*Trigger alert my darlings. I was so wrapped up in my own emotional experience of this powerful piece, that I almost forgot to include this, but please proceed with whatever self-care you need, okay?
First, you have to watch this. Remove yourself from any distractions and really watch this video. It’s the Sia video for ‘Elastic Heart’ featuring Maddie Ziegler and Shia LaBeouf. If you’ve already seen it, and can watch it again, please indulge me.
Are you back? Great. Now I can tell you that at the exact moment this landed in my lap, at the exact time the Universe decided to hand me this little gem, I was alone, in a familiar bed that was not my own. The video extracted the slow, hot, fat tears that brim up and then roll down one’s cheeks with unapologetic abandon. The kind of tears you can’t hold back because you don’t even know they are there until they are staining your shirt. Or a pillowcase that isn’t your own.
When you are standing on these cataclysmic precipices, life is cast in a strange filter. Everything starts to feel like a movie that you’ve been cast in, and you’re standing in the wings waiting for your cue. You are in it, but you aren’t really in it yet.
Here’s what amazed me most about this video; I was so locked in the intimately familiar dance of this prepubescent girl and the comfortable monster she has grown to hold as close to her as her own heart, I couldn’t even tell you a single lyric to the song the video is attached to. I know the artist is Sia, who I have decided has a secret window into the angsty teenager who lives in my brain, but beyond that, I have no idea.
Shia LaBeouf makes me feel things. Dark, complex, beautiful and terrifying things. Not just in this video, but in interviews, articles, appearances on Jimmy Kimmel. He’s intensely attractive to me as an archetype. I’m fairly certain he represents the tortured, tormented male figure who I want to save. I always thought the narrative was that I want to help him before he hurts someone, but I think I’m realizing that the real story goes like this; I want to help him before he hurts me.
The end of the video haunts me. I can’t shake it. I can’t stop thinking about it. If she lets him go, what will she be? What will happen to her? More painfully, ironically, what will happen to him? To think of the monster as feeling, and hurting in his own right, well…that’s just…
It’s only Tuesday, the peppermint tea feels like it needs gin to snuggle with, and this is another beginning.