On Lorena

and men who make worlds

Lorrie had black hair and rebellious eyes. She floated through the rafters of my childhood home and splayed across the dashboard of our car. She played cards and smoked cigarettes, and called it quits when she stopped having fun. She broke hearts. The carefree counterpart that saunters through The Turnpike Troubadours’ discography, Lorrie stars in the Epic “Good Lord Lorrie.” I grew up on the Turnpike Troubadours. Always a family favorite, Evan Felkers’ lyricism unfolded around a scrubbing fiddle or whimpering six string throughout my adolescence. So I twisted Lorrie into my reflection whenever I looked at something shiny. I wanted to be her. I wanted to be described like her. Dark hair, bare feet, didn’t give a fuck. She was having fun until she wasn’t, and then she was gone. I often came back to her in these songs, a teenager seeking some kind of sense of self.

In the backdrop of countless listens, I was trying to find comfort in calling myself a writer, too. I always loved words. In high school, I stumbled headfirst into the word petrichor while scrolling through an article on my phone. Its’ consonants jabbed me in the ribs. Three syllables and I held something precious. The smell of rainfall after a dry period. One word and I understood how the world worked...it rained and then it didn’t. And there could be a lot of beauty in that. The only problem was that I didn’t have anything to say. No tragedy with which to string these little pieces of language together. But I liked the process, so that was enough for then.

In college, I continued to try to chase that elusive notion of having a voice. There was (is) not a single subject in existence which I hold unique knowledge of. I was bored by my own cliche, a sometimes-sad white girl writing in her spacious bedroom. But I read Why I Write and Slouching Towards Bethlehem and felt another pang deep in my core. Didion's pieces were intimate and honest, free of pretensions of expertise. She describes the idea of images that shimmer, those sparkly experiences that linger in her minds eye. She writes her way through them to figure out why. So there was my assignment; shape those glimmering images into words. Listen, read, reread to find out about the world, and write to find my place in it. I began to see the shimmer. For some, the drive through Sierra County is one of sequoia trees and roads that elicit motion sickness, but for me it always sparkled with youthful nostalgia and disconnected freedom. Felkers’ characters, Didions’ coolness, various others’ poetry...there I stood: an exquisite corpse in a game between writers I admired.

It was during this time that one of my professors wrote me a letter. It was almost romantic. A convoluted stream of compliments that fluttered between observations and predictions. How I unfolded in his class, how my words blossomed under his tutelage, how one day they might bloom with the potential of my physical beauty. Praise and poetry from a man who read too much Nabokov. It was as if he had discovered a brand new species after daring to venture through the wilderness. It was as if he had discovered me.

I was surprised to receive this letter. I had kind of phoned that semester in, I thought. I was quiet in class, often hungover, always unengaged. I didn’t deserve this flattery, and I didn’t want it. Reading this letter didn’t satiate the desire for attention and validation that dictated so much of my behavior at 19. I didn’t show it off to my friends, not wanting to giggle at crudely crafted professor jokes. Instead, this letter fed some kind of shame. I felt more used than violated. On a college campus, more despicable things happened every weekend — more derogatory things every day. He hadn’t even made a pass at me. I had just been cast in some story without my knowledge, turned into a canvas for one to paint profound intimacy. Whatever art was being created, I didn’t have a hand in it. He barely knew me.

I ignored it. And then years later, I got mad about it. I was starting to get mad a lot. Instances like this one, or worse, or different, reverberated throughout living room discussions and news outlets. The levity of girlhood was cracking, the way even pavement buckles on top of tree roots. I was angry. Angry because I kept skipping breakfast, angry that I couldn’t decide where I stood with porn. I was angry that I cried when I found a grey hair, and I was angry that a grown man wrote about my teenage self more intimately than I ever could.

So maybe this was my something to say. And who would know how I felt better than Lorrie. A female character without a point of view! She’s like me, I thought, cast in some fantasy to show up and disappear when the plot so requires. I could write my story through hers, give her a voice, for feminism! I tried and failed to write this song over and over again. Never mind the hypocritical logic of usurping her story as a vehicle for my own, Lorrie wasn’t like the character I was wrapping my fiction-adjacent arms around. A flighty dream girl, sure, but Lorrie was drawn by a poet to come and go as she wishes. She’s always been able to get angry. Dark hair dangling behind her, legs outstretched, Lorrie’s been shimmering in my mind for over a decade. So I pulled Lorena out of these fleeting glances of Lorrie, an homage more than a continuation. She was braided together with a story that feels a little like one that I know, and a little like one that a lot of my friends know. Lorrie never needed me, I needed her.