Dear Enya and Dear Sinead

by Abe Louise Young

Dear Enya,

I read that you live in Ireland all by yourself, in a castle, with a dog, that you like it because of extreme quiet — is it true? Did you decide —

(Google what Lamotrigine does to a fetus, then come back) —

did you decide not to bring not to bring
another life
into this world?

Or did something else decide
for you, like medication you had to take, or never
finding a perfect partner?

Dear Enya, my Mom played your CD almost every day in our kitchen. Your music filled the air as she cooked, a kind of pre-dinner ritual to beg the goddess that my father wouldn’t turn over the table.

Dear Enya, I am slightly defective regarding music because I binge and purge. I’ll keep one CD playing in my car for months (or, to be honest, years). Listen to it unceasingly.

Dear Enya, as I’m writing to you now, I’m playing Orinoco Flow, and tears are falling.

Solitary female voice. Dear Enya, I grew up in New Orleans where there is music absolutely everywhere, but it is live music, people sitting on stools on the street.

An aubade is a poem played at dawn as you sneak out of a lover’s house, but I think of your songs as aubades because my mother would hit “Play” on the CD player at dawn when the fights were done and my father went up to sleep. Your album was the bookends. My mother’s way of asserting ethereal clean-up control. She couldn’t make anything stop or go but she could add your voice and harps on the margins.

I thought CDs were sacred because you could only touch them on the edges. Tapes you could throw around, toss in a bag, find underneath the car seat or in the street. Use your pencil to rewind the long loop of black plastic ribbon, the tape eager to turn over on itself, to lick its own limbs, to curl then surrender to the slow turns of teethed gears.

CDs were special, they had to be kept in a jewel box and not touched, a fingerprint could degrade them. Invisible scratches harmed the music. Similar to a woman when she’s not allowed car keys or a checkbook. Not allowed to leave the house.

Dear Sinéad O’Connor,

I want you to know that when I was in 8th grade, after tripping on LSD at McMain Magnet in New Orleans, I woke up in the house of a boy I didn’t know and asked if he had any scissors.

His parents weren’t home, and he didn’t know where scissors were, but there were hedge clippers in the backyard shed. I took those to my hair. I could see your face in my mind. I could hear the piercing gut-range of your yell. Nothing Compares 2U.

Sinéad, you used 2U before people even had cell phones. You laid on the gravestone of an apple tree.

Cutting off all my hair then shaving my head caused an instantaneous transformation: men no longer yelled crude things at me on the street. I got powerful. I wore a thin gold lamé zip-up hoodie. I wore combat boots and a white dress, like you.

It’s been seven hours and fifteen days / since you took your love away

Dear Sinéad O’Connor, I have been following your recent breakdowns on social media and I’m Sorry. I read that you were diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and when you got Lamotrigine, it felt like the gigantic pothole in the center of the road that you fell into every single time you tried to go somewhere got filled in with cement, paved over and smoothed. Then you realized, for the first time, what it feels like to be a person who can simply walk on a road.

Sinéad, I loved when you posted that on Facebook. I felt the same way when I took Lamotrigine. I went from lying in bed unable to swallow anything that wasn’t a liquid for almost two months, unable to say anything that wasn’t first a sob, or to dress myself or answer a phone. I wanted someone to drive me to Wal-Mart so I could buy a gun and bullets. Everyone said no and I cursed them. My lover in another city ordered hot vegan lasagna for me, delivered. I asked her to stay on the phone with me while I wept.

My mother came to do a ritual with me. We thought maybe her mother was attacking me from the spirit world, draining my life force, riding my body. She yelled, “Wally, get off of my daughter! Leave! You are not welcome here! Unhand my daughter!” and I cried because she loved me.

When my lover came back, she took me to a psychiatrist. I got a prescription for Lamotrigine.

Sinéad, my hole was paved over three days later. I popped out of bed, ready for a haircut, I put on bright primary colored eyeshadow, ate pancakes. My list of people to thank was at least three feet long.

Sinéad, I hear that you’ve had or adopted four children. Is it true?
Will Enya who is childless come look after you?

Dear Enya, on the album cover, you are very Celtic. You, a craggy cliff of woven, flowing garments. A woman without a husband or children. The thunderheads are your husband. The moon is your vibrator. We are your children.

Sinéad, you made poor white girls feel Celtic. I knew I could hate the Pope, wear combat boots and refuse to buy dream catchers or condoms at the gas station. You gave me permission to be sad and not die.

Thank you.