the beets are staining my gums red on the one side where i chew, smears of paint on the curved canvas of my teeth. it’s something i feel more than see, the inside of my mouth pink and marked by shredded red pieces. beets always taste like earth smells to me: healthy, wet dirt. they remind me of frost melting toward roots in cold early spring and because i am in the headspace where i am able to block nothing out, home rushes at me with the first bite. so i’m stuck on the 7th floor of concordia’s hall building, eyes closed and head leaning against the wall swimming in thoughts. the people’s potato has a small line up and the poet, gui, and someone who was not introduced to me are talking but i’m not participating. lately it seems like i am just a pipe for my emotions and they run through me, unstoppable. i feel waterlogged and heavy.
i opened my sketchbook to the drawing of a leaf i started earlier in the lineup, while the poet was studying and i was trying not to cry. at home my mind is blocked and sluggish but when i go out it begins to work overtime. in crowds i feel my thoughts click into motion and take off. this morning it was overwhelming, that sudden influx of realizations while people stood around me talking or reading, busy on their computers as my body sank under the heavy immersion of my emotions.
my anxiety is overwhelming me to the point of imparing my day-to-day function. it happens sometimes. it will stop eventually, but right now i am watching what i want being swept away and i feel like it isn’t coming back.
the frozen lachine canal
in winter, the lachine canal freezes. t and i walked there yesterday through snow half-soaked by the recent thaw we’ve been having, the air thick with the deceptive january-spring that happens in montreal before it is plunged into numb, numb cold from february to april. i keep telling myself: i know what spring smells like, this does not smell like spring. spring smells thick and delicious and green. but it feels like spring: the snow piles i pass almost every day, which seem like as much a part of the streets as the concrete, are gone (though as of now, snow is falling again.) the temperature the other day was seven degrees! seven! in montreal! in winter! it is back to -18 now, as i kept telling people all week. i am the january thaw killjoy.
i have been reading a lot of blogs about st. henri and montreal recently. one of the ones i am fascinated with is called walking turcot yards and it took me a little while to realize that the turcot yards and the wasteland are one and the same. going into areas barred from the public is something i find fascinating and amazing and, in some strange way, just. i love to explore my neighbourhood, to walk down the alleys, through the streets late at night. i think cities are really only the top layer of a landscape and underneath all the buildings and concrete there are centuries of other details and stories, patches of earth, rivers even! rivers we have contained with concrete and careful planning and then abandoned like forgotten prisoners. and that makes me sad and furious, that human beings willingly choke natural water sources. it happens everywhere, but since i’ve started learning about the area where i am living, i can’t help thinking when i walk down the street: below me there is water. below me there is history.
(lately, all i want to do is make art and make plans. i have two paintings to finish, poetry to write. zines to finish. all i want to do is make delicious green food and eat it with people i care about. i want to start planning a garden, even if it is only boxes on my porch. i want to dry more herbs and learn how to make more medicinal teas and read books on ecology and permaculture and the history of montreal and colonialization. i want to make plans to visit the graves of my ancestors on manitolin island in ontario and plans to visit my home and plans to do bike-camping in the summer. i am half-overwhelmed with plans!)
truthfully, though, i feel sort of lost without a community here. this morning i was pouring coffee on top of my almond milk and the smell that resulted reminded me of my home, the small muskys coffee shops and tables selling thick coffee at the world community film festival. of the community pancake breakfasts and bean suppers, miners memorial nights, peace marches, union song circles at the lake, all the librarians knowing my name. drinking coffee with jack and muddy gum boots and the smell of the salmon run which no one except those of us who grew up with it seems to appreciate. i feel like most of the people i know here are transient and will be gone when school is over, gone when they need to leave and sometimes, that becoming part of existing communities is not only hard but unwelcome (and rightfully so, because i myself am a student and privileged and maybe transient, who knows?)
Filed under: a city called montreal, city called halifax, observations, thoughts about thoughts
at some point i became someone who is known for her baking. i am not really sure how this happened, or how my love for baking sort of came about overnight and then became something my friends know about me, or that i would have particular things requested by them.
i kind of feel like a fake, though, because while i know baking is about chemistry and measurements, i don’t do it that way. what i do is sort of follow a recipe but almost never use measuring cups or spoons and then i end up adding or substracting things until the recipe is different. mostly, i use what i have on hand- sometimes my hands themselves- and just do what feels right. (this is how i cook best as well, caught in a sort of distracted haze of smells and thoughts)
i know this is sort of antiethical to what attracts a lot of people to baking: they come for the measurements, the surety that adding x amount of flour and x amount of eggs will make x dish. i understand that in the same way that i understand- and completely disregard- the comfort of mathematics. i can see how having math is like picking through a metal scrap heap and finding two connecting pieces to form a hinged elbow joint… i just prefer to not anticipate the equation and do things my way. i am remarkably bull-headed for someone who is so bent on pleasing everyone (“your sick and disturbing desire to please” the smartest lady ever once called it, her voice a lot kinder than it comes across written down.) and my brain doesn’t work in any mathematical sense, is a jumble of short circuits and wires braided and tangled into other wires. i don’t see it as anything having to do with neatness- my brain and organization don’t even grow in the same field, let alone from the same root. i make weird connections. the irish con-man we met this spring told me he wanted to analyze my brain because of the weird connections i make between things, but i don’t think my head is anything particularly special (also: con man.) it’s just that i am so mentally disorganized that sometimes things find their way to each other randomly simply by being thrown haphazardly in the same direction. my brain is like a hallway junk closet or an attic storage space or dark basement full of old ornaments and broken chairs.
the other day i met up with t to hang out, and they started telling me about these chains they had found attached to some boards that might be super useful, that they were excited about. and i stopped them and said “by the firehall? leaning against a wall there? i wanted to take those the other day but i didn’t have my pocket knife and i couldn’t get them off!”
“those are the ones.” they said as we started walking “it’s funny because i thought: no one else is going to want these.”
which is how i feel when i find someone i can share my thoughts with, the sense of odd similarity that resonates with me when i realize someone else wants something i have that i thought no one would ever be interested in except me.
late-night winter cold
lying on a broken crate that smells like tea, stretched across the sofa we ripped apart last week to start the first fire. i’m wearing my heavy winter coat, feet in my combat boots resting on one end of the crate and knees bent, head leaning on the other end, my back supported by the last beam we’ve left inside the square of wood. it has been snowing for two days but nothing sticks, only makes everything damp and cold. if it weren’t for the two sweaters and the heavy coat, i’d feel it against my skin, wet wool sticking to my body. i’m wearing a skirt and leggings and heavy leg warmers, but only my thighs are cold as the jean skirt slips toward my waist, i pull it back, it slips down, i pull it back.
we’re watching the moon.
the poet’s backyard is right beside the turcot interchange, cars rushing above our heads unseen in a vague dream of movement, all the streetlights that blink on and off every few minutes. the whole neighbourhood is in a state of hesitation because everyone could (will) lose their homes if the construction happens. a city displacing the people in it, the cruelty of progress that doesn’t care. (not progress, then.)
the poet’s backyard is concrete breaking into mud, surrounded by a fence tangled with plant growth. an alley runs behind it, stepping between the yard and the massive feet of the interchange. part of me wants to hate concrete, but much more of me sees the animal qualities of huge structures, patient beasts we create and then lose control of. i like how defiant broken-down buildings are, monuments to old predators who used to stalk us in shadows. i think we build things to prove we’re never going to die and i like it when they crumble. everything returns slowly to its origins, the beauty of breakdown aches a little through me. but it’s easy to romanticize it from my vantage point on the couch where my back is starting to get a little damp and i’m directing my quiet monologue with a long, thin cigar bought at the dep for this evening. because this decay displaces people and it’s easy to love a threat that doesn’t effect you.
the moon has a rusty circle around it and as the clouds pass over, it seems like the sky is breaking apart and floating downstream. i think that, with a little more wild in me, i might feel like the world was disintegrating. but my common sense knows how to convert fear to wonder, so i’m lying on my back as the street lights turn off and on like delayed light-houses and cars whisper by in hidden blurs on the interchange, knowing the sky isn’t breaking apart, that soon i’m going to get up and go inside with my cold hands the only tangible impression of all the things for which i want to slice my belly open, welcome inside of me to grow.
oh my, today is the last day of november…that crept up on me.
so, at the start of the month i decided to post every day for all of november…and i only missed two days. while the perfectionist part of me (i *am* a virgo, afterall) is disappointed, the rest of me knows that i missed those days because they were times spent away from home, enjoying myself to the wee hours with no computer nearby. i relish those moments far more than i would have enjoyed doing 30 days as opposed to 28, and so i’m satisfied. november has been a really good and really weird month for me, and i’ve appreciated all of it.actually, this autumn has been incredible, and the first snowfall today kind of marked its end…winter has finally reached montréal, the semester is almost over. the thing i am starting to realize these days, however, is that my time in this city is so far from over i can’t forsee a date of departure…which is sort of scary but also incredible.
regardless, i’m going to try to keep posting regularly- at the very least, once a week but probably more.
the poet, hyena and i were sitting in this pizza/poutine place and, over the mess of fries, gravy and cheese curds, i said: “i want to have an adventure tonight.” so we headed to their place in order for the poet to change, and then followed hyena for about fifteen minutes through dark passages till we came to an abandoned building. adventure!
we had to climb down to get to it, sitting on damp earth and pushing ourselves forward with our hands into the vast, empty room littered with glass from broken windows, chunks of concrete, and spray paint cans abandoned after lengthy graffiti sessions, the evidence of which was all over every surface. hyena led us through the bottom level to a set of exposed concrete stairs and up into a huge open room where the length of one wall was pane after pane of smashed or broken glass where a soupy-yellow light from street lamps filtered through, saturating the floor with intricate shadow-patterns. we couldn’t see very well so we went slowly, feeling with the soles of our boots for rubble, weak spots in the floor, bottles lying around. as we made our way up rusty stairs to the roof the slight anxiety i had felt lifted, and we looked out over st. henri, over the lights of the neighbourhood. then i saw them.
the roof was weak in many areas so we kept ourselves six feet apart, me in the middle. all at once, i had to pause. a piece of triangle-shaped wood had fallen onto the rooftop, sinking into the muddy rubble. around its perimeter small yellow trees had sprung up hugging the rotting wood. the trees were here, nowhere else, just in this tiny, perfect pyramid of miraculous-yellow. the poet and hyena went ahead and i knelt down beside the trees, boots squishing in the thin layer of nurtuing decomposition. i touched the yellow leaves, running my finger along the stems, saying “hello, hello, hello” to each little beauty, feeling myself start to cry. i can’t explain how much those trees meant to me, how desperatly happy they made me feel, how they moved something terrible and wonderful inside my chest. but these trees made my night with their fragile, increidble ability. even thinking about them now, i can’t help it, i start to hurt.
like i told the poet later, i could see myself falling in love with someone who understood those trees, that emotion…this is the kind of person i want to love, someone who would understand that crying over tiny yellow trees wasn’t foolish or odd, just a natural reaction to such overwhelming, intense beauty.
walking home, alone, through the sketchy part of st. hen. pull my roommate’s borrowed page-boy cap down, tuck my hair up inside of it, hood over face. useless swiss-army knife in my pocket only sort-of reassuring. hunching my shoulders forward hoping to hide the telltale signs of curves that even a bulky jacket can’t and painfully, ridiculously aware that i am wearing a bright-pink leopard-print bra and tight black shirt under my old flannel and jacket, making my desire to appear as male as possible somewhat impossible, at least as far as attitude goes. i just don’t want to be messed with, but i feel like a girl and because of this, vulnerable and at risk- who cares that i have just won four arm-wrestling matches, one of them against a welder and another against a person trained in fighting? it feels fucked up, ridiculously gender-normative to say that, but just the other day some man grabbed j.cat at the metro. this makes me angry, worries me. i don’t think gender is this simple but on walks home, i am reminded sometimes that the way my body looks is often interpreted as a target. sometimes when i’m riding my bike home late at night from the poet’s men follow me, call out to me. the neighbourhood isn’t actually that great a place to be alone. it feels dangerous and i am on foot tonight, escaping from my friends’ bar-desires. i don’t want to go to a bar where everyone else will drink, having already shared two bottles of wine with the poet, j.cat, and hustle as hyena tended yet another bathtub-fire. i reach the convenience store/tim hortons and follow my sudden craving for a boston creme inside where the man behind the counter calls me “ma belle” and i realize i am not fooling anyone, at all. shake my hair out of the cap, take the ugly paper bag, and walk the block and a half home looking over my shoulder, irritated and tired.
