Filed under: a city called montreal, the island (home), thoughts about thoughts
in about two weeks my feet will touch down on b.c. soil. well, on the worn carpet of the vancouver airport. but still. i haven’t been home in almost a year and a half. i look a little different- my hair is short and curly (the last time i was anywhere near home it was pretty straight, longer.) i actually don’t look that different beyond my hair, but i think mum will tell me my face is older, she might say i’ve lost weight, though i haven’t. i think it is one of those ingrained compliments she gives without thinking, which i inevitably tell her i don’t need to hear and then tell her why i don’t need to hear it. in fact, i expect i’ll hear it from a few people and i have to brace myself for this because people always assume i’ve lost weight when they haven’t seen me for awhile, and also assume that it is a compliment to tell me so.
i am sort of scared to see the physical changes in my parents. i already know my dad’s hair and beard have gone white, but i have no idea what other things have happened that mark their progression in years. thinking about how they are ageing scares the shit out of me, and even typing this, thinking about them getting older, i am tearing up.
it is weird to think that my perception of home is changing. home used to be, firmly, my hometown: the valley, the ‘mox. every other place was temporary. in the past few years that has changed, and i’m not sure how or why it did. i got older? i grew into my adult self, suddenly, and needed/wanted/was forced to create home wherever i was instead of relying on my parents? my family draws people in: my parents parented the three of us and at least four other kids at different points in their lives. it isn’t us kids that people want to be around, it is the stabilizing, caring, accepting force of my parents. it was/is hard to give that up.
but as i crossed the street at st. henri and notre dame yesterday warm drops of rain started splashing on the backs of my bare calves- the hesitant clouds had broken again as they had been doing all day, on and off, while t and i sawed wood in the backyard, went to the hardware store for drill bits. (i say we sawed: i held the wood. t did most of the work.) and i started to realize i am pretty happy here. i love the people in my life, i’m starting to understand how i limit myself without reason. i’ve started telling people about my anxiety and how it straight-up prevents me from doing things i want to do. i don’t have a community here, but i do have some amazing friends, a couple of whom know exactly how to deal with me when i’m having an anxiety attack (which is so rare and so amazing.) i am learning, slowly, how to look in mirrors and see myself properly. i’m getting there.
traditionally (in my own small, me-tradition-of-city-living) i haven’t spent more than two years living in the same spot since i was eighteen and left my parent’s house. on august 18th i’m going to pass the two year mark here and for the first time in almost eight years, i don’t have any plans to leave.
today i am thinking about summer. probably because i walked home from the poet‘s at six am through the slush, my boots leaking cold water into my socks and wishing for early mornings where the heat isn’t fully awake but you can feel it coming and your body anticipates it, the day ahead full of thick, syrupy sludgy air. this is definitely a symptom of winter because i hate heat- i like warmth very much, but i can really only stand one super hot day every once in awhile. if the heat is intense every day i get grumpy and irritated and no one wants to spend time with me.this morning, in the slush, i was thinking about the music festival in my hometown- we’ve gone to it every year since i was about six years old and it has grown and grown. the first year i lived in halifax was the first time i missed it after twelve years of going. i missed it last summer and will miss it this summer too, since my visit home (yes! i am going home!) is going to be in may, not july. anyway, this music festival takes place on the exhibition grounds back home, which consist of four fields and some forest next to the river. i never wear shoes there. you leave your shoes at the tent in the mornings, maybe put them on to use the porto-potty or if you have to walk on gravel. the paths through the fields are dirt and over the weekend your feet get coated in a warm grime of dust and grass-stains. and (probably because my heavy socks were waterlogged and every step i took i could feel my cold feet squishing) all i could think about was that warm layer of dust on my feet, dark around the cuticles of my toenails. it sounds odd, maybe, to miss dirty feet- and if i’m confessing, i’ll add that 1. i don’t really like feet much as a general rule and 2. the bottoms of my feet are so perpetually dirty that they have become somewhat infamous in my group of friends/housemates- but i associate the freedom of barefeet with warm late-nights, outdoor music, warm dry grass. all the things i miss in this season of soupy streets and intimate layers of thick clothing.
i wonder if i’m going to get a lot of foot fetishists visiting my blog now?
in case you were interested, this is j.cat’s solution to a lack of love for winter:
gluten-free pancakes with strawberry syrup
(yes, i got to eat it after i took the picture)
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.
i often forget when i am happiest. i mean to keep it somewhere in my head to write down later, but i get caught up in the moment and experience it in my body and heart, not my head. i think it is because when i am happiest, i am not analyzing or thinking i just am, and it feels beautiful to let my body rest like that. then i remember i wanted to say something about it days, weeks, months and often years later…
i was writing something just now about how to make good coffee, which got me thinking about my friend jack (who always makes good coffee) and how a couple of years ago i had spent a day hanging out at her small cabin out in the woods on community property where she had lived with her partner and was living alone before she moved to vancouver. (which is where island kids end up when they can’t find work in the valley, or they need to escape the small-town mentality, which often means drinking in the city instead of the woods. it didn’t mean this for jack, though.)
jack was one of those people whose friendship with me was something of a mystery, because at that time i had trouble seeing why people would want to know me. we met in highschool, but i got to know her better after we graduated, when i was beginning to be comfortable with talking to people again. (she was actually the first person i came out to, the first one to school me in gender theory and oh, writing this now makes me miss her a lot especially because our contact has dropped off lately.)
it was kind of lonely in the woods for her, and i was kind of obsessed with the idea of her cabin, shaped like an upside-down ship with her incredible loft bed and open-cupboards and mice who scaled the unsanded wooden counters to get at anything left out. and jack took out the puppets she made and showed them to me, and i felt like maybe she was one of the most amazing people i had ever known because the puppets were like dark stories there, heads made out of clay and clothing hand-sewn, some really terrifying and beautiful in that terror. we watched old black-and-white movies on her computer and she made soup. jack was one of those people who knew how to make soup, too. didn’t just throw ingredients in, knew how to mix foods intelligently so they complimented each other. i sat on the couch, looking out the window at the path where the neighbours on the shared land passed by (“and see me in the kitchen and wave, because the windows show them everything in my house.” jack told me) stealing glances at the puppets, who were sitting in their open box. at the time, jack was making a man with a horse’s head, and i studied him from a distance thinking about how stupid words could be, how i could never tell people properly what i thought of the beautiful things they did because everything that left my mouth seemed trite and brittle. thinking about how much i wished i could open my emotions up like cutting into a vein and give them to people.
but remembering happiness, this is one of those important moments i forgot at the time to write down. i slept on her surprisingly comfortable couch that evening and when i woke up, jack cooked pancakes and that strong strong coffee she makes so well and i sat at the counter, watching the sun slowly dry the condensation on the trees and grass and drinking from a nice mug and thinking about how i always say i don’t need people or friends but how happy-to-tears i get when i see how beautiful my friends actually are, thinking about the quiet and comfort of being around someone i trusted.
Filed under: the island (home)
i am missing the island so badly today.
i was the kind of child who read voraciously, and usually more than one book at a time because i was also the kind of child who needed a lot to think about. usually i would lie down on the living room couch, on the dust-sheet mum kept over the print against muddy dog paws and cat hair, and lose myself entirely until my head was heavy and full and i had to stop.
but on days where it was raining, and the grey skies seemed to be coming closer to the ground as clouds rolled above, i would take two blankets and a pillow and run barefoot into the back of my dad’s flat-bed truck, which had a wonderful grey canopy about four feet tall on the back. i would make a bed from the blankets and lie down, metal above and metal below, listening to the rain hit the canopy, a noise that grew quieter and quieter as i fell slowly into whatever i was reading.
occasionally, i forgot to tell my parents where i was going- which usually was not an issue because it was a small town and children were allowed to be where they wanted, in the woods or riding our bikes or wherever. but sometimes, when my mum would leave me sitting on the couch with a book and it started to rain suddenly, i forgot to tell her i was leaving in my hurry to be in the truck surrounded by the sound of rain. at these times, i would suddenly be shaken out of my book by her voice echoing through our backyard into the forest, and i’d swing the back window open and call out “i’m alright!”
and mum would say “for a few moments there, you were lost! tell me next time!” before she went back inside and i closed the window to curl up again.
i miss that, the quiet of my life in those moments of being lost
Filed under: a city called vancouver, city called halifax, friends, observations, the island (home)
mrs. kim’s: when the weasel and i first moved in together, at ages seventeen (me) and eighteen (her), we shared a dark basement apartment, illegal, beneath mr. and mrs. kim’s house. two bedrooms, bathroom and a kitchen with three windows all about half a foot over our heads. it was dark most of the time, and our lights were flourescents, harsh in the 8-foot ceilings. i had headaches often, hating the flickering bright glare that dominated our rooms. at around the time we moved in, a man was breaking into apartments in the area to watch women sleep. i used to come home from work and check the apartment over, clutching an empty wine bottle at its neck, looking for him. although we lived there for four months, we saw mr. kim only once, when i came home for work to find him fixing our sink, having just wandered in without warning. when we left, mrs. kim stole my favorite sweater and a scarf and refused to give them back.
cogswell st.: the second halifax apartment was weasel’s boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s ex-apartment. she kept it dark and it smelled like cat pee. on one wall was a charcoal mural of a cow’s skull and runes, though we never asked her their meaning. it was a one bedroom, cramped and a mistake emotionally, but cheaper and not mrs. kim’s, a distinction we felt was important. it was dually less and more inviting than our old place. one day as i reached down to pull my up underwear while sitting on the toilet, i saw tubular fungus stretching toward me from a moldy spot behind the basin. at that time, stupid enough to disrespect mushrooms, i killed it with spray stain-remover. it wasn’t a shit hole, it felt like a shit hole, but it was alright until our downstairs neighbour came back from vacation (we never could figure out where he would have gone on vacation.) this man hated us passionately and aggressively through the floorboards. we walked too heavily, spoke too loudly, were stupid fucking bitches he would kill at the first opportunity. he would show up outside our front door and scream. dude was huge, heavy muscly arms, long blonde hair like a viking, thick ring in his septum piercing. our landlord made jokes about his death threats and suggested we move out to avoid physical violence. i didn’t know what victim blaming was then, and since weasel and i were having problems, we broke our lease three months early in april and i flew back to the west coast.
the camper: my parents’ house was full of kids (homeless, kicked-out, visiting and both Side A and Side B) the spring i went back home (slightly heart-broken and definitely head-broken) so i moved into a camper-trailer on our neighbour’s land. i decked it out in pirate flags and the kids used to sneak over in the evening and smoke pot at the cramped fold-out table. my bed was inches from the ceiling and the ceiling was full of spiders, which are really the only bugs i have issues with (i don’t kill them.) i used to coccoon myself in a sheet pulled over a rattling old fan until it billowed out like a sail and i slipped into a blissful airy rest. the camper was stifling by the time i went to bed, the metal of its structure having baked everything into a warm haze, but it felt good to be out of the over-crowded house.
the bus: this always makes me sound cooler than i am. the second summer i spent back home on the island, i lived in a white bus on my parents’ land, again because the house was full of kids and my old bedroom had a couple living in it (notably, Side B and her boyfriend at the time.) my favorite home, i fit a single mattress into it and grew plants, kept my clothes in mesh shelves and my books on the built-in counters. my rats lived with me until it grew too hot for them, gnawing everything they could reach. the dog slept with me most of the time, but he was a collie and nervously stared out the windows, barking so frequently that i often wondered what was outside, despite my common sense. but it was beautiful while it lasted.
