Lana by Tara Giancaspro

I am not a Lana Girlie. I have never fucked a cop. I have never seen her live and don’t feel a need to. She knows why. I have never sampled coke or gotten one of those surgical douches that makes your vagina taste like Cherry Coke Zero. I have been to Venices Italy and Beach but would not classify myself to be as intimate with these locales as to call myself their bitch. I am not a featured performer on the Great Gatsby soundtrack. I could go on. 
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But. I saw this tweet and thought I’d tell you all why I put on rings engraved with a Lana lyric every time I leave the house.

In 2018, I left a seven-month relationship that decimated me. Seven months doesn’t seem like much. We didn’t hit every holiday. We weren’t together for either of our birthdays. But there was time entwined before and after, and I took tearstreaked leave four times before it stuck, and I was threatened, and made less of, was told I was irresistible for a mind and a spark and a brightness that was maligned and made gauzy and dim. And nearly snuffed out entirely. 

It all felt wrong. It felt wrong. It was wrong. It was so very wrong. It was not love, what I was living. It was not love, what I was being given: a fire scorching my palms, not passion. My throat being slit, a garroting, not an embrace from behind, not a spooning sway. It was not love, what I had to give back: CVS receipts with the prices for “but” and “you said” and “on this date” and “that’s not true” and “it’s okay,” which I eventually started shopping for at Costco, where you could save fifty cents on every mollification if you bought six cases. 

It was not who I was, who I had to become to love him, to protect him, and to best him in a chess match with my sanity nestled at the bottom of a gold trophy cup. 

I won. 

Of course I won. 

Lana helped.

I want to include some of the lyrics below because I believe you all can quite easily understand how such an anthem, a “modern manifesto” as Lana calls it, would be a clarion call to safety for someone in and then leaving a toxic relationship with a middle-aged man (of course) whose patterns, proclivities, nigh-kinks involved invalidating my reality. 

This is my commitment, my modern manifesto 
I'm doing it for all of us who never got the chance 
For, and for 
And all my birds of paradise 
Who never got to fly at night 
'Cause they were caught up in the dance 

Sometimes it feels like I've got a war in my mind 
I wanna get off, but I keep riding the ride 
I never really noticed that I had to decide 
To play someone's game, or live my own life 
And now I do 
I wanna move 
Out of the black (out of the black) 
Into the blue (into the blue) 

Finally 
Gone is the burden of the Crowley way of being 
That comes from energies combined 
Like my part was I 
Was not discerning 
And you, as we found out 
Were not in your right mind 

There's no more chasing rainbows and hoping for an end to them 
Their arches are illusions, solid at first glance 
But then you try to touch them 
There's nothing to hold on to 
The colors used to lure you in 
And put you in a trance 

When I left this person, the single oil slick-colored thread tying my soul to my insides decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to get a tattoo to commemorate the Houdini heist of my own body and essence. Thank goodness. The cognitive dissonance was still so heady for the months after I left, and I felt that not only would I never move on - spiritually, to a better life, a happy relationship, a happiness within myself - but also that I would never be able to let him go from my heart despite the damage he did. No Lifetime movie ever takes the time to describe how it is, likely more than money or “confidence", cognitive dissonance that keeps you in an abusive situation. Looking back, a tattoo would have kept this man’s memory and his touch on my skin, something I couldn’t take off every night. There are some days that go by where I do not remember him at all. Some. Not many. But some. I’m proud of that choice, to allow myself the grace of forgetting. 

Instead, I called upon a mantra from Lana that made my heart soar each time I listened: “Out of the black! Into the blue!” I had these lines inscribed on rings by one of my favorite jewelers in the cursive I never shook and that my childhood best friend Chelsea says hasn’t changed since the third grade. This, too, felt important and I am so glad I honored myself by putting my heart and my intentions in my own hand, and they are wrapped around my right ring finger every morning before vaulting off into the world. I rarely feel their weight anymore, in symbolistic ounces or grams, but my hand feels less like mine without them. I feel less mine without them. 

I find frequent irony in this lyric’s resonance within my soul and its accompaniment to my every outfit. I wear black, all the time. My eyeliner is black, my Lambo’s blue. I wear black more than any other color. If I own an orange or red or blue shirt, I also own it in black. My email receipts for bra orders contain colors like “onyx,” “eightball,” “like my soul." 

But I knew what Lana meant. Thanks, girl.

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Tara Giancaspro (she) is the creator of xoxo Gossip Giancaspro, a weekly Substack including personal essays, pop culture commentary, and the various and sundry of her silly little life. She has released music under the name Sweaty Lamarr, available to stream everywhere, including "Abbey, I'm Sorry I Stole Your Man," a Jolene sequel from Jolene's perspective. She has been published in Wig-Wag Mag and Drunk Monkeys Literary, is a Cancer sun, and got bit by a dolphin once - establishing a potentially generational blood feud. Giancaspro can be found on Instagram and Twitter at @SweatyLamarr. She is based in New Jersey, if you couldn't tell by the hair.

taragiancaspro.substack.com