I love crowded rooms. I love sitting in the corners of bustling environments, seated on comfortable upholstery that’s wealthily cushioned, with a cocktail on the table, a notepad and pen, and a Dictaphone. I love the burn of low lighting beaming from fashionable fixtures, and I love sitting amongst stylish interiors as if I’m an added art piece. I love crowded rooms of people, noise, art, and music. Congested rooms that record the velocity of life.
The Dictaphone might appear an unusual device to cart around a metropolis, granted, and certainly not one that’s often seen on the tables of trendy bars and clubs. Nonetheless, it’s a necessary companion when these moods of solitude strike. We, writers, are funny creatures. We spend so much time within our own world that it’s a genuine effort to leave. Sometimes it takes bribery, other times it takes a Dictaphone and a notepad to crossover from one world to the next.
One of the great uses of a Dictaphone is that it captures the atmosphere. The recorded commotion of randomness; people clutched within gasps of laughter, and maybe the occasional shatter of glass too. All these collective noises will trigger me once I’m home, lounging in Marvel PJs, while pondering my next writing assignment. The encapsulated recordings are a stimulant, reviving the labyrinth of my interconnecting thoughts and musings, curiosities, and questions. All of which my hands can’t scribe efficiently.
I have sore hands. Lymphedema and arthritis are the main culprits. An unhealed triquetral fracture is another source of discomfort in my writing hand, which is why it’s easier to use a Dictaphone to document the bigger thoughts. Deliberations that often lead to a tangent of concepts; ideas overlapping and pouring into semi-developed plots. Before I know it, I’m building an entire framework of hypotheses, and my Dictaphone has sealed them all into a digital file. If nothing else, it’s hella convenient.
I haven’t always loved sitting in crowded places alone. It didn’t seem cool when I was younger, so I chose to take me-time somewhere more passable for an art and fashion student. I’d go to all the vogueish fashion museums and art galleries, and with each hour that passed me by, I’d somehow gain more and more of myself. My authenticity bubbled beneath the peer pressure of society, yearning to be released from the jail of social constructs and cultural norms. I never truly understood why being me was so wrong in the eyes of so many.
It was within those rooms of high ceilings and provocative installations that I’d feel the embodiment of power. The exhibitions would drive rockets of inspiration into my soul; hatching and provoking reactions, formulating, and rousing ideas, all before asking me poignant questions, like, what am I going to create? When am I going to be free?
I always created masterpieces after days alone and hours uncounted. No one knew though. I had too much pressure to remain the cool kid, and the cool kid didn’t spend time alone. Just as it was deemed uncool to be part of the LGBTQIA+ community, to be an emphatic feminist writer, to be a proactive activist constantly marching for change, to be a non-smoker, and to be tattooed and pierced in an era where that was for leftover Punks and those doing hard time. It wasn’t cool to either love or relish in having uninterrupted self-time. Nor was it cool to create the worst sin of all – to compete against men, creating better art and fashion than them. The 80s and 90s were a different era, for sure. Not all of it was fuzzy and cute.
My Dictaphone and I have seen each other throughout the decades. I remember taking my Dictaphone out to chaotic environments when I lost my mother figure and guardian, Mae. That was one of the worst years of my life. I needed to hear noises over silence and to feel happy vibrations over the physical anguish that brutalized my internal organs. To be too distracted to think or feel was an absolute gift back then. Just as Mae’s corpse rotted, so did I. Inside out, we rotted together, except I wasn’t dead. I was expected to live on and on and on, indefinitely, suffering and altogether mislaid within a world that hated me. I tried not to blame a dead woman for feeling so outlandishly abandoned, and yet…
I no longer have those recordings. I deleted them once I was healthier in my journey of bereavement. Alone in a crowded room, slightly drunk and getting drunker beneath a pink neon sign, rolling bitterness over the hard lump within my throat, and spitting out pained cries into fragmented sentences, isn’t something I ever need to hear again. I remember enough of my breakdown without trying to relive the horror story that was losing Anna Mae Caswell; the end of her days told to me in a phone box with smashed glass.
Nowadays, most of my digitalized thoughts are either happy or indifferent. Some of them are extraordinary to listen to because the voice doesn’t sound as if it is my own. The ideas sound foreign too; extraterrestrial and far-reaching. Sometimes, I just sit there stunned, listening intently, hanging off every word articulated, all whilst succumbing to a new world of passions that’s inexplainable and altogether electrifying. Sometimes the ideas seem too big for me to carry to fruition. This is usually followed by afternoons plagued with self-doubt, before eventually, I talk myself out of frenzied panic attacks by remembering who the fuck I am and where the fuck I’ve come from.
All alone in a crowded room is where I sometimes long to be. Dictaphone. Noises. Sensations. Vibrations. Happiness. Reflections. I love overcrowded rooms, sitting in the crooks of humming settings, with a creamy drink on the table, a notepad and pen, and a Dictaphone.
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