i’ve had guests for the past few days, friends of Side B from home, total islanders. i was a little awkward about the idea, but my parents have raised us in this way: someone needs a place to stay? they stay with you. (it also goes: someone needs food? you feed them. someone needs your help? you help them. etc.) when i say they’re islanders, i mean they are laid back in the way city people are not. we have shared childhoods even if we weren’t friends as kids- at some point, all of us went swimming at the falls and danced in a crowd at music fest and ate huge, sugary doughnuts from aucterlonies and spent most summers on the logging roads heading to “secret” swimming places or working up the mountain. it’s the shared experience of being from the valley, of growing up in the valley (which is divided into a village, a “city” [by jurisdictional name more than physical cityness], and a town- most of us lived in the village or the “city” . if you were wealthier, you lived in the town. they are all about 15 minutes from one another, though as the “city” expands the gap narrows.)
it was good to have some people from home staying with me. many british columbians (and by this i mean the people who have poplated the cities and towns, not the first nations to whom the land belongs) are fairly notorious for being hippies. i don’t really know why, but in “canada” the west coast is considered more laid-back, hippiesque, new agey. when i say i’m from b.c. people take that as an explanation for the fact that i don’t dress conservatively, that my politics are far-left, that i pronounce vancouver as vanquever. they also assume that i smoke copious amounts of pot, which i don’t anymore. in fact, i smoked my first joint in halifax with the weasel, nervously rolling it on our collapsing couch that we’d dumpstered earlier that day (which turned out to be full of fleas.) i did spend a lot of the following year being a fairly regular smoker, but i stopped when i moved home, except for the occasional toke with my friends. i have no desire to be a stoner, i am much much too fired up to be so relaxed and laid back. anyway, these islanders brought pot with them and i had a couple of tokes, maybe more out of nervousness at being around people after locking myself in the apartment for a week. then i went to bed.
i woke up at 2 am to loud, metallic crashes. in my haze of sleep and leftover high, i assumed the noise was coming from outside. zombies! screamed the irrational part of my brain.
kids knocking over trash cans. explained the rational part, and we closed our eyes again because we were tired and sleep was good.
CRASH.
i sat up in bed. inside my apartment. inside! there was crashing *inside* my apartment. shitshitshit. i stood up and looked around for my underwear, pulled them on, found a t-shirt and some cut-offs, pulled them on. found a swiss army knife and opened the tiny blade against my hip, then sllllowly opened the door to my room and squinted down the hallway, which is never fully dark because of light pollution. the hallway is fairly long and i couldn’t see into the kitchen, just the muted grey-dark shapes of boots and runners, my jackets slumping against the wall like legless drunks. potato, my cat, was stretched out in her spot on the floor between the two bedrooms, where she sleeps until she decides it is time for me to wake up. she didn’t look wary or alert.
why aren’t you a dog? i thought.
why aren’t you? she blinked back. good point.
i slid past her, one arm over my chest and one arm stiff by my side, thinking quiet, quiet.
the living room opens into the kitchen, and both were empty. off the kitchen is the back porch, with a fusili-pasta shaped fire escape twisting into a backyard, which belongs to the family below us and is chained closed. then i looked down- pots and pans all over the floor. one of Side B’s clay figures smashed to pieces. one empty christmas-tin (part of Side B’s present from mum) had ended what i can only assume was an amazing twirl leaning against the stove.
someone broke in and wrecked my shelf! my irrational brain thought, scanning the wall where the shelf had come unbolted on one side. my arm moved stiffly from my side, brandishing the impotent knockoff-from-the-dollar-store-swiss-army-knife-blade at the empty kitchen.
wait said the rational side, catching up to us wait wait. no one broke in. the window is shut. the shelf collapsed on its own.
ohhhh said the irrational side.
and that is another reason i don’t smoke pot very often- because when i do, i mellow out until something totally normal and only slightly freaky happens. then my fear springs open as though someone has thrown their weight against it from the other side and i do stupid things, like go after imagined intruders with a knife blade that is about as long as my pinky finger and i don’t even know how to use anyway.
