Indiana as a concept
Written by Noel Martin
Personal Essay
I wish I could say I was on the great American frontier.
When attempting to believe in the Midwest, my rolling impressions return to teenagers leaving school. They dotted every “i” and primed their oddities for afternoon activities; socially neglected kids dumping their reusable (totally ethical and totally cool) water bottles in music rooms or auditoriums. I had a friend who would sling one strap of his bag over his shoulder and disappear into the chaotic intersection of the football field and the McDonald’s across the street, slumping into a drug deal. My youth culture spilled out escapists who would go home to their abusive fathers and withdrawn mothers. Coal miners, factory workers, pedophiles, Christians, Republicans, meth addicts, and some middle-class families stuck between boring and in denial—my birthplace was a debaucherous carnival.
I smoked in the driveway of my red-brick ranch home, attempting to make homecoming an elaborate rebellion, desperate for a listening ear. Leaves scraped the snow, and it turned out to be the only thing I heard, as I quickly put together Christmas lights on small, uniform trees to mock my shakiness. In every one of my regressions, there’s a progression to simplicity. Not necessarily an appreciation for it, but rather a moment of focused observation; another thing to obsess over. In New York, I was absent from backyard cornfields, my very own pile of GMOs, where I’d drain my stories. I used to flash my body amidst paper-like stalks, inviting the breeze to press against my skin without pain. Rejecting the human hand and joining the elements, polluted air never felt so neatly benevolent.
As I sat in the driver’s seat of my old black Jeep, I started regressing further and further back. To when I was 17 and first drove this car, and further back until I was 9, when the crossroads of America waved as my paddling beacon of identity.
There was once a gas station on my country road called Love. Every routine pump of the week, all there was for me to draw from the dry farmland diesel scapes were poorly dyed hair, animal tattoos, or some man’s initials, a slight angle of a pale neck, a rich look, a poor look, leggings or daddy’s denim, nicotine fiends, and twanged small-town chic. It exhausted and exhilarated me to find evenly stamped women all aware of what they were and what they would become. I knew from my pink bedroom walls and dirt under my nails, virgin sandy hair, that I had an unsteady slate too plain for my sake. I could choose to slither between faith and nuclear families, family men and their untaught boys, or leave before it trickled too closely into my veins.
To waste time, I often thought of myself as a completely impossible person in various settings. My grandparents lived in Florida, and I would place my restless hands there, under the sun, completely burning and beguiling me. We would go to flea markets and see gun stands. Guns in Florida felt more like running tap water than in Indiana, where they were special to the hicks. I could float over the South like a woman from Love, but not quite emptying my secrets anywhere else but the Gulf, like turquoise razor-thin confessions pulling me out to the elements.
But in Florida, they talked about the devil just as they did in Indiana. They frightened young women into picking the right face to put on when caught in disagreeability, like when I would spree naked through cornfields alone. Even in my spun confusion into alternate paradises, I found nothing more than controlled doses in twilight zones.
In the progression back into my 21 year old winter homecoming, a bittersweet reckoning—a return not to my frostbite worn jeep, but to letting my old body and wanderlust wither away into the tobacco wind, refracted through the prism of escape. Each greeting back and goodbye again chisels away at the sculpted identity handed to me from my generational neurosis, living on blanched soil and cooling our vacational coils in the panhandle coast. I am a woman of Love and a woman of leaving, over and over again, until I have unraveled every metamorphosis coming to me with open mouths and sharp teeth.
About the Author
Noel Martin is a writer and poet from Indiana. In 2021 at 18 years old, she moved to New York City to study acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute. In her first only semester there, Martin was hand selected to be in a rendition of the play Bent by Martin Sherman. This is her debut poetry collection. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
In 2024 Noel Martin, alongside friend Elena Redmond, founded Bimbo Rhetoric, a Publishing House and Book Club. Bimbo Rhetoric published Martin’s debut poetry collection in August of 2024. Martin is currently in development with Bimbo Rhetoric on her second book, a work of fiction.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryan_noel18/
