Fully Realized Project
Solo-r Power: A Playground for Me, Myself, and I
(With the Help of Lorde and Her Best Album)
Acknowledgments
To all the people who find themselves more jaded than they thought, on witnessing unadulterated pieces of their past selves, to my inner child and younger self, and of course, the Lorde fans, and maybe even future me… this one's for you
Welcome!
It was September 11, 2022 when I sent an email to Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor, otherwise known as grammy-at-16-extraordinaire, New Zealander Lorde, who had taken the world by storm so young. It was my first week of college, and I had read about the expanding universe, and texts like “Permanent Negative Value,” and “The Uninhabitable Earth,” that week. I had just turned eighteen, and spent my first birthday away from home with a bundle of balloons and flowers on my windowsill (courtesy of my mom, whose love language was extravagant embarrassment, and who didn’t want me to feel forgotten on my first day in the world). Lorde’s third studio album, Solar Power, had been released around three weeks before, on the day I flew to Michigan to move across the country and live on my own for the first time.
While fans across the board despaired in their disappointment over Solar Power not being what they needed in their latest depressive episode, the album felt like a breath of fresh air and streak of sunlight in this period of navigating the waist-deep, inky thick waters. It was, as it’s named – that forgetful wink of warmth, the instant relief that melts and spreads over your skin, oh, here it comes – the sun.
Turn it on in a new kind of bright
It's solar (solar, solar, solar)
Come on and let the bliss begin
Blink three times when you feel it kicking in
That time is so distinct, and this email, accompanied by the album – that carries an untarnished, pure memory of the distinctive ‘feeling,’ or a picture of the times that music was our anthem, what we walked through life to – is the key, a gold-spun disk that slots right into the video player. How often do I get a chance to immerse myself in the past? I was more nostalgic back when I had time to be (probably reminiscing my peak-easy middle school years as I was in the thick of starting over) – but I realize that I go through cycles of these moods, like heat building up, getting trapped within a hot car in the afternoon, and all gets fuzzy – blurring dream and awake, haze and real. As described of the book Swimming Towards the Sun, in the thick of the fog, I’m prone to “explore the relationship between real and imaginative landscape as she bears witness to her place and time.” I may not be there now, but the past is all said and done, and it did all exist, even if it's hard to imagine its place in the here and now. Here, in this email, is a time machine directly into the mind of a-year-ago-me.
So I decided, why not? Hop in, buckle up. Press play!
Play in the Dark (blackout poetry)
A Sisterly Grumble
(I forget she keeps growing with me, as does the rest of the world)
A
Self-
Reminder
​
Play in the Dark (blackout poetry)
An Ode to the Cool Dark AM:
​
Sprint Around the Sun –
It
Will
Never
Catch
Me
Freshman
Year
in a
Nutshell
A Hi and Farewell
To the Ally Who Wrote to Lorde
​
01/05/2023 From Ann Arbor – the Quarantine Cram Circle)
How to write a letter to oneself… and to the one who won’t ever get to read said letter? I guess that takes the pressure off of me, since this thing won’t ever make it into the recipient’s hands. There’s something so tragic about an unread letter, one that never made it to the other side. So maybe this already feels somewhat silly.
But anyways, I hope you enjoyed my attempt at conversing with you. Even if right now, it’s one-sided. You’re a thing of the past, so I can’t await your response. But that’s okay; I’ll imagine what you might’ve annotated yourself, how you might’ve loved the rub of a thick black marker over old writing, how you would have marveled at all the transparent stickers I plopped into this webpage (faaancy). The annotations, we’ve been doing, since we love to react (I remember my Youtube timeline back in the day was a plethora of reaction videos. (And I loved reacting to those reactions.)) But I’ve never allowed myself to make contact – breach that gap onto the page – with my own writing. I reread things aplenty, and often get the juice from my old journals, but I never write out my reactions, dare touch those margins. Because it’s a sacred thing, to see something left as it was, capsuled. As I said before, untarnished.
I think you would like that I included the blackout, graffitiing the thing, even though it was your words that I was chopping and erasing, reusing. As a person who steals words (copy, paste, copy, paste) I’d imagine you’re more yay than nay for it. You know I’m not a poet. So it was something new. But enough about what I think you’d be thinking.
Perhaps you’re waiting for me to drop some wisdom, or get to the managing life in the moment kind of stuff. But I don’t think those things matter much, at least not in this letter. You’ll see soon enough. I’ll say one thing: You will see Lorde, at St. Andrew’s Hall in Detroit the same week you fly to Vegas to see BTS (the week before finals). You will get very sick afterwards (accidentally drank out of the girl next to me’s water bottle). You’ll be so far back in the nosebleeds that you’ll mistake her guitarist for her during the opener. You’ll sing along to the non-Solar Power songs too, but will fake most of the lyrics. And yet, your inability to shut up will still clog every single concert video.
It’s weird to write a letter by typing… feels more like an email, like the way I wrote one to Lorde. I can feel Miss MacBook Air overheating through the keyboard, and she’s really not living up to her name. The nature of annotations is funny – it seems one-sided, like pitching a story into the void for no one to hear. But it’s like you, younger me, actually started the conversation by writing that letter, and these annotations are now my
response to you. Now the nature of letters… Maybe back then, I wanted to talk to musicians who shape our lives, but now, I just wanna talk to you, even if this time, it really will be left one-sided.
You might wonder why I’m so invested in this singular email, that I spent a whole semester responding to it. Per Lorde’s email edition, the one that I replied to: “Putting out records is wiiild. Total rebirth for you as well as me, I’m realizing! I wanna say thank you again, for caring so deeply about what I write down when I’m alone. I know this is different to what’s come before, something new from me. You deserve nothing less. It’s my honest belief that if you felt like you totally understood what I’d made instantly, I may not have done my job very well… But however you engage with what I make, I’m grateful.” Instead of asking that question, I think you should take Ella’s words and let them sink in as your own. I think that’s just what writers, creators, and artists do to people – make them care. Especially about things that don’t seem to warrant as deep a caring for. So soak up the validation; there must be something you’re doing right for me to care this much (though of course, I’m biased).
When I think of the time around when I wrote to Lorde, I think of dancing to Solar Power in the dorm’s basement studio, of hammocking around campus for hours at a time, of walking slowly and stopping to the side every few minutes to write something down. I was so connected with myself, free to spend a lot of time alone, and that nourished my
soul as an introvert. I can't say the same as much these days. Now it's becoming summer (my favorite season), but it’s seared with the knowledge that things won't look the same. So many important people are leaving and the amount of times I see them in a week might become that of a year, or years. So that’s made me savor every second I had this last month. With those people, but not myself.
Being alone brings the kinds of thoughts and time and silence to have inside jokes (... with myself). Here is a prime example of what being alone should look like: laying upside down on my bed, looking at the sunset out the window and singing the children’s song, ‘Oh mister sun, sun, mister golden sun,’ which suddenly pops into my mind as the blood flows to my head. I laugh at the thoughts that can be unlocked, the thoughts I haven’t thought in years. And there is not a modicum of energy spent scrambling and overthinking and 눈치ing (reading other people). Hanging out with you, my past self, is different in that I don’t have these worries. But it still feels like company. Like another person is here, in this room with me. Because I see your thoughts so plainly put down – I can tell that I was in an introvert stage here, because I was so deeply immersed in my passions, more than connected with people. It feels like I always have to give up one for the other… and just the fact that I wrote this and edited it and sharpened it for Lorde on my own accord speaks volumes to where I was. I sat down to write a poem the other day for the first time in ages (I’ve probably written less poems than I could
count on my hands) but as I got into it, maybe down to line ten or so, in the trenches of solitude, I felt this sense of rightness with the world and with myself, that this was what I was supposed to be doing. I get the feeling that I was in that state a lot back then when I wrote the original letter. All those all-nighters to make dents in drafts – I truly was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed – she is rubbing off on me, that passion I once had, trickling back into the now. So I wanna thank you, and tell you to cherish! Your! Alone time!!! Someone recently said that it’s because of that time to connect with themself, that they’re able to connect with everyone else more fully. I’m here in an apartment all to myself, for the first time in months, and I literally had to catch COVID for that to happen. (Let’s work on not hopping straight from one state to the other…) But with balance. Don’t think you’re tied down to being a homebody at home, but social at school. You can always bring a little of each place to the other. You were once able to do jumps and back walkovers on the beam, so I know you know how to. Let the muscle memory return.
I hope you don’t take those times for granted, and let yourself also relish and recharge in them without guilt. And also without too much loneliness. Because when you’re alone, you’re often not. See even now. If you ever do feel alone, know I’m smiling at you from years later.
I’ll leave you with a few Solar Power lyrics:
Baby [girl], you're super cool
I know you're scared, so was I
But all will be revealed in time (Time, time)
'Cause I got this power
I just had to breathe (Breathe out, breathe out, breathe out, breathe out)
And tune in (Tune in, tune in, tune in, tune in)
If I had to break it down
I'd say it's the way you love to dance
We've been through so many hard times
I'm writing a love song
For you, baby
… Your dreams and inner visions,
all your mystical ambitions
They won't let you down
Do your best to trust all the rays of light
The temperature is unbearable until you face it
When we've reached your final destination
I will leave you to it
You'll be fine
I'm just gonna show you in
And you can stay as long as you need
To get familiar with the feeling
And then when you're ready, I'll be outside
And we can go look at the sunrise
By euphoria mixed with existential vertigo?
Cool
Burning with love for you, (and not just from my fever)
Ally <3
