hanami 花見

Fragile cherry trees

Social media chaos

Too much lies broken

My nightmare is a sunny day. Identically dressed toddlers stand in a neat row, organized by height, as a stranger circles them from behind a camera. Their parents look over the shoulders of the photographer, voices raising a strained octave each time one of their children refuses to cooperate.

“Look at mommy! Look at — look at mommy!!”

They begin to clap their hands, to wave shiny rainbow toys in the air, anything to get their children to look perfect for just one milisecond as the camera shutter clicks up a frenzy. Soon, they’ve even stopped using words.

“Woo woo ayeeeee, look at mommy, boop boop beep!”

Shouted jibberish betrays their desperation. The children splash their new shoes in the mud and laugh.

I am laying on a blanket on the damp grass, looking up into a sakura tree, admiring the meandering branches dotted with delicate blossoms. The clouds have cleared, and the pale pink flowers look even more striking against the blue sky than when I arrived. I’ve picked a tree near the end of the row, a few yards away from everyone else. With my headphones in and my eyes turned skyward, I find I can mostly ignore the dozens of individual photoshoots happening to my left and gently drift towards serenity. A few petals fall on the pages of my book, and I happily consider this blessing.

That is, until the unthinkable happens.

The improved weather increases the number of glamor shot hopefuls, and more families are pushed to the fringes. A group of five–three kids and two adults–enters the grove to my right and sets up camp at the tree directly in front of me. Thus, do I bear witness to the utter carelessness of humanity.

The eldest child is tall enough to reach one of the branches. As she pulls, a shower of tiny petals rains down on her siblings, who giggle and twirl, delighted.

“Do it again!” one of the adults cries, holding her camera at the ready.

The child obeys, shaking the branch vigorously, using all her weight to bend the flowers low enough for the younger children to reach them. They pull off some of the blossoms for their hair.

A few camera clicks later, they begin climbing the tree. Other families see them and join in. Soon, I count 10 children in trees, ranging from toddlers to teenagers. I watch as the same branches are bent again and again, as needed until the perfect shot is achieved. Petals fill the air as though the trees were weeping.

This particular grove of cherry trees was gifted to Cleveland by the Japanese Association of Northern Ohio in the 1990s so that folks in the city could enjoy a particularly beautiful aspect of their culture: hanami (花見).

Hanami (花 “flower” & 見 “to see”) is an annual pilgrimage to sit beneath the sakura and contemplate their beauty. Sakura represent the overwhelming splendor of life and its tragic fragility. The trees are a symbol of Japan, appearing in literature, poetry, and art for thousands of years.

Because sakura are delicate and prone to disease, it is proper etiquette to keep your hands away from the trees. Any pulling or shaking could crack the branches and harm the tree. Shaking all the petals away, means they’re gone for good, and ruins the experience for other people who may arrive later. It is disrespectful, and, in some cases, illegal.

It was only after I saw these families yanking and tugging that I noticed the full extent of damage done to the grove, which had only just bloomed. Bare sticks and discarded, wilted clumps of flowers littered the ground. In some instances, branches that had been broken still hung from the tree by a few fibers, swaying sadly in the breeze. All of this for a picture!

Hot tears stung my eyes. My heart was pounding in my chest as I osscilated between anger and melancholy. I wanted to scream! Never before had I felt more like the unheeded Lorax.

These are the moments that push me towards misanthropy. Willful ignorance and a quest for the perfect social media aesthetic has rendered us as destructive as King Midas. Our priorities are broken. We examine beauty filtered through a screen. We stress over our image, comparing ourselves to countless imagined others, pushing further, further to be the best. We want, want, want, so we grab, grab, grab, and nothing but broken sticks and crushed flowers lies in our wake. We leave as unfulfilled as we arrived.

The the tiny, miraculous gifts of spring are fantastic healers. They lift the spirit and teach us lessons about life, but they are fleeting and fragile, and we are selfishly of balance. We constantly force the tyranny of our desires on a world that is already mined to capacity. The flowers give us hope. They look for reciprocity, and we deal them death instead.

I honestly don’t know how to change this story for the better. I didn’t confront the families. In the end, I just packed up my blanket and left. All I can wish is that this post reaches someone, and that someday we remember how to engage with our planet in a way that enriches our spirits and does no harm. A healthy, thriving tree is worth a missed photo op. I can only keep saying it: put down your phone, look around, breathe, live.

c’mon, shift back to good again

I took a sip of beer and gazed up into the rainbow lights behind the band. In a sea of jumping, gyrating exhilaration, I alone stood still.

The bubbles tickled my tongue and grew flat in my mouth as I struggled to swallow against the tightening of my throat. My lips trembled even as I clapped my hands. I blinked back tears. Although the strangers surrounding me were so close that our soft upper arms touched, I felt miles away, lost in the black hole gravity of my panicking consciousness.

A light flashed across my face, and I made eye contact with the bassist. Did he see me there, naked and vulnerable, suddenly exposed, the lonely girl with the purple lipstick, crying through their opening set? I blinked, and the moment ended. The band played on.

When the text message came through from the landlord that my rent application had been denied, all the anxious waiting and positive intentions I had built up over the weekend collapsed inwards. Amidst the palpable excitement in the room, I was laughably maudlin, mourning an apartment and a new lifestyle I had already begun to live in my head. The couple next to me kissed and danced; I contemplated homelessness.* Hands raised high and cheers rang out; I wept quietly for all my crushed dreams, which in that moment, joined together in a cruel almalgamation of hopelessness. What a painful, ridiculous dissonance!

(*This is not realistic, but my brain often jumps to extremes.)

I can honestly say, receiving bad news during a concert is an isolating experience. Although my evening started nightmarishly, my mood did lighten as the main act, Of Montreal, took the stage an hour later.

A masked man in skeleton suit introduced the band with a dark, irreverent monologue that was, incidentally, exactly what I needed to hear. A woman going on a date narrowly misses being pooed on by a bird, but instead steps in dog poo and so is annoyed on the date. They don’t fall in love, so they don’t have a child who chases a ball into the path of a car driven by a woman researching cures for cancer, who then doesn’t crash into a pole…and so on. Something happens, something follows. Or not. The universe moves on.

The universe moves on, and so did my brain, to a different, less doomed thought cycle. Is it possible, I wondered as a glowing skeleton puppet entered stage right, to separate the things we like from the painful, or even toxic, relationships that introduced us to them?

To provide some context, I am not an Of Montreal superfan. I was introduced to their music sometime in 2012 after I had moved back to Oberlin. A person I adored with all my heart came over, as he often did, just to hang out. I let him choose the music, and we sat on the floor, talking, laughing, sometimes touching. It was a supremely happy moment in a slightly-more-than friendship that later turned very sour. Still, I liked the songs. I played Of Montreal at the burrito restaurant when he stopped by and when he’d come over to make pancakes. I even drove to Cleveland to see them live. When we were on better footing, before he graduated, I asked him to burn me a CD with some Of Montreal tracks on it. He obliged, taking the time to scrawl the titles on the front so I’d know what I was listening to. Long after he moved away, I would look at his handwriting and wish it had turned out differently between us.

The feelings of betrayal and shattered trust that poisoned our relationship were very real and, in some regards, persist into my present relationships. But I still love Of Montreal…which begs the question: is it possible to reconcile this joy with the utter wreckage of my mental health during that time of my life? When does it become a band I like and not a band he showed me? Can I excise the malignant memories without somehow neutering the overall experience?

Having no answer, I followed the bittersweet Tour de Nostalgie where it led, and where it led is someplace sweeter, if no less painful.

I first came to the venue, Beachland Ballroom, in the summer of 2013, with a man I will call Dan. Dan was mature, kind, respectful, and gentle in a way I’d never experienced before. He made me feel smart, vivacious, even desirable.

On this particular outing, we ordered drinks and sat in the tavern, listening to a band neither of us had heard of until we both got tired. We walked to the gravel parking lot a few blocks away holding hands. The sun was setting, and we hugged before both getting into our respective cars and driving to our respective homes on opposite sides of the city. I lived in Oberlin at the time. He lived in Brecksville. The moment was tender and drenched in warmth.

Dan and I ended abruptly, almost without warning. He got a job in a foreign country, and this time I was the bad actor, betraying his trust by kissing another person without first checking on our yet-to-be-disclosed status. There was no coming back. Dan quietly unfriended me on social media and we haven’t communicated since. I think he’s back in the United States now, going to grad school. Who knows.

It’s a mental scab I pick at only gingerly, with the understanding that our very normal, undramatic separation is tied up in knots with a trauma that I have yet to heal. But, if I tread carefully, I can wonder, for example, how spaces like Beachland Ballroom (or Brecksville Reservation, or Playhouse Square) become so haunted by ghosts of memories long past, even after new ones are made. Can holding space for a complicated memory ever be considered healthy? Where is the line drawn between ritual remembering and torture?

I stop myself when I begin to wonder if Dan ever thinks of me. That, I know, is not healthy. But I can’t help it. Places like Beachland are conductors to my electric introspection. The thoughts just flow.

Luckily, the pauses between songs were few and far between, and there were plenty of other things to distract my errant brain. I considered the fact that this is the most I have seen Kevin Barnes directly relate to an audience. He talked about being from Cleveland, joked about the Browns, and seemed genuinely happy. He was goofy and silly, beyond the more performative aspects of the show. It was infectious. It made me happy, too.

Eventually, I was just like everyone else, having fun, pure and simple. I was dancing. I raised my hands and screamed out what lyrics I knew by heart. I got confetti in my bra and helped a costumed dancer surf the crowd. The night ended on a high.

I left the venue with my ears ringing and a head full of unanswered, but now less urgent, questions. I still don’t have all the answers. I still don’t know where I’ll live next. I still don’t know how to hang on to the good and let go of the bad without hanging on to or letting go of everything all at once. All I know is that it’s complicated. And that’s okay.

Something happens, something follows. Or not. The universe moves on.

mind of a model

Almost four years ago, I entered a quiet studio in the back of an old, brick schoolhouse. I laid a blanket on a small upholstered couch, removed my glasses, stripped off my clothes, and stood naked in the middle of the room, surrounded by faces behind easels.

I wasn’t just standing, though. My right leg, which bore my weight in a bent knee, was in front of my body. My left leg stretched out to the side, and I could feel the pose pulling the muscles in my thigh. My toes gripped the paint-spattered wooden floor as my legs began to shake. Even for just two minutes, I realized, this pose had been ambitious.

Nevertheless, I was stubborn. I had bristled at the artists’ shock and gentle advice to try something easier to start. I was a dancer. I could do this, I assured them, and so I would.

When I tell people I am an art model, it is usually in coded, business-approved language. To those familiar with the art world, figure drawing is just as good as “I stand naked in a room full of strangers for three hours.” To the uninitiated masses, figure drawing is vague enough that they can imagine me sitting demurely in a chair, fully clothed. If, by chance, an acquaintance ventures to inquire further, I will respond honestly.

It’s a hobby not many understand. Thanks to that meme-famous scene in Titanic, people’s first thought is of plump lips, arched backs, and furtive, lamp-lit glances in lavish surroundings. I can almost see the scene playing in the back of their brain as their faces arrange themselves into a reaction. French girls, French girls, French girls… I can hear that iconic line echoing in their ears as their mouths form around a response.

“So…like Titanic?” they’ll inevitably ask, either fearfully or excitedly, depending on the person.

And, here’s the thing: it’s nothing like Titanic.

To help dispel a few stereotypes about my little hobby, here are a few things that cross my mind when I pose. It may surprise you to learn that it is neither sexy nor scary to stand naked in a room full of artists. As with anything (talking to your cat like a human, watching Netflix in your underwear, accidentally grabbing the barista’s hand instead of your coffee mug), it just is what it is.

Posing. One of the most important jobs I have as a model is to come up with an interesting pose that can be held for the intended amount of time. I cannot simply plant my feet squarely on the floor with my arms at my side and stare at the wall. The artists want a challenge; they want to be pushed to practice difficult skills like foreshortening. I have to assemble myself in some attempt at contrapposto (pointing my knees in one direction and my nose in the other, subtly lifting one shoulder to lean against the back of a chair, an outstretched arm or a bent leg), while also acknowledging the limits of my body (where are my pressure points, how long can I stand upright, if my leg falls asleep up to the knee will I be able to walk afterwards), while also appearing believable. It does nothing to splay myself out like an octopus in a desert. Instead, I think: what do I look like when I’m tying my shoes? How does my back bend right before I stand up? Sometimes I do alright. Other times I forget what real people do with their bodies, and I come out looking a little like this:

Bodily Functions. It makes sense that most people think the most awkward thing about art modeling is the nudity. We consider our bodies private often because we are programmed to think of them in sexual or shameful terms. I have my own qualms about my body, which I have written about before, but that’s not the point of modeling. It’s not about how you compare to imaginary French girls. It’s about how the shadows fall on your flexing muscles, how your bones support your flesh.

However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t concerns. A prick in the back of my nose becomes an overwhelming need to sneeze, the deep breath of a yawn threatens to pry my jaws open, my armpits grow sticky from sweat with no fabric to absorb it. I am always wondering how to avoid these things while keeping my face schooled and holding steady. Bodily functions, embarrassing bodily functions, dominate a solid portion of my modeling experience. One, in particular, is the most menacing: the dreaded fart.

It’s hard to fart in public when you’re wearing clothes and can easily distance yourself from the scene of the crime. Farting while naked is a whole different animal. If you try to hold it in, there is the worry that the artists will notice the sudden clench in your muscles. If you try to ease it out, there is always the chance that it will be like a trumpet heralding the arrival of a king, or that it will hang on the air like an unwelcome guest. Before releasing my captive flatulence, I must consider what I ate for lunch, the draftiness of the studio, the texture of the surface below my bottom.

There is a strategic approach to every aspect leading up to the final moment. Passing gas while naked is like going to war.

Passing time. Poses can vary from two minutes to two hours, and, while my face must remain passive, my mind has permission to wander. There are sessions when my gears are turning remarkably well. I plan my week, I make personal resolutions, I consider the issues of the world. It can be extremely meditative and helpful to engage in an activity that requires I step away from a screen and just think. Other times, it can be a chore to occupy myself as I sit in silence save for the soft whispers of charcoal on paper.

Without my glasses, the world becomes a blur, so distracting myself with my surroundings is a fruitless task. Instead, I’ll throw it back to grade school with an old-fashioned times table test. Often, simple counting exercises are not enough to fill the entire period, and so I am forced to get creative. The list of mundane mental acrobatics I can conjure for my brain is extensive. I’ll say the alphabet backwards and forwards, then I’ll try to find a word in German to represent each letter. I’ll quiz myself on all the Presidents, and then I’ll go back to the beginning to list the Presidents and one event during their term in order. I’ll try to name as many of my teachers I can remember, from kindergarten to college. I even, sometimes, recall enough about Supreme Court cases to spend time listing their various stats and outcomes.

I like to think this keeps me sharp. If nothing else, it keeps me awake.

Once the drawing session has ended, I’ll walk around and peek at the artists’ work. It’s pretty neat to see the different styles that have blossomed out of your poses, to see how different people translate your features to paper. Occasionally, an artist will gift me one of their sketches, and I’ll tuck it proudly away, sheepishly pleased by my own image. Sometimes I look like a goddess on a mountain. Other times, I appear gracefully pensive. I do not have a mirror at home, and so these sketches are a welcome glimpse, a precious reminder, of the body that carries my overactive mind.

Art modeling is a hobby, a skill I enjoy perfecting. It is my chance to engage in the creative world, despite having nothing but thumbs attached to my hands. It is a challenge and a joy, and sometimes ridiculously hilarious. So, the next time you meet an art model, I hope you imagine a well lit, cheery studio full of artists who care more about lines and shadows than the zit on the model’s elbow. I hope the last thing on your mind is James Cameron’s Titanic, unless, of course, you are watching James Cameron’s Titanic together.

The Wooing of Lucy Stone

Now Harry, I have been all my life alone. I have planned and executed, without counsel, and without control. I have shared thought, and feeling, and life, with myself alone. I have made a path for my feet which I know is very useful…and it seems to me, I cannot risk it by any change… I have lived alone, happily and well, and can still do it… My life has never seemed to me, a baffled one, only in hours that now and then come, when my love-life is consciously unshared. But such hours are only as the drop to the ocean.

– Lucy Stone to Henry Blackwell, 1854

The first time I used an online dating site was in high school. In one of the cruelest teenaged acts I would commit, I created a fake profile so that I could join a few of my peers in mocking a young teacher behind his back. He was 24; we were 16. We thought we were so clever, revealing the latent desperation in his swagger. We thought he was such a dweeb. We did not yet recognize the crystal ball of his profile for what it was.

It was almost a decade before I would log onto OkCupid again. I had just moved to Cleveland. I was sitting alone in the dark, absently clicking through pictures on Facebook, looking for a me that didn’t exist–perfect hair, decade-appropriate outfit, cool background. For the benefit of virtual strangers, I spun half-truths like an expert. “I’m great at being silly and tripping over air,” I typed. “I love Game of Thrones,” and, “Everything goes better with beer.” To the casual browser, I appeared charmingly vacuous. Harmless. I got a lot of messages. Most of them just said, “Hey.”

“Hey.”

Three years, two platforms, and some choice unsolicited pics later, I have finally lost my mind. It happened a few days ago, after I had a surprisingly sustained conversation with a man about his new tank top. “What color is it?” I asked. “Green,” he replied. A few minutes later, he sent me a picture, mostly of his flexed arms, with just enough of the shirt visible that vanity could be denied. “Yup,” I responded, obstinately refusing to acknowledge the elephant biceps in the room. “That’s definitely green.”

And then I threw my phone to the foot of my bed and silently screamed for ten whole minutes.

I often turn to history to help contextualize the present–“a sister’s hand may wrest a female pen”–but I had never before thought to apply such a panacea to my love life. After all, what could a Victorian lady have to say about the ennui of modern dating culture? As it turns out, I have more to learn from my historical heroes than how to weather politics. Enter: Loving Warriors: Selected Letters of Lucy Stone and Henry B. Blackwell, 1853-1893.

When Lucy Stone met Henry Blackwell, she was 31 and building a solid career of speaking for abolition and women’s rights. In an Antebellum twist on an unfortunately persistent trope in every woman’s life, her critics anxiously awaited the day when “a wedding kiss” would “shut up the mouth of Lucy Stone.” She had been skeptical of husbands since she was a teenager, and marriage was the last thing on her mind when she entered a hardware shop in Cincinnati, Ohio, looking for supplies.

Henry Blackwell was 24 years old at the time, a businessman like his brothers, but desperately seeking to reconcile his desire to leave a financial legacy with his reform-minded soul. He had five sisters, most famously Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the U.S. He was immediately smitten with Lucy Stone, and seeing her speak a few years later in New York solidified his affection. “I decidedly prefer her to any lady I have ever met,” he wrote to his brother, “always excepting the Bloomer dress which I dont like practically, tho theoretically I believe in it with my whole soul.”

Bloomers, a radical (though much maligned) sartorial choice

He immediately started writing to her, with her consent, about every aspect of his daily life. He opened most letters with a description of his surroundings, coolly segued into a discussion of civil rights, and then closed with an apology for writing so much to such a busy person. Her responses, though less prolific, followed a similar pattern. He carried her letters with him when he traveled until they practically disintegrated in his hands. Lucy, while “generally thankful for pen & ink,” admitted that she hated them in her current separation from Henry.

Their strong personalities shine in their letters. Lucy–strong-willed and frank–kept her missives short and to the point. Very rarely do her lines stray towards poetry or romance, and her love caused her to hold him, perhaps, to a higher standard than most. “With much love,” she closed one [adoringly] chastising letter, “and the hope that, as we know that we are not perfect, we must strive to become so.”

For his part, he was so full of passion, humor, and eloquence that no amount of paper could possibly contain it all. This dearth of space did not hinder his pen. He simply turned the paper from portrait to landscape and wrote over what he had already written. It is incredibly annoying, and I am unbelievably grateful to the tortured grad student that transcribed this madness:

Fig. 1: A Researcher’s Hell

But I digress. Very early on, Henry Blackwell began describing to Lucy Stone his idea of marriage, in the hopes that she someday might amend her revulsion towards the practice, if not for his sake, then for her own.

My idea of the relation involves no sacrifice of individuality but its perfection–no limitation of the career of one, or both but its extension. I would not have my wife drudge…while I found nothing to do but dig ditches. I would not even consent that my wife should stay at home to rock the baby when she ought to be off addressing a meeting… Perfect equality in this relationship…I would have–but it should be the equality of Progress, of Development, not of Decay. If both parties cannot study more, think more, feel more, talk more & work more than they could alone, I will remain an old bachelor & adopt a Newfoundland dog or a terrier as an object of affection.

– Henry Blackwell to Lucy Stone, 1853

Knowing that she felt more comfortable conversing in person, he made every effort to meet her on her speaking tours. Their first “date” occurred after he discovered she would be passing through Niagara Falls to attend a women’s rights convention in Cleveland–a manageable trip from his home in Cincinnati. Eagerly, he penned her a request to meet her in Niagara and then accompany her to the convention. Her response was painfully lukewarm, but Henry still raced to Niagara and had the time of his life, even speaking publicly on women’s rights for the first time.

I…am very willing that you should be there too… I think you know me well enough to put the right construction upon my consent to meet you at Niagara. I am glad of the friendship of the good whether they be men or women… But believe me Mr. Henry Blackwell when I say, (and Heaven is my witness that I mean what I say) that, in the circumstances I have not the remotest desire of assuming any other relations than those I now sustain. I would incur my own heavy censure, if by fault of mine, you did not understand this.

– Lucy Stone to Henry Blackwell, 1853

Though we may never know what passed between them in Cleveland, the tone of their letters shifted almost immediately from friendly to intimate. She wrote very little of “Mr. Blackwell” to her mother, but she began addressing him as “Harry” in their personal correspondence. As for Henry Blackwell, one need only look to his reminiscence of the event one year later. “I was with you at Cleveland,” he wrote. “I stood with you in the dark cool night overlooking the Lake–with Charles Burleigh & Antoinette–your hand in mind & the great roar of the waves coming up & the winds sweeping over us–& Charles quoting poetry–while I was living it.”

At this point, I was screaming into the book for Lucy to just accept him already because my heart couldn’t take it anymore! But, of course, she didn’t. As their attraction grew more obvious, Lucy grew more distant. She even went so far as to claim that she “instinctively recoil[ed]” from the thought of marrying him. The fear of losing the happy life she had built for herself seemed too great to overcome. It’s heartbreaking the abuse he took in pursuit of her affection, but nothing she wrote could deter him.

I know that the argument is not necessarily that you should marry me. That is again another question. You say you do not love me enough to do so. Then I say–wait until you do. But do not resolve beforehand against marrying me. See me & think of me & give me a fair chance of being loved by you. You cannot love by your simple will any more than you can see. But you can let yourself love or prevent yourself from loving just as you can open, or shut your eyes. Dear Lucy, love me if you can. I will endeavor to give you no cause ever to regret having ever done so…

– Henry Blackwell to Lucy Stone, 1854

It took two years of constant correspondence before Lucy Stone finally consented to marry Henry Blackwell. Excitedly, he wrote her asking if they might set the date his 30th birthday, but also expressed his wish to defer to her on every point in planning their upcoming nuptials. “I do not want you to fetter yourself one particle for my sake,” he wrote, fearing she might get cold feet. “I do not want you to forgo one sentiment of independence, nor one attribute of personality.” He knew what pain it brought her, even without reading the wedding invitation Lucy sent to Antoinette Brown to “help in so cruel an operation as putting Lucy Stone to death.”

Dear Lucy–we know each other & we know that we are one. It was not for nothing that my heart leaped towards you & yearned for you when I first saw you in our store six years ago…but dear Lucy I am not at all anxious that you shd promise to love, honor & cherish me, for I know your heart. I have no preference for any particular form, or place. My home is in you–my marriage is already solemnised.

– Henry Blackwell to Lucy Stone, 1855

As for the ceremony, it was a small affair on May 1, 1855, undertaken in protest against “such of the present laws of marriage, as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should possess.” Henry Blackwell married his true love; her identity remained in tact. When they retired to their room (an event she feared almost as much as the wedding itself), Henry slipped quietly into bed without waking her.

Throughout their lives, he proved true to his lofty sentiments. The first time Lucy wished to attend a conference as a married woman, she asked for his permission. He said he could not give it, and advised her to ask Lucy Stone instead. “I cannot get him to govern me!” she wrote Susan B. Anthony, happily. Together they raised one daughter, Alice, who grew to be just as strong-willed as her mother. They lived happily for almost forty years, separated only by Lucy’s death in 1893.

Draft of their marriage protest, 1855 (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University)

So…what? When I look at my love life up to this point, I cannot help but feel discouraged. Yet, I have begun to find hope in darker moments. Superficiality breeds superficiality. If I’m done appealing to boys who only want a girl to ooh and ahh over their work at the gym, then I need to let my feminist flag fly. No more the meek woman who lets a man call her a communist for thinking health care is a universal right. No more the bland statue who spends more time taking selfies for boys than discussing sexism and white privilege. If a man doesn’t love me for my brain and my passion, then that man doesn’t love me at all. I’m sick of changing myself, diluting myself, for the fleeting gratification of simply anyone telling me I’m attractive.

Someday, I will meet my Henry Blackwell, my perfect person who will find themselves as enriched by my light as I am by theirs, someone who can be patient despite my reluctance, whom I will love (as Lucy did) with “the capacity of 20 women.” Until then, don’t look for me on Tinder. You won’t catch me preening over flirty chats. I’ll be in the library, nose buried in a book, reassembling my dignity.

water, a timeline

~11,000 B.C.E.: an infant glacial river is formed. The river proves an invaluable source of life for the people who settle on its banks, as well as the game they hunt.

1650s: at the height of the fur trade, Iroquois hunters push west, bringing “fire and war” to their Algonquin neighbors. They call the river “Cuyahoga,” meaning crooked; they call the territory “Ohio,” meaning beautiful.

1795: the Treaty of Greenville is signed, ending the war between the Western Confederacy of native peoples and Anglo-American settlers. For a brief period, the Cuyahoga River stands as the western border of the United States.

1796: Moses Cleaveland and a team of 50-odd workers dock their boats on the eastern bank of the Cuyahoga River to begin exploring what they call “New Connecticut.” He reports that the water is clear, and the land is excellent. With the completion of a 10-acre Public Square, a city is established that will become a capital of transportation and industry. They call their city “Cleveland,” for their leader.

1860s: industry, like the people who call the city home, is booming. Population in Cleveland increases 150%. Businesses, like Standard Oil, Sherwin Williams, and Public Steel, blossom on the banks of the Cuyahoga.

1868: the first fire is reported on the Cuyahoga River. The volume of oil in the water is so dense that steamboat captains are moved to caution as they shovel coals.

1881: the Cuyahoga River is considered “an open sewer through the center of the city.” The river is no longer treated as a source of life; it is valued only for its economic potential.

1912: a spark from a tugboat catches an oil spill from a leaking cargo ship, igniting a devastating series of explosions and killing five. Noxious gasses and foul-tasting waters are seen as mere side-effects of progress. All environmental regulations are ignored.

1936: the Cuyahoga river burns for five days straight.

1952: oil leaking from Standard Oil creates a two-inch thick oil slick, spanning the width of the river. On November 1, a fire begins in the Great Lakes Towing Company shipyard that causes over $1 million in damages.

1969: “Some river!” declares TIME Magazine after the polluted Cuyahoga ignites for the last time. “Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows.” There is no visible life in the waters near the city, not even leeches and worms. “What a terrible reflection on our city,” mourns Mayor Carl Stokes, as Cleveland citizens tell a joke with a grim punchline: “Anyone who falls into the Cuyahoga does not drown. He decays.”

1971: as Cleveland celebrates its 175th anniversary with a reenactment at Settler’s Landing, 20 people from the Cleveland American Indian Center attend to the event. As the boat crew tries to disembark, the group blocks their passage with an organized picket line. Citing over a century of destruction enacted on the banks of this very river, they propose that all the money spent on the celebration be reallocated to rescue the Cuyahoga from the perils of progress. “We might be 175 years late,” calls their leader, Russell Means, as a gussied-up Moses Cleaveland stands at the railing of the boat, “but we’re imposing an immigration law. Go back.”

The story of the Cuyahoga River joins us in 2016 in the midst of rebirth and restoration, thanks to federally funded environmental protections and decades of hard work. It would be easy today to walk along its banks, whether surrounded by reclaimed forestland or riverside bars, and think our work is done…but history is never a closed book, and we are always in danger of repeating it. How many of us read The Lorax as children, but grow up to be the Onceler?

I am thinking, now, of the Dakota-Access Pipeline, and wondering when we will stop treating cancer and poisonings, oil spills and wildlife extirpation as the unlucky results of progress when they are, in fact, warning signs that we are killing ourselves with greed. I am thinking, now, of the brave native people at Standing Rock who have not allowed dogs or pepper spray or fire hoses to intimidate them into submission.

In Ohio, we grow up sheltered from the oppression and poverty of native people in our country, but it is a mistake to portray American Indians as relics of the past. They are our neighbors, our co-workers, and friends. Despite over 500 years of violence and cultural suppression, the first people of this land remain proud and stand their ground. The same goes for our environment–the first and best source of life. A clear stream may flow from our sinks today, but that doesn’t mean our health is secure tomorrow. Fish may have returned to the Cuyahoga River, but it is wrong to believe our fight ends here.

This Thanksgiving, I urge you to read up on the Dakota Access Pipeline and consider the story of the Cuyahoga River, a beautiful, life-giving waterway with soft, round curves throughout its 100-mile journey to Lake Erie. We choked it nearly to death with oil and waste and allowed the plague of human industry to spread into the Lake. That was almost 50 years ago, but we cannot grow complacent as the struggle continues elsewhere.

There are people on this very day who are standing in the freezing cold, standing up to a longtime bully that has tried to strip them of their dignity for centuries. Cleveland, perhaps more than anywhere else, should know the value of our rivers. Cleveland, perhaps more than anywhere else, should understand that, though our environment is the first victim of unchecked progress, we are the second. Water is life, plain and simple, and history is a dire warning to do better or perish. This Thanksgiving, I stand with Standing Rock, and I hope you will, too.