Kern Carter's Blog, page 90
October 15, 2021
Another Lesson Not Learned
New chapter on Love & Literature
Love is a complicated thing. The love we have for others face to face with the love we should have for ourselves. That’s what Allison Gaines is facing in chapter 3 of Heartbreak, Home and Hip Hop.
Once I made it to the apartment, I drank soup and waited. But Jackie never made it home that night. Neither did our newfound roommates. No one even called me. It was then that I started to reconsider this whole New York adventure, that landed me sick, far away from home, lonely, and invisible. Maybe this relationship was too new to take on the road, maybe I wasn’t made for New York, and maybe it wasn’t so bad being a big fish in a small pond, I began to wonder.
Allison is in another relationship with a rapper, this time in New York City, away from her home of New Orleans. Homesick, relationship sick, Allison is forced to consider that maybe this life isn’t for her.
But in a way, Jackie was right. I dated rappers in the past and certainly had some poor experiences to show for it. Hadn’t I learned anything? I guess not because deep down, I was a hopeless romantic. Despite what the past showed me, I wanted to believe there was more love out there for someone like me. Despite everything, I felt it was perfectly natural to want more.
Isn’t it, though? Natural to want more out of your relationship? To expect that you feel seen, appreciated, loved in the language that you crave?
Chapter 3 is titled Another Lessson Not Learned. Check out the full story.
[image error]Another Lesson Not Learned was originally published in CRY Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
October 14, 2021
Editor Picks — Favourite Posts On CRY Last Week
By the open rates on these Editor Picks, I can tell you’re really enjoying this. Good, because we’re enjoying it, too, so much so that I’m personally going to cheat a little bit this week.
KernMy favourite post from last week is Words In A Jar Held Close To The Light by bradley flora. Honestly, some pieces are just written so beautifully that I almost don’t care what the topic is about. Bradley’s prose pinned me to the screen from the very first paragraph.
I wrote this with a pen that’s lived in ten million landfills. Those are alternate reality stories, alternate moments on alternate timelines. Clear crystalline examples of what would happen if I wasn’t holding it in my hands in this here and now.
Then this paragraph made me laugh:
Apologies for the tangent. Unfocused and drifting, I want to point fingers but second-person-tense is just an academic way of gaslighting with permission.Honourable Mention
Anyways, I know we’re supposed to pick one, but it’s my publication so I’m breaking the rules. My other favourite piece from last week is Just Say No, It’s As Easy As It Sounds by Odettaafraser. I love this piece because it’s both personal and practical and written with just the right amount of attitude.
Favourite excerpt:
Ultimately, our voices are our tools on the battlefield of life, and for a semi-introvert like me, perfecting my voice required missed opportunities, quiet, preparatory practice and unabandoned assertiveness, because I am naturally a listener. Therefore, I had to learn how to get a word in edgewise when I realized that people were not as accommodating of me as I was of them. They would not let me speak, so I had to find ways to insert my opinion without shame, and so I learned how to value myself enough to know that what I had to say mattered, and therefore, I said it.
Safia
My absolute favourite post from last week is Feeling the Significance of Our Traumas, Big And Small by Melissa Steussy. Wow. What a powerful and vulnerable piece about trauma, addiction and searching for freedom.
Melissa pulls you into her world with descriptions that make you feel like you’re standing right beside her.
Such as with this excerpt:
I drank to rid the feelings of inferiority. I understood that hole in my soul from a young age and wondered why I was different. I wondered why God would let me live with these strangers. A mother and her boyfriends who were abusive and mean. A mother who was herself an alcoholic and when drunk could be funny or jovial or a switch would flip and she was just as mean or delirious as her partners.
I also really felt this part:
I’ve had a deep longing to feel loved and nurtured, but I also am the first one to push it away because I can’t trust it. My childhood affects my adult life on a daily basis and I am ready to be free.
Editor Picks — Favourite Posts On CRY Last Week was originally published in CRY Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Saying No: Saved by Writing
Pike’s Peak RoadIn Colorado Springs for a wedding, with three hours to kill before we could check into our hotel, my 13-year-old and I decided to drive the 19-mile highway up Pike’s Peak. At the entry gate, the guard let us know that there’s a parking lot at the 17-mile mark where we can catch shuttles to the visitor center at the very top and eat the only donuts made at a 14,0000-foot altitude. We pulled away from the visitor center and made our way up the mountain in the rental Corolla. Things went fine for about the first 15 miles.
Then, at about 12,000 feet of elevation, I took a hairpin turn into a steep switchback just as the last of the trees and the guardrail disappeared. There was nothing around me but sky. And a very little bit of road. But mostly sky. Lots and lots of sky. Too much sky.
My head spun for about two seconds. Vision jumped. Lungs suddenly had trouble pulling in air. Panic. I thought. Or altitude sickness too?
Either way, I was in trouble. There was no way to stop and go back down. There were no turnarounds, no shoulders to pull out on, and no room for a three-point-turn. Just sky, cliff, and road. The only way out was up.
Just breathe. I thought, focusing on air intake as I kept driving. In. Out. In. Out.
I found if I trained my eyes to look only at the double yellow line, it was easier to keep my usually-leaden foot steady on the gas pedal. We moved forward at maybe 7 miles per hour. Each glance at the sky above or next to me shot a whole new wave of panic through my body.
Focus on the road in front of you. I thought.
This is where my internal writing angels started talking to me. This is a good metaphor for writing your book, they said. Don’t think about the whole project or you’ll freeze. Just focus on one sentence, one chapter, one step forward.
I did realize how weird this was. Thinking about writing during a panic attack. But then I thought about how I would probably write about this panic attack at some point in the future. I knew I’d want to describe it through body language. So, I noted the feeling of the fabric seat when my shaking leg pressed into it and away and into it again, the smooth solid steering wheel inside the grip that kept my hands from shaking, the sweat on my palms that left me fearful the wheel would slip through their grasp but not so afraid that I was willing to let go and wipe them off, and the way each breath felt like a conscious effort. Noting sensory details became a form of meditation.
These unbidden writerly thoughts did not send my panic away, but they kept it from completely consuming me. I continued driving through hairpin turn after hairpin turn up switchback after switchback. It felt like the road would go on forever, but then I saw the 16-mile marker and things started to flatten out. After only two or three more turns, I pulled into a space in the parking lot where my 13-year-old and I could catch the shuttle to the visitor center.
I sat in my car breathing and trying not to look at the faraway horizon in front of me. I imagined an ending to this story where we took the shuttle to the top of the mountain, ate one of the famed high-altitude donuts, and snapped a celebratory selfie. After all, I suffered this much to get here, shouldn’t I keep going for the payoff?
But as I sat, I also thought about a tidbit I read earlier that afternoon. In 1806, Thomas Jefferson sent Zebulon Pike with a crew of 20 soldiers to explore what is now Colorado and the southwest. When the expedition formed a camp at modern-day Pueblo, Pike spied the mountain that his Ute hosts called Tava — the very mountain I’m now sitting on. Pike made plans for his expedition to ascend Tava in hopes of mapping all the surrounding mountains and valleys.
The expedition began their ascent from Pueblo in November 1806. The team had limited winter gear and limited mountaineering experience. Their heroic attempt stopped at Mt. Rosa, about 60 miles from Pike’s Peak, after they’d gone hungry for 2 days. They didn’t want to die.
Despite his retreat, Zebulon Pike still got the mountain named after him.
I also thought of more recent examples of people making brave retreats: Simone Biles choosing not to compete in the Olympics; Naomi Osaka refusing to give press conferences at the US Open; Harry and Megan deciding not to continue in their jobs as part of the Royal Family. Every one of them cited mental health as a priority in making these decisions. Every one of them is still viewed as powerful.
I decided to follow in these champions’ footsteps. I chose safety. I said no to a possible story ending where I tried to get on that shuttle and the combination of panic and altitude sickness left me vomiting and too dizzy to drive down the mountain. It helped that my 13-year-old didn’t want to take this risk either. So, I took a deep breath, turned the key to restart the Corolla, pulled back out onto the road, and started my descent.
Saying No: Saved by Writing was originally published in CRY Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Sorry, We’re Not Adding Any More New Writers
Hey CRYers, we’re excited that so many of you want to contribute to CRY. It’s literally what we dreamt of when we started this publication. Right now, though, we need to take a pause on accepting new writers.
If you’re currently a writer for CRY, you can submit as usual. But it’s already difficult enough keeping up with the daily submissions as is. Adding new writers is making it impossible.
We’ll still be publishing new stories daily and putting out prompts every Monday. That’s not changing and we don’t see that changing for the foreseeable future. All we’re doing is putting a pause on new writers.
Thanks and we hope you understand.
Sorry, We’re Not Adding Any More New Writers was originally published in CRY Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
October 13, 2021
As We Cross Jupiter’s Night
Photo by USGS on UnsplashLast night, I went out into the street to take a moment from my life, and I looked up to Jupiter. After a while I began to sonder. I imagined that I was just a fragment of reflection on a shining dot that passed over Jupiter’s sky.
I wondered if Jupiter, with its great red eye, had ever stopped to consider that dot. Or, if the dot just passed anonymously across its night sky, lost in the matrix of stars.
Jupiter has passed nightly across the lives of all that have lived here on Earth. All confined to this dot in the sky. Lives passing in and out of existence, confined as minutiae with no consequence to the Universe, yet gravely and ironically consequential to each other.
Standing there in the hot bitumen night, feeling my confinement to Earth amongst the vastness, I asked Jupiter, what is the point of this suffering life? What is the point of our social loneliness? Why do we pine away and work to death? Why do we aspire to titles and accolades that achieve nothing in the end but to ensure our absence? Why do we care for our extinction if we won’t be there to see it?
Why, Jupiter, do we do all we can to stop living, when we have an opportunity to live briefly upon this shining dot in your sky? Is there meaning amongst this meaninglessness?
And it occurs to me, we have life within us. We are life. I am a cell as much as I am a man, living briefly so that the great meta-organism can live an eternity.
There is no point other than to be alive, to feel alive, and to sustain life. We created the meaninglessness. The money. The jobs. The status. The worries.
It is love that drives us. Makes us feel and makes us sustain. Love is all there is. Everything else is pointless.
So, what of our cyclic journey across Jupiter’s night? Confined to a dot. Meaningless or not, I choose to feel alive; therefore, I am in love.
Lest I am just breathing.
If this musing made you feel alive or despondent, either way, then please clap it, follow my page, and subscribe below. Get unlimited access to my brain and that of every other Medium creator by signing up here today. Your small membership fee unlocks the expanse of Medium and supports me, and all other writers on here, to create the articles that you want to read. I did, no regrets.
This musing is dedicated to Rebecca Leigh, who requested for me to write on if love was all there is.
As We Cross Jupiter’s Night was originally published in CRY Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
