Warren B. Davis
“ Glory of the Dance “
.*.
Perhaps it victimizes me to admit that I am expertly betrayed. Easily taken advantage of. I am not a martyr. I am The Devil’s Professional Advocate. I will put myself in your shoes till my flesh melts with the soles. And in these trappings not made for me, my clumsy and stumbling gait walks me into gaping pits of disillusion. Bear traps set in a forest by those who know I will stop to admire the leaves and search for beetles on their backs who need rescuing. I suppose that I owe my survival to a magic trick I learned (earned?) when I was young:
“Leave your body, and go somewhere else.”
I became such a skilled dis-associator that I split in two. Peel myself straight down the middle like the plastic backing of a bandaid. Astral project into a timeline where I haven’t made whatever grave error in character judgement has landed me in my terrible predicament. I have been asked 100 times what the difference is between Halsey and Ashley and I have never answered honestly. The truth is that I built her, as a child, to protect the tender core that lies beneath. In a confusing chain of events, my maladaptive daydream became my full time reality. My armor can walk and talk and they look just like me. But you can’t hurt us anymore,
Because one of us is not real.
We’re lying in the sun, getting pleasantly sloshed, when Halsey confesses that she’s read a story I wrote for Rolling Stone in April, about Planned Parenthood and a miscarriage I had. “I felt like I was suffocating reading that article,” she says. “Like someone put a shopping bag over my head. I didn’t want to meet you at all. I was really terrified of you, because I knew as soon as I saw you, I was going to need to tell you that last year on tour I got pregnant.” Then, at a breathless pace, she’s describing being in a hotel room in Chicago before Badlands even came out, back when her whole career could have easily been ruined (“What happens? Do I lose my record deal? Do I lose everything? Or do I keep [the pregnancy]? What are the fans going to think? What are the moms going to think? What is the Midwest going to think? What’s fucking everyone going to think?”), and before she can even decide what to do, she’s screaming on a hotel bed, bloody, naked from the waist down, hours before she’s to go onstage. “I’m like, ‘I have to cancel this show!’ And everyone’s kind of like, ‘Well, it’s Vevo LIFT, and it’s 3 million impressions, so …’ No one knew what to do.” Eventually, Halsey sent her assistant to the drugstore to buy adult diapers. She put one on, took two Percocet and went to the venue to do her job. “It’s the angriest performance that I’ve ever done in my life,” she says, her voice breaking. “That was the moment of my life where I thought to myself, ‘I don’t feel like a fucking human being anymore.’ This thing, this music, Halsey, whatever it is that I’m doing, took precedence and priority over every decision that I made regarding this entire situation from the moment I found out until the moment it went wrong. I walked offstage and went into the parking lot and just started throwing up.”
Halsey says she isn’t sure why she had a miscarriage, but it’s easy for her to blame herself. “I beat myself up for it,” she tells me, “because I think that the reason it happened is just the lifestyle I was living. I wasn’t drinking. I wasn’t doing drugs. I was fucking overworked – in the hospital every couple of weeks because I was dehydrated, needing bags of IVs brought to my greenroom. I was anemic, I was fainting. My body just broke the fuck down.” The part that bothers her most is that, as insane as it was to play that concert, no one forced her to do it. “I had a choice,” she says, though she did the thing that made her feel like she didn’t. She looks off toward the fields where children play in the distance. “I want to be a mom more than I want to be a pop star. More than I want to be anything in the world.” Later, she says, “I’m really scared of being alone.” We sit on the blanket, clutching our drinks. “I’m not trying to upset you,” she says softly. “I’m really sorry.” - Rolling Stone Magazine
Introduction, I Would Leave Me If I Could: A Collection of Poetry, Halsey
IF I CAN’T HAVE LOVE, I WANT POWER. — costume design by law roach.
i sleep with one eye open and one eye closed,
‘cause i’ll hang myself if you give me a rope.
