i am eating a free sausage on a bun, standing under the awning of an expensive restaurant in one of the loft-condos attached like a parasite to the lachine canal. it is raining, i shift my bag and the on-sale wholebean espresso lets out a cloud of coffee smell. home isn’t far away and that word feels solid, safe. last summer is almost a year gone, and i’ve put most of those bad memories out with the trash. i’m eating the sausage in huge bites, satisfied and proud of myself, my whole body triumphant with a day of sweet friendship and self-sufficiency. two well-dressed men climb the steps, giving me the space i would normally give them. one smiles tentatively. i think about what he probably sees: my face smeared with ketchup, messy hair and scraped legs. i smile into the wind and it rains harder.
but what i’m feeling isn’t shame for looking dirty, or eating a sausage under the awning of an expensive restaurant. i’m wiping my hands on a napkin, licking my lips for crumbs, putting on my helmet again. i’m feeling like the freest person on that street and when i step onto the pavement, it has stopped raining.
the weather turned. suddenly 10 degrees and cold, enough for my favorite sweaters and leggings under my skirts. i like to cover up, feeling safe in my warm clothing, exact comfort against my body. i’ll take my comfort where i can get it, these days.
i went to a theme party, danced in a small dark room. these days, i’m slowly realizing just how much i miss romantic intimacy, how easy it is to crush on strangers when i’m drunk on cheap booze, hoop earrings hitting my face as i nod, shyly introduce myself. really, all i know is:
one. i miss kissing, the way desire crawls up my back when i breathe in against another mouth but
two. inviting even a person who is willing into this little hurricane of self-doubt is still emotional manslaughter.
this is my personal ultimatum: a job and a place to live by mid-november or i head back west. hyena tells me that it is more than a step back, and i believe him. we walked on the canal and i couldn’t see myself leaving the city, but i’m running out of time to make it work here. if only i didn’t feel more true to myself in montreal than anywhere i’ve ever lived.
Filed under: a city called montreal, friends, st. henri, that weird feeling i like to call attraction, thoughts about thoughts
my cat misses me. i come home and she’s angry, intolerant of affection, constantly needs to be near me. i can’t explain to her what’s going on, that i’m hurt and sad and can’t be in the apartment where i used to be happy. why i’m sleeping in friends’ spare rooms or their empty beds or on their couches until august 1st when i can move out and put distance between myself and the last two weeks of sadness, mistrust, and loss. all she knows is that i’m never home anymore, there’s no one to cuddle up to on those sweltering hot nights in the muggy loft bed where all of the day’s smells have risen and are trapped between our bodies and the ceiling. and she isn’t sure why i haven’t honoured our morning meeting on the fire escape where i drink coffee and she sunbathes with her tiny nose bent upward, reading the wind like a newspaper. i feel bad: she has a history of being abandoned and while i’m trying to visit her as much as possible between feedings, it just hurts too much to spend time there and feel nostalgic for the friendship i’ve lost.
that’s where we are these days, my cat and i. we’re stuck between not okay and okay, waiting to move on.
Filed under: thoughts about thoughts
ever since the g20 i’ve needed to hold people’s hands in public. actually, the need for human contact is just really strong, really demanding. i want to be hugged and held. i miss sleeping next to someone, the reassurance of another person through the night so even if i wake up i’m not alone, turning over to feel another body reassure me. but i’ve been not-dating for months now, so i am mostly used to sleeping alone.
the first few nights after being released were hard, i was fighting with someone i care about and crying all over a’s porch in a city where i don’t belong. when we got back home, sleeping in a room alone i couldn’t make myself drift off and didn’t sleep more than three hours a night. i just couldn’t stop thinking about detention, about being strip searched and feeling my body reject the thoughts. it is slowly going away, but the need to hold people’s hands in public isn’t, or the desire to be physically close to people. i’m lonely, and it is ridiculous because i have so many people who care about me.
it’s sort of hard, learning how to be okay with all of these emotions- fear, anger, violation, love, sadness, loneliness, infatuation all swimming in my chest like fish waiting to be caught and gutted.
that’s a horrible similie, but there you go.
Filed under: thoughts about thoughts
..and i got arrested and detained for twenty-four hours. i’m not going to write much about my experience here because i’ve written about it in a lot of other places on the internet and i don’t want to link this blog to my real name internet presence. but you should go read the stories of the people held in the detention centre. go read what happened to us there, the diversity of horror stories. it’s in the public eye, but it isn’t unusual. the system of policing and detention we have is fucked up. people have their rights violated like this every day. so read the stories and realize that these things, and worse, are happening as you read them and are underreported or unreported. the prison industrial complex is a horrible institution created by an oppressive colonialist government. it isn’t good for anyone.
lately, everyone i talk to feels like things are going to shift soon. as though we are all waiting for a wind to come up on a muggy day, eagerly anticipating a small change. and it’s true, i’m waiting for it, whatever the shift is. truthfully, i feel like a human tideline: just a scattered collection of debris to sort through, a constant influx of solutions i will eventually discard. i’m messy, i’m overwhelmed.(it doesn’t help that my affection is like birds rising and falling into the same tree no matter how many times i flap my arms, yell at it to leave. goddamnit.)
everything seems to be stuck, gluey and thick as the heat today. which is why i haven’t posted anything in nearly a month; i feel slowed down, irritated. yesterday i spent some time engaging in a debate that frustrated me with a man who constantly interrupted and confronted me. i hate debates with people whose education in debating comes from university classes and white male philosophers, who will use terminology that others don’t understand in an attempt to sideline discourse. and it has been my experience that often when i debate with men they talk down to me, almost reflexively, as though it is expected (it *is* expected, in a sense.) what then started out as a friendly discussion over a lovely breakfast with Side B, j.cat and the poet turned into an aggressive debate when this guy showed up uninvited, letting himself first into the house and then into the conversation as though he had a right to both. but my time spent with him (and i’ll admit to limiting it as quickly as possible) is actually a perfect metaphore for how i’ve felt lately: challenged but stuck, valid attempts to make sense of things constantly being sidelined, not valued for the things i value in myself.
Filed under: thoughts about thoughts
it’s funny, perception.
i did this self-portrait a month or so ago. i felt like i was being very honest, but no one i know likes this drawing. everyone i show it to tells me they like the style, but not the representation; they see something ugly or unhappy in it.
to me, it feels honest. i included my puffy eyes, my chickenpox scar, my frown lies, but also my lips, my nose, my blue eyes. it is a mixture of the things i see in the mirror. i look tired… but i am tired, often. i don’t sleep well. i’m not smiling, but i’m not unhappy.
i keep coming back to this drawing. worried, because i wasn’t trying to represent the ugly people seem to see in this, wasn’t trying to distress people with it. i was simply trying to be honest. i already know that my self-perceptions are really off anyway, but creating an image of myself that others reject is odd. unsettling. it makes me wonder just how much i distort my reflection. and as someone who knows she has a fucked up sense of self, it is also sort of scary.
i’m standing in the kitchen of my old apartment, waiting. the place is empty, waiting, moving from on set of people to the next. i used to live here, but now i don’t. there is nothing of mine left except the paint on the walls in my room where a boy barely out of his teens is going to park his belongings, look around at the first room that is really his outside of his parent’s house. every place that is sacred in this apartment is no longer sacred. the rooms echo. i’m the last person from our household to stand in this kitchen, lean on the counter (where i bakedcleanedreadkissedcrieddoubledoverwithlaughter across the span of almost a year) and look around at the walls j.cat and i painted bright yellow, my herb drying rack (which was also part of a costume) and its solitary, dead sprig of parsley. the magnetic poetry we could not get off the fridge says: rise every/almost laugh/about/surprise work of why/must chase then consume.
i’m moving into the house of someone i trust and care about a lot, but that doesn’t make it any stranger to suddenly not live here.
…
i wrote that yesterday, intending to post it. but then the poet showed up and we went downstairs to have breakfast at the cafe and i came back up to clean and leave. and now i’ve left and i’m in my new place and the feeling is overwhelming goodness, just goodness. t and i hung out last night, made food and went for a walk in the warm air as the sky got dark. we came home (home, i live here now) to the outdoor concert the nextdoor neighbour was having in his backyard, watched the group of hipsters dance and sway from our spot on the back porch before i crashed early in the tall loft bed that is (for now) my tall loft bed.
when i woke up this morning t had cleaned the entire kitchen during the night, something i find beautifully promising. waking up to a clean kitchen feels so good, and they know that. i made an egg on the terrifying gas stove (still have no made peace with that thing) and ate it as i finished reading carrot quinn’s zine. i went out on the back porch with my coffee to watch the turcot, the highways, look into the neighbours’ backyards. i thought about how weird fences are, how strange the idea of property is, how sleek and calm the turcot looked in the warm 8 am air.
i thought about how the man working in the biker’s garden had no idea that a cat was watching him from under hyena’s car and the cat had no idea i was watching it from the balcony. i felt like the promise of a wonderful summer was tickling the back of my neck, asking me to give in to warm mornings and new plants, backyard fires and making space for a home. then i heard the distant living rumble of trains and that sealed the deal. okay, i give.
