing with the stretch as I tried desperately to scrub the smear of my mascara’s black heart from the fibers.

This memory is shrouded heavily in the haze of Burberry Brit, though I don’t know why—this, and Priscilla’s Esse Strikes the Note. Cyclamen and violet, a hint of lipstick and violent femininity, a possession of plastic and nostalgia; strawberry kicked under vanilla orchid and the black cherry bite of getting into screaming matches you never quite apologized for.

I’ve only ever had one great argument with my sisters. I remember that at the time it felt as though the world was ending, my dollhouse collapsing in around me, my spine snared and crushed under the plastic kitchen sink and a rhinestone-dangling chandelier.

It feels the same, now, to think of it.

Since then, I’ve gone to Portobello Market thrice and bought a diluted travel-size version of Burberry Brit, the bottle like a diamond with the diameter of one in my palm. I rarely wear it, but I keep it saved; I mask my room with it when I’m bored or in need of transport to somewhere distant, drowning in a daydream.

My sisters have always been my ground zero. Even though I know I am my mother’s growth, it feels more like I was manifested through the vivid imagination of my older sisters. My eldest wanted to name me something-Lynn; my mom wanted to name me Chloe. Sometimes I see them—just for a split second—and there’s a need for pressure, to remind myself that even though my life as a sister feels like a dream, it is so beautifully real. It’s like being a doe in the forest, looking at the inside of a home through a window. All my life I’ve wanted nothing more than to get inside, to be right where they are.

As a younger sister, your dream is to be let into that great big room that houses your older sister. And they always found ways to let me in, to unlatch the gate. One of those ways was through my introduction to Lana Del Rey. It was her birthday just yesterday, the summer solstice. She’s turned 41.

I could wax poetic about how much finding her has changed and, more importantly, saved my life. But the best explanation I have is the one sitting at the base of my belly, a hot coal, a dragon’s egg in the apex of my hips: Lana Del Rey shifted the direction of my life when she showed me that you could be born with a deep, inescapable sadness and still gain entry to the emotions you thought were only accessed and maintained through happiness. I had never once seen someone so sad before, so articulate about this vast sense of emptiness I had discovered within one day, and then never could quite figure out how to silence after, how to properly shut out. Even now, I can get swallowed in it, never to emerge.

To be a fan of a woman so openly flawed provided me with hope in a strange way. It had never occurred to me that I was allowed the freedom to, at times, fuck things over and up, and be alright after. At times, Lana is so ridiculously sensitive—a true Cancer sun, Leo moon—rising to the smallest provocation, and yet I understand her like a second calling, nearly share the same heart. Most importantly, she’s taught me not to ridicule myself for that, because the world will already do it for you; it will beat you, will try its best to splinter you for it.

Though many argue that Lana Del Rey has done detrimental damage to the conversation of mental health, I would argue the opposite is closer to the truth. There is something to the first claim—her early aesthetic leaned heavily on suffering as spectacle, glamorizing passivity and romantic ruin in ways that were rightly interrogated. But to stop there is to miss what happened in the margins: the community she built. Long before mental health had become a palatable talking point, her listeners—largely teenage girls, largely struggling—were finding each other in comment sections and forums and Tumblr threads, naming things they had no other language for.

The artistry of Lana Del Rey began a conversation about what it meant to be mentally ill as not only a woman but a teenager, a young child—girls made sylphic and enchanting despite the clear signs of struggle and lack of compassion. She held up a mirror to the way culture had always romanticized young wounded women, made beautiful objects of their suffering, and let the sexual threat lurking underneath that romanticism become audible: the man who loves you most dangerously, the girl who is most desired precisely when she is most breakable. She gave her listeners a vocabulary for what they had only ever felt as atmosphere: the mother wound, the romance as harm, the inherent beauty that coexists with collapse.

That is not a small thing, even when the messenger is imperfect. Especially when the messenger is imperfect.

Elizabeth and I were both born on Friday, daughters of love. We’re aesthetically sensitive, with a desire for meaningful emotional bonds, harmony, and affection. We harbor a preference for peace over conflict, with an instinct for smoothing tensions when possible—sometimes at the risk of condemning ourselves to a more shallow existence in order not to rock the boat.

It has to mean something, to be born into such a similar affect. It has to mean something to want so badly, so intensely, to be so obscenely free.

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