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.
i’m sitting on the fire escape, a standard montreal model twisting steadily toward the backyard. up here on the third floor there is a sweet, warm wind catching the tiny hairs on my legs, making the broken plastic sheeting around our back porch crack softly over the noise of t putting dishes away in the kitchen. i can see the poet, hyena and b’s porch beneath me, mini-orange tree in full-green reflected in a dumpstered mirror, hyena’s bike and two plates of seedlings, the poet’s cactus plant. the backyard is half-sunlight, half shadow, under construction. two houses over, the neighbour who plays loud dance music from 1 pm till roughly 1 am is watering the vines in his yard. farther away, there are cars passing like herd animals on the street, small enough from this perspective that i could reach over and grab them, chew on their fenders with my giant mouth.
and then there is the turcot, of course. maybe fourty feet away, an over-sized lawn ornament in cool grey concrete. the back alley is a vein of green beside the faded overpass, but those of us who live here know where the hole in the fence is, how to get under the turcot and stand, diminished, in the imensity of its underbelly. i had never imagined i could live next to a highway overpass but suddenly, there it is, threatening in its faltering solidity, shaking our kitchen table with the sofness of a quiet belly-laugh when a large truck passes unseen except for its shadow across the thick concrete above.
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.
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.
it has been so hot lately. saturday was twenty-seven degrees (celcius) and i organized a picnic with my friends on the lachine, about ten of us sitting on my pink-paisley comforter beside the canal eating and talking, sleeping in the sun.
in the evening, the poet and i took food to the canal and sat on its stone side by the train tracks, drinking wine out of mason jars in the hot summer darkness as trains went by, the occasional stone kicked loose by my badly-worn shoe splashing into the water. how much i’m going to miss her when she moves back to the states is an emotion i haven’t fully explored yet.
this morning as i waited for 10 am to arrive, i sat on the poet’s front porch and wrote in my sketchbook:
suddenly all the birds started making noise- the chickadees and sparrows with their small pips, the starlings’ long trill. a baby screaming somewhere down the block, almost as high pitched, its singular cry carrying on for three or four of the birds. i like mornings like this, cold after the intense heat of the day before, sullen in the face of better-liked weather. cold spring days, more than anything, feel like days that belong to me. i’m just not sure how to capture these cold, cloudy mornings resting like squatters inside the heat.
i’m doing a lot better.
i want to be in a quiet car flashing my smile at streetlights and sleeping towns
that will never dream of me. the dash dash or solid line beneath us could be the backbone of travellers, companion for my own spine curved in service to the passenger seat. this is what i dream of when coffee is holding me firmly away from sleep, eyes open under my bedsheets. these walls go grey-green at night, my bedroom in diluted streetlight spots, rainslick deck outside weeping as it bounces circles of wavering white at my balcony door. behind my thick, sandy eyelids summer moves in fast blinks against sleep. i try to lull my body into the soft, motionless place where my feet walk lightly and my hands stop wanting solutions. last night the lachine reflected everything back at itself and i looked, thinking: what does wanting mean? what do you want that you can’t have?
