Emily Starobrat
Seminar Final
12- 07 -15
Wonderland (In Flashes)
DOWN THE RABID HOLE
Night lights. One of the worst types of late night lights. The LED kind, that burn your eyes instead of the paper you are supposed to be writing at 3:08 am. Your nights were spent developing your finger cramps and starting your sleep deprivation streak. These Friday night lights were different, in your mind at least. Blurred, melting into the black skies and spreading across the sides of the New York City streets. The lights that somehow awaken you from the restlessness you have been feeling for the past one hundred and twenty six hours.
Why drown it all out with alcohol and expensive drugs? Drinking vodka for breakfast instead of coffee and drinking coffee like water. Your mind is punishing your body.
The past five days night diet consisting of Starbucks espresso shots, that are conveniently placed by the Advil tablets, don’t forget you have to pick up another bottle from CVS. And now you’re washing it all down with a cheap bottle of Svedka and in an hour you’ll be sipping on a Budlight at your local bar along with the five people you convince to come with you. They’re your friends but maybe it’s easier to not refer to them as so. You met them out of luck in one of your introductory courses two years ago and now they’re convincing you to take a few more shots of tequila and maybe down another beer. You’ve decided you’ve had too much but that never stopped your before. What time is it? 1:28. Not too bad. Besides you were awake past 4:39 on Tuesday writing that paper about the history of something you really couldn’t give a fuck about.
FLOWERS
The stupid peach roses that used to call you a weed are now dried and shriveled and hold an unattractive green color. Processed and passed into a familiar miniature zip-lock bag to be sold to the next person who is convinced they need a few ounces. Grinded and rolled up with sugar paper, lit and disintegrated in the lungs of someone who couldn’t handle the reality anymore. The temporary world you travel to with the same main character, you. Soaring through the thinned clouds, everything is happier cause for once your mind is silent. But when it goes bad you snap. Collapse to the floor while being reminded you’re failing your parents and couldn’t maintain a decent relationship if you tried.
Why do we get like this from puffs of smoke? It’s the luck of the draw. Either you’ll be on the floor begging the devil to drag your soul under the flowers’ roots or you’ll pretend you’re grabbing the tail of a cloud as you soar over the Earth’s disappointed inhabitants.
TWEEDLEDEE
Leaning up against the side of a Dunkin Donuts was a man, a result of a rusty cookie cutter, a photocopy of a homeless person placed on every street corner asking the poor for money. You quietly slip a five into his red solo cup that reminded you of the good old days and take a seat next to a mysterious pile of blackened clothes that smelled of cigarettes and squirrel piss beside him. After telling you about the loss of his twin brother, which you now realize whose matching attire you pushed aside when you sat down, the man tells you something that at first doesn’t make any sense. “Life is a meaningless puzzle. What do we do? What do we really fucking do with our lives?! I’ll tell you, all we fucking do is slumber only to awake in world that we can’t do anything for. Think about it! Fucking think!.” This anger spilled out of his heart and through the teeth of his crooked smile. “I mean think about it. What are you doing here? Who even are you?“
TEA PARTY
You know how parties can be. The promoter pushing you to come inside, offering you and your buds deals you can’t resist. 89. Each. How about 65? Fine. He knows you shouldn’t be allowed in but with the slip of an extra twenty heading his way, how could he turn that down. You know the dirty pink and purple lights that flash on the floor swirling around and fade at the end of each song. Hiding the identities of the poor souls that are the excuse for the hook-up culture that New York night life is built upon.
Now casually swinging mid-air is a small Ziplock bag filled half way with what looks like sugar but you know its not. Cold blurs and bright colors, that take you by surprise because they are so different from the reflections that light up your face as you walk down the street at 9am or 3 pm. Lukewarm tea and granulated sugar, not the Splenda kind that the paper-thin women suck up their noses during their work breaks, but the good kind you steal from diners when the waitress’s back is turned. The real kind, the stuff you used to snort as a child or even now to get the “mistaken sugar high”. The conversation you’ll have with yourself “I’m not a mile high” “you are” “nearly two miles high” (Carroll 98)
CATIPILLAR
You usually get your trips from this insect of a man, I say this because his wiry hair poured over his face like antennae and his rolls of fat segmented him like a caterpillar. Inhaling a joint slowly, he closed his eyes and let out a puff into your face. “Who the fuck are you?” He never did ever recognize you.
Who are you?
Hookah bars, where college kids and thirty year old men go to have a good time on Friday evenings. The place was dark and smelled of foggy nicotine masked by artificial fruit flavor. Laughter and mediocre sangria spill over the walls. You listen to the overplayed radio sounds as you pretend you’re having the time of your life, instead you sit hoping you’ll get that call, you need to stop getting your hopes up.
QUEEN OF YOUR HEART
LOVE 1
Surrender your heart. Give it away. Why are you so scared for someone to love you? Oh right; its cause you’ve never been loved back. You’re broken in pieces and no one wants a broken toy. Remember when he slammed you against a wall and you left with purple around your face and your wrists begging for help, remember he said he loved you. You told him right away that he didn’t mean it but he insisted Ignorance led you to believe that shit. A few years later and you realized he was lying to you and maybe himself at the same time. People don’t mean what they say when they’re in the presence of physical love. Now you think love is pain. “I couldn’t help it,” you’ll say (Carroll 63).
Love. The concept that you think that you will have the same mutual feeling in your ribs as a stranger. Remember when you first saw him? You just fell into this dark world and woke up with a new feeling in your chest. The same pressure pushing against your chest as it did when he said he thought nothing of you. All of a sudden you were dancing with shampoo suds and your voice filled the room with clouds, the rain poured down on you and he waited outside with a towel. But one day he didn’t. He slid up against the concrete and sliced through the strings of his arm. You were next.
LOVE 2
What people don’t realize is you cannot use people. Love is not sex. Sex can just be sex. The flashing lights, the blurred faces surrounding you and you pick one from the crowd, drawn only by his/her voice. A kiss can just be a kiss. Getting someone’s number doesn’t mean it’s something. Going on dates means nothing.. It is all nothing, gone in a flash leaving behind jagged shards that cut through the string of memories slicing directly through your chest every time one floats through your head even when it begs you not to. All you can do is wait for the pain to stop testing your urge to talk to him/her. The perfect solar system of bruises he left on your chest haunt you every time you stare in the mirror cause you know when they fade, he does as well. Like they say, nothing good ever lasts forever. All you’ll be left with is “sorry”, which they say only to save themselves a little guilt that they shouldn’t have to feel only cause they don’t feel the same about you.
Anymore. The word that haunts all of us because it reminds us of the past. The “used to-s” and the “remember when-s” that smudge any hopefulness that could’ve fixed us. Then again hope is the very thing that caused the end of whatever you thought it was. You hoped he’d/she’d love you back but he/she didn’t..”sorry.”
ALONE
You walk around this place and think that you’re doing yourself a favor by pursuing your dreams. What kind of bullshit is that? It’s funny huh; you call these pursuits “dreams” the creations of your mind when you close your eyes. “I know what you’re thinking about.”( Carroll 149) You’re thinking of all those dreams now. Everything that you said you’d do when you were six and played hide and go seek and splashed around in those very dreams. Where are you now? Do you even know?
TILL DEATH DID YOU PART
Your demons are the ones that killed you. The thoughts that eat cereal at your breakfast table and hide in your head and have taken over your heart. We’re all born to die. It is what we do in between birth and death that counts. The small moments of flashes that hit you. You’re barely a kid anymore, no more holding hands hoping that will stop the cars from hitting you, no more secret hideouts to stop the screaming. You’re living and dying at the same time. Except now you are dead. You’re replaying all the magic that was your life in the last seven minutes that your brain works and just like that, you go dark.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Richard Cavendish, “The Alice in Wonderland Story First Told”, History Today Volume 62 Issue 7, July 2012, http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/alice-wonderland-story-first-told
This article explained the history behind the writing of Alice Through the Looking Glass. Stories about the original Alice and how real the descriptions about her influenced me to want to make the stories very true and real.
- Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, “Alice in wonderland- what does it all mean?” Guardian News and Media Limited Friday 20 March 2015 http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/20/alice-in-wonderland-what-does-it-all-mean
This article discusses the possible meanings behind Alice and Wonderland. It explains the different theories and why they are significant possibilities. It inspired me to take different views and talk about each theory in my piece.
- Micheal Wood ‘The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland’© 2015 The New York Times CompanyJUNE 8, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/books/review/the-story-of-alice-lewis-carroll-and-the-secret-history-of-wonderland.html?_r=0
This article explains the history behind Alice in Wonderland as well as the different versions that have been created. The different versions are explained and explore the meaning behind each of them.
- Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Alice in Wonderland: the never-Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Alice in wonderland: the never ending adventures, © 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited Friday 20 March 2015 http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/20/lewis-carroll-alice-in-wonderland-adventures-150-years
This article explains the concept of wonderland, the imagination and the powers of this mystical place. It mostly discussed the other versions of Alice in Wonderland and gives examples of books that were based off that idea.
- Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass” Bantam Books
This book is the original version of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. It provides the foundation for my story and its vivid colors and explanations of the characters. This book gave me the descriptions of characters and Wonderland itself that inspired me to want to write about this story in particular.
STUDIO PARAGRAPHS
For my bridge project I wanted to depict the girl with the different hallucinations surrounding the outside. I displayed it on the ground because I wanted it to appear to be a hole that the girl is falling into. She enters this world of hallucinations and dreams through her death. My story does revolve around death but very subtly. Death is the reason for all the hallucinations that are meant to be telling brief flashbacks of the girl’s life. But I don’t want the reader or viewer of the piece to be focusing on her death, instead I want them to be delve into the different hallucinations and flashbacks.
Unlike the essay, the hallucinations in the painting are more abstract and organic. The essay is meant to be a more detailed version of the flashbacks while the painting is more symbolic in a way. In the painting I wanted to express depth of the hole to show that the girl is being sucked into these hallucinations and consumed by the memories. The painting is drug induced which is hinted by the vibrant colors and wild hallucinations. The girl’s eyes are surrounded by a blue tint that is meant to represent death but especially that she is under the influence. The painting created under the same idea but is expressed in a more visual and abstract way.