BY DENISE JARROTT
I am 18 when I fall hard.
After only a couple of months on these blue pills—one half robin’s egg, the other half periwinkle—the pills which are supposed to help me forget, I know I have it bad, maybe even worse than before. They are powerless to pry me away from my beloved. I have a couple of boyfriends, one even breaks my heart, but none compare to the all-consuming love I have for sadness.
I pray at the temple of the sadness, lighting candles of self-pity with single minded devotion, just like my religion taught me to do. Catholicism wasn’t made for those with a naturally sunny disposition. I was raised on a steady diet of shame and fatalism. I was raised on bloody, ecstatic saints and white robes and cadences that entered my mind and stayed there. I was raised on fire and spiked wheels. Even now, I think in trinities and I write in litanies. I still think all water, not just that which is blessed, is holy. There are some habits that are impossible to break.
Or, I suppose, you could blame my love affair with sadness to being born under the sign of death and rebirth—my being in love with sadness is only part of the natural, cyclical nature of life itself. It’s the same sign as Sylvia Plath, who for me never really died. At 18, she seemed as real to me as any living person I knew, maybe more, because everything she said felt truer than anything I’d ever heard anyone say out loud. At 18, my swan song was performing “Daddy” to a room full of my peers. It was my vehicle. I let anger and sadness and desire possess me when I read that poem aloud, and it impressed and terrified everyone who saw me read it. I was in a fugue state when I read it, and I let the storm consume me. A week previous, I’d taken a handful of those blue pills in my closet, threw them up with the help of liquid charcoal given to me in a Styrofoam cup, spent two days in the hospital, and somehow kept it a secret from the majority of my classmates. Resurrected from the local behavioral health ward, I put on my black dress and performed that poem at the statewide speech competition. I didn’t have to memorize it, but by then it was part of my blood.
John Keats, another poet born under this sign of life and death, who also died young, wrote “for many a time/I have been half in love with easeful death/Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme...” If I treated anyone with tenderness, it was sadness, but I still wonder whether I was sad or just so painfully bored that I wanted to feel something, anything, and if it was sadness then that’s what I’d devote my life to. That’s who I’d choose to love.
To be fair, I think all the girls I knew were, in some way, in love with sadness, or at least the wise ones maintained a flirtation with it. I think all of us stole our father's pocket knives or mother's razors and locked ourselves in the bathroom. Self-destruction is one of the few things that makes itself available to teenage girls. It happened so often that it became ubiquitous. I'm sure there were girls who went on a long run or prayed, but we were not those girls.
Now that we are older, I wonder what it was we were seeking. How did we learn to press the blade horizontally across the wrist, or do it in an area that could easily be covered by clothing or a strategically placed cuff bracelet? We listened to boys with eyeliner scream into microphones, boys who wore our jeans and couldn't grow facial hair. They were so much like girls, so much like us. Conor Oberst girlishly whining his poetry from nearby Omaha could have been Lana Del Rey in boy drag, but she hadn’t arrived yet. This was 2005 in the Midwest, and we all had a crush on sadness. We all had our reasons why.
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“Dark Paradise” is a song that is naked in its love for sadness. Gone is the Lolita personality, at least temporarily. This one is the voice of a woman who has long ago lost her innocence, a harbinger to the “deadly nightshade” of Ultraviolence. Lana appears in a cloud of smoke. Lana asks the spiritualist to intercede, to speak to the dead on her behalf. We do not know if the lover in question is far away or dead, but they are obviously gone. There is no pretending to be the lonely starlet waiting to be ravished. No one is coming.
Lana laments before every chorus “But I wish I was dead” It would be easy to write it all off as melodrama, and many have. It’s a common narrative of love lost and the one left behind, unable to move forward, haunted like a sea captain’s wife yearning for her beloved across the world: “All my friends ask me why I stay strong/Tell ‘em when you find true love it lives on...” This lover has a hold on Lana. He is like God, and his absence leaves her utterly bereft.
Maybe her lover is God. “After one has seen God, what is the remedy?” Sylvia Plath asks in “Mystic”—a line that, even if it was not a refrain, would still reverberate for me years after reading it. After one has loved, lost, or simply sat in a high school gymnasium with a stack of books and no concept of a future, what is the remedy? This song could be about a lost love—and even if it is, why can’t it be that?—or is it about touching the bottom of something and wondering if you’ll surface?
“Dark Paradise” doesn’t apologize for its own self-indulgence. It languishes in its grief. It contains all the things I love about Lana Del Rey’s music—theatricality, sweeping strings, deep, dark vocals like a split pomegranate. There’ also something in it that speaks to that 18 year old girl in love with sadness and to woman I am now, who is beginning to lose her infatuation with it in favor of something unknown, something even closer to the truth. But there’s a tenderness within me for the girl I was and the girls I knew. There must be a girl there now, who wants to love and be loved, someone who wants to give her pain and confusion a name in order for it to really exist. If you learn the name for something, you can call it forth. You can banish it, too.
DENISE JARROTT is the author of NYMPH (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2018). She is also the author of two chapbooks, Nine Elegies (Dancing Girl Press) and Herbarium (Sorority Mansion Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in jubilat, Black Warrior Review, Zone 3, Burnside Review and elsewhere. She grew up in Iowa and currently lives in Brooklyn.