Sleeping in the night is difficult these days. I am tired, and love to nap, but at night come the dreams. It is hard to dream, to go there, as I never know what awaits me or what I will uncover. The stress of the packing and travelling dreams is so real, I feel so much in them. Rushing, trying to get prepared to go somewhere, always falling short, forgetting something. Panic. Fear. Sadness. Stress. But wait, I have to do this, or that, get here, or there. Why, what does it all mean? I am alone in this world. No more parents. No more adults to look after, instead of them looking after me. So now what?

I’ve slowly realised that I am watching the film of my life in these dreams. Some of the locations have changed slightly; of this I am not sure why. But I recognise a version of the high-rise apartment building in Chevy Chase, just across the DC line in Maryland, my last home in the US. I dreamed of this place for years after I left the country while living in tiny spaces in London. I also visit versions of the apartment I had before that one. It was just a couple of miles down the road on Wisconsin Avenue; it was here where I was the happiest in the seven years I lived in the area. It was mine, it was doable. I could walk to the Corcoran print lab, the Georgetown building, where I spent so much time learning to make things again, after stopping for awhile, having abandoned my artistic pursuits for an easier life, one with a job and money. On the way was a cemetery, where in the early spring I would stop to be in peace, in nature, on my days off, and take pictures of the tiny, easily overlooked flowers with my first digital camera that was a gift from that same boyfriend who didn’t understand my self-portraits. I would fill the frame with these flowers, in wonder of their beauty. Then later, in the lab, using photoshop, I separated these photos into their four digital colours -cyan, magenta, yellow, and black – printed them in negative onto clear plastic sheets, made a screen-printing screen for each colour, and printed them by hand. I had found something new to make, it was beauty for the sake of beauty, and I was at peace with it.

It was a lovely apartment, with a chandelier that I bought at Home Depot with my own money to class up the place a bit. Behind it on the wall were two large vertical canvases that I painted a textured gold and displayed on a shallow shelf, and in front was a shaker style round wooden table and chairs. Between the chandelier and the canvases, the room radiated with a warm golden light. It was the perfect single girl apartment. There was no view though, and the heating/AC unit smelled of DC mould, but other than that, it was ideal. The rooftop deck looked out on all of Washington. I wish I had enjoyed it more, just as I wish I’d enjoyed the rooftop pool in Chevy Chase. Once, a unit opened up on the top floor with a view on the city. Perhaps if I’d moved to that apartment, instead of selflessly recommending it to a sad, single colleague who was in her forties and living with her parents, my life would have gone a completely different way. Perhaps I would have never moved to the two bedroom in Chevy Chase, stolen from my sister to make her help me pay for it, and destroyed her trust in anyone, forever.

I think again of the airport photo, and the others I did to finalise my studies, after I was told to do something else, and I did, but the prof didn’t like that either. The project I did for her was about time. Not images, but time. I took all of the ends, or maybe it was the beginnings, of the rolls of film that I had shot of my friends, my life, my memories, and I printed them as abstract vertical pictures. You see, when colour film is exposed as you are loading it, it gets a bit of light exposure. The class was a colour class, and I was in love with the range of colours you could make when printing just by turning the dials one way or the other in the printing lab. The balance of green, blue, and red light when filtered through the film, creates the opposites – magenta, yellow, and cyan – when hitting the paper. It is the additive mix of just these three colours that make up all other colours and when you put them all together, they make black. When printing the abstract composition from the bit of the film that hits the light, you get a random display of colour – uncontrollable, surprising, sometimes shocking – but to me, always interesting and beautiful. These pictures to me were abstract accounts of my life, artefacts even, that time had passed; time, light, colour, and memory. Memory of what? How I felt, what happened, the symphony of dysfunction that were my friends, my associates, the others who had all fled something to come to the city in search of something else. We were all transplants, refugees from lives we wanted to leave behind. In those days, there was not a lot of self-awareness among my friend group. When you put together a bunch of people who never really felt like they belonged anywhere, you get a sort of chaos. The only thing that calmed us was creation. To make something is to externalise your inner process and inner self, demons and all. I think that most of us were really searching for something, not the least for a sense of belonging. Not sure if we really found it, but many of us found a portion at least, of ourselves along the way. For me, moving beyond self-portraiture and snapshot portraiture was a big step. I didn’t only take pictures of myself at that time. As photography students we were encouraged to take our cameras everywhere, so that we could photograph at any time, when the urge hit us, so that we could discover our subject. So we did, and for me, my subject was my friends, my life, as it was for many others.

It was the age of Nan Goldin, an artist I was introduced to by my friend Laura. She lasted just one year, or maybe a year and a semester, and I think I’d forgotten that she was even at school until now. We’d both wanted to go to Columbia. I don’t know how she discovered it, but since my senior year I’d wanted to go there, since I had the box of college info that kept arriving to my house, a box that sat in my room. It had filled up quickly, full of hope, promise, and the future. It sat, looming. I had no idea what to do or how to choose. I was interested in Columbia as it was in Chicago, the big city of my childhood, one that I loved deeply. The building, the arts, the museums, the cosmopolitain feeling of my grandparents apartment; I loved it all. It also felt safe, familiar. The brochure tempted me, it seemed like a place full of interesting people and programs, a world away from my past experiences. It also had open admissions, so I was very unlikely to fail if I tried to go there. With a campus in downtown Chicago, it was the antithesis to the sprawling University campus that everyone else seemed to be so interested in. No thank you to that, being surrounded by sororities and frat houses seemed like a version of hell to me. More fitting in, more boxes, more conformity. No, thank you, I’d had enough of that already in my short lifetime, no way. But I didn’t know what to do, so I let the box sit through the first semester of my senior year, and then the second, and then through the summer of ’93. It just sat there. While my friends had their parents making sure that they met the early admissions deadline for their top choices and their back-ups, my box just sat there.

It was a miracle that I had a full box of choices at all. You see, my grades were pretty mediocre in high school. I had stopped trying after about my sophomore year. School had always been so easy for me before. In primary, grade school as we call it in the US, I was levels ahead in reading, writing, and math. I was in the ‘gifted class’ in my first school, and I got to leave class to do fun stuff like number games, where you figure out the next in a sequence of numbers, which required an understanding of how the first few numbers related, and then continuing the sequence. I loved that game. There was a lot of spatial arrangement games too, but I don’t remember those much. I remember when I changed schools in the third grade, my mom and I went in before the year started to meet my new teacher and have an informal evaluation. She didn’t or couldn’t believe that I was reading at the level I was. She searched for and brought out the lesson books to ask, you mean this you’ve already done, and this one too? Yes, exactly, we answered. So off I went to the upper classes for several subjects, away from my peers, who were not so welcoming to the girl that they assumed thought she was better than everybody else, when if fact, she didn’t think about them really, at all. Oh and how cruel they were.

I perceived my family as incredible poor, which as you may know, is a sin among sins, a default like no other. Poverty is the greatest disgrace one can have, especially in a place like ours, a rural farming community that had been settled there for generations. I think it was and perhaps still is this way, because if you are poor, that means you haven’t worked hard, haven’t stayed the course by working hard, saving your money, buying your home, staying put, and making the expected life with a wife and kids, and survived. This was not a rich land by any means, but it was one that demanded a certain standard of existence, one of weekly church-going white Christians who dressed themselves and their kids well and cared what people think. We were not that. My parents were hippies in a way. They, or perhaps just my father, wanted to homestead, go back to the earth, and drop out of normal society. He’d been raised in a military family, living on or near bases his entire young years, with time spent abroad as a child in Germany, France, and I can’t remember if they were in Japan before the kids or with them, and perhaps Italy. Anyway, he’d been scarred deeply by the violent alcoholism of his father, which was likely a trauma-response to the PTSD of war and the things he experienced during the reconstruction after. My mother, as I’ve recently come to know and understand, was oh so very different, she grew up an elegant young thing, in cities, with working parents, both of them, which painted a much different picture. I am sure she was ignored at home in a way too; her mother was cold, and perhaps her parents were both drinking then. She told me once that her parents were part of the cocktail culture, where drinks and smoking every night were par for the course, but that her mom at some point stopped drinking, while her father continued on. She had experienced a considerable trauma just before meeting my father, and it had broken her completely, as would be expected. She told me recently that she thinks that she just wanted to get married, and my father asked her, so she said yes. There was not much reflection or consideration there, how could there have been, she was probably completely disconnected to her body at that point, and perhaps stayed that way for may, many years, if not forever. At least now she is free.

My father was likely bi-polar, in retrospect, and through no fault of his own. He’d been made to sacrifice a lot in his formative years, and was probably rebelling against that too. So the story goes, he heard of a parcel of land one day, went to see it, and the same weekend asked his parents to borrow the $10, 000 needed for a deposit on it, and bought it. He did this all without my mother knowing, or so the story goes. Knowing her affinity for re-writing history to erase any fault or complicitness, I am not sure of the truth of this, but there it stands. On this land he would build our family home, but it took years, and we lived in a one room shed with an outhouse for a toilet for at least a year or two, maybe more, before we moved into the house, still and forever unfinished. He was a creative genius, always drawing, designing, making and building, and was decades ahead of his time. If he were my age, now, he would be flourishing. But he is not, he is fifteen years dead already, a casualty of oh so very much, but most likely, of his own unresolved misery and a deep, deep sadness for a life not lived as it should have been.

The box of college mail was there, in fact, not because of my grades, which began to slip as school got harder, as I became less interested, as I needed more help, more parenting, from my parents, and they couldn’t step up due to their own deficincies. It was there due to my high testing scores, specifically the ACTs and PSATs, one of which I took while painfully hungover, one of my very first. I may have still been a bit drunk at the time, as I had no tolerance then. Other parents would have made sure their kids were home the night before, well-rested and fed. But I had lied and said I was staying with a girlfriend the night before, when I was in fact at a small party with a group of friends, mostly boys, at the house of my boyfriend. He lived across the street from the park where we had our first kiss. He was at least two years younger than me, so cute, a skater boy. We started out as friends, we liked spending time together, I could be myself with him. He was funny, goofy, and quiet. No father around, he lived with his mom, who wasn’t around much either. I think I drank Purple Passion that night, and I think I threw up outside in the early morning after sleeping on the couch. I’m pretty sure my boyfriend met his next girlfriend that night. She was 19, older than me, and stole his affection and friendship from me, right out from under my nose. Losing him broke my heart, and made me feel always on alert for danger from other women. The point is, I took this very important test still drunk, but I still did well enough to convince a whole lot of schools that they wanted me, and my money, to go to them. Enough colleges to fill a box with materials that would never be looked at by my parents, not once.

I thought about Bennington in Vermont. The classes were very progressive, and they had no grades, only pass fail. I liked this, it not only felt safe, but I liked the idea that you either did it, or you didn’t, there was no in between. I liked that concept. There were small class sizes, which meant manageable social situations, discussions, a way of learning that I’d always enjoyed. Vermont was enticing; my first love, my long distance boyfriend lived most of the year there, and would visit, with his cool younger sister, his dad in Edwardsville for the holidays. We met during one such visit and fell in love as only two lost, lonely, sensitive, and intense teenagers can. We’d talk every Sunday night, taking turns on the long distance charges, with an intimacy and calm that I don’t think I’ve known since. He snowboarded, and was from Burlington, Vermont. He was actively anti-racist, part of SHARP, skinheads against racial prejudice, and liked music I’d never heard of. He sent me mix tapes full of love, longing, and angst. One of my first times getting high was with him. We watched snowboard videos and I spent a great deal of time wondering how their feet would detach and then reattach to the board in mid-jump. Finally, I realised I was just high.

Later on, while in school in Chicago, I came to realise that Bennington College was the first choice for spoiled rich kids from New York City with a penchant for clubbing and casual heroin use. My ‘friends’ Ali and Jessie went there, I believe that she was kicked out for drug use, and sent to rehab, one of many stints. Oh how I would have been eaten if I had gone there, so far away from home and anything I’d even known. Or maybe I would have actually met some good people, not the rejects who came to the Art Institute as their second choice, their easy way out. The Art Institute of Chicago to me was a dream school, the kind of school that gets you gallery shows and easy access to an MFA program, the fast track to the art world. To them it was just a place far away from home where they could shore up in a high rise and do drugs without interference. This is where Laura got turned on to heroin, when she got together with Jessie. He had a New York pedigree with LA money. His dad was a songwriter, I believe his biggest hit was ‘Natural Woman’. He was an asshole, an addict, with the safety net of wealth and escape. When rich kids get a drug problem, they take a vacation at Betty Ford. When other kids do, they prostitute themselves and end up dead.

I ended up at Columbia. Luckily, heroin wasn’t my thing. I tried it once, snorted it with Ali and got high as fuck. It felt amazing. We just went to the posh late night coffee shop next to The Three Arts Club where I was living, in the Gold Coast. I literally lived in a neighbourhood called The Gold Coast and still felt poor. I lived just around the corner from the real estate developer at the time he was murdered by Andrew Cunanan, who went on to murder Gianni Versace before killing himself. It was the original center of wealth in Chicago city. I still felt like I was not enough, and couldn’t even enjoy living there, I felt like I had failed by not having my own place, instead of feeling like I was living a privileged life in an historic residence for women but it felt like the sorority I’d never wanted to be in. I never once painted in the light-filled top floor studio there. At least I did use the piano room, the stage, and the art gallery for a photo shoot.

After that night, I went to see Laura the next day with some coffee, to check on her and maybe see if she was still going to go to school, as she was on the verge of failing out. She was living with her asshole boyfriend at the time, a relic from the group of Chicago Hardcore dickhead promoters we were hanging out with at the end of our raver days. These guys once though it was funny to start a fight at a 4th of July party we all went to together on one of our visits from St. Louis. Her guy was why she really moved to Chicago, to live with him. I first went out with one of them. I was at first taken by his kindness, but after a few months I was bored with his limited intellect and penchant for meth and violence. That relationship ended with me throwing his jeans out of Laura’s mom’s 4th floor loft in St. Louis, followed by a jar of Ragu pasta sauce. I loved a dramatic gesture like that, probably inspired by films and soap operas. For Laura, Sage, an ironic name for such an asshole, it was more than that. It was her first tough guy boyfriend, the strong silent type that would protect her, or so she thought. First Jessica moved to Chicago with her man, who was fleeing imminent arrest had he stayed in STL, as the DEA had gotten wise to quite a lot by then. Laura left soon thereafter, to be with Sage in a shitty apartment in sketchy Humboldt Park. I think the abuse started there, and Jess was the one who figured it out.

By this time, the late morning of me bringing her coffee, they had moved into a loft in further downtown, where she befriended a kind guy named Michael who lived next door. So I show up with coffee, and while still holding it, she made some remark in our normal bitchy tone, probably about her dick of a boyfriend, or something else that injured my ego. Anyway, she pissed me off, so I threw the coffee at her. I was frustrated and coming down, so I didn’t think twice about it. It was emotion straight to action. She was shocked, I immediately apologised, she threw me out. I’m sure I said something about him hitting her but sure, I’m the asshole, or something like that. She forgave me in the next few days, but something changed after that. Maybe it was me, her affair with Jessie which I learned about shortly after, or the heroin that she used more and more, with them. I never did it again, after that, luckily.

I later shared an apartment with Ali for a short six months, a cool loft style back house in the Old Town area. I can’t imagine why I though that would be a good idea, but it probably had to do with her convincing nature, and my desire to get the fuck out of that posh club, to be somewhere where I could be depressed in peace, not having to cross paths with a doorman all the time or fifty other women when I wanted to eat something. We inevitably fell out, I hated her drug use and her bitchiness. She was such a mean and spoiled cunt. Laura and Ali were closer now, and there were others more important than me, too. It all revolved around heroin, but I didn’t see it so clearly then. I remember when Ali moved out she called me fat. I wasn’t fat, she was an asshole, and my response to her was, well I can lose weight but you can’t fix ugly. I’m pretty sure she stole my new camera the first few weeks I knew her, probably to sell it for drugs. She was poison, through and through, but it took me almost a year to figure it out. Legend has it that when our friend Emily was dying or already dead from an overdose, she and Laura stole her jewellery and some clothes from her apartment. I saw her once after that, a couple years and lifetimes later. She had spent some time in rehab in Florida and was living down the street from me in Pilsen on the South Side of Chicago with her boyfriend, a total douche that was part of the group from the 4th of July party. She had chased him for so long and finally trapped him into living with her, he was likely gay and covering it up by being an asshole to everyone all the time, trying to be the biggest, manliest dick he could be. She was miserable, and trying to finish her degree and get out of there, get back to New York in time to still try to marry well. I felt nothing for her. Laura was dead, and she was still here, and all I could think was that she finally got what she deserved, an empty, miserable, pointless life.