dear,
the coffee is hot and strong, thick in my throat and i’m sitting in my bedroom on cazelais feeling french and english heavy on my tongue like i’m balancing weights there, in the small middle-groove i can dip into a bowl to hold liquid. i take “oui” out flick it back and forth through my mouth like i’m shaking a dusty sheet over the balcony out back. oui. oui. everyone knows that oui means yes. when practising, start small, start with oui. practice saying yes when speaking french. i’ve said oui jokingly into the mouth of a lover, biting my smile into sections we can share. and i’ve said oui, seriously, to someone in a shop “oui, c’est ca. merci.” often, i feel an obligation to say yes.
i m trying to halve my possessions, trying to get rid of my things in this bedroom where i live on leased time anyway. i’m figuratively homeless as of the 1st, couch surfing and sleeping in a closet with my cat and my boxes. i haven’t been here before. maybe this sad, but never sad and without a space to entrench myself and heal.
they are doing repairs on the turcot, pieces of cement fall from its legs day and night; we go to sleep with it and wake up with it. at times it pulls me out of a dream and in my sleep i wonder if the world is ending, buildings caving of their own accord around the neighbourhood.
i don’t even know how to leave this city on foot or by bike. i’ve done exit-ramps on buses, but thinking about it i realize i really couldn’t walk out of montreal on a whim. imagine highway stretching grey and thick for miles and miles, neutral territory without buildings where cars mimicking wild animals cross the open space that is not naturally tree-less. i want to leave the city. iwanttoleavethecity.
as for the rest of the week, if you want you can picture me in the social assistance office, sitting like a doughy easy-bake treat under hard neon lights. if i were i ship i’d be the titanic, i’m that sunk. my mum would diagnose post-traumatic stress, maybe, the way she was worried i’d start having nightmares after what happened to me in toronto. but mostly the dreams are just jarring and cold: i’m sleeping between my mattress and the wall, in the small gap with the box-spring below me, comfortingly unyielding. my body ends up there every night like a planet attracted by gravitational force, sleeping and unable to resist its pull.
but there is always a sick beauty to feeling this fucked up, a sort of openness of possibilities because there are so few options left you just have to make some up. and i have never been the kind of person who forgets to love fall and its crisp, cold air with a magnetic undercurrent of dead leaves. and i am building a new piece of me inside every secret chamber of my body; i feel like soon this sadness will roll over in submission to the person who isn’t ready to be breathe quite yet.
no poetry today,
v