I haven’t been writing much. I guess that’s because my head, heart and body are pretty full of everything right now. I’m busy with the task of building up different life scenarios in my head as I move into making one of the biggest and loneliest decisions of my life.
When I first moved away from home I was pretty excited about life. I really love Toronto and love living, working and getting educated here so it was and has been the perfect fit. In September of this year I met someone who, for the first time in my life, was actually quite similar to me in personality, likes and dislikes and career path/life goals. It was exciting to feel like I could have finally found a place within another person to call my second-home. On top of that I was learning things that excited me, the leaves were changing color and I had a cute house cat who occasionally bit me for no reason at all. Things were peachy. And then they weren’t because that’s life.
Now I’m alone again. The old boyfriend calls me occasionally to argue with me across the table at coffee shops or after movies. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that everything hurts for a reason. Life moves on and things happen. Maybe there’s more truth to that now than I know. I have been on my own since I was seventeen. At twenty-two, that’s five years of adult life under my belt. I can say for certain that with every helpful thing I’ve learned, I’ve picked up at least three not-so-helpful things as well. I still get the feeling of being overwhelmed almost constantly and slightly (very) confused. There are good days when my room is clean, my rent is paid and my cupboards are stocked and I think, “hey! I can do this. I have got it.” And then there are days when I’ve been sick for a week (or not so sick) and my room is a mess, my visa bill is over-due and I haven’t even put my laundry in the dryer after three days of it being downstairs. I think to myself on those days (or weeks) that sometimes, just trying to be an adult comes with a compact set of ideas and action-based plans that I can’t even begin to wrap my head around.
I have lived in Toronto for almost eight months. In those eight months, I’ve gotten into more “trouble” than in most of the time I’ve lived elsewhere. Now I’m tasked with incredibly hard decisions that even women twice my age struggle to make. I sit and I think. I think. And think. And think. No clear answer pops into my head. No “right” thing. I can’t buy a magic 8 ball and shake it 100 times until it gives me an answer that I want to hear because I don’t know what it is that I want. It can be tough at twenty-two to not really have any support either. I don’t have a strong family background and even with a growing friend base, I can’t simply pull new relationships into big idea issues.
So I think lately I am grateful for having grown up as an only child. For moving out when I was seventeen and for all the other life events that dragged me through mud. All the loneliness. The struggle. It taught me to have empathy. It taught me to have a heart. To be soft. Gentle. Vulnerable. In spite of even the darkest days. My suffering helped me to not be scared. I do my best to provide for people what I can. Every single thing has brought me to now. And I realize I am more capable of being alone and facing my loneliness than I might otherwise have thought. I am strong though I am afraid. I have guidance though I feel dizzy and disoriented. The man who I thought could have been a place to call my “second” home? That’s because the first is within me and nowhere else. I’m not saying it isn’t incredibly hard at this stage in my life to not feel like I have options or people who are going to be able to be here for me however I need it right now but where there is weakness in your life, you will learn to find strength. That is the hidden gift and some people are weaker earlier in their lives for not knowing it. It’s true that nothing can ever be perfect and sometimes it can’t even be okay but it’s my story and I think I can lose sight of that just as much as anyone else.
Everyone wants to throw their cent into the ring which can be frustrating because with every penny, I’m one more coin away from what it is that my inner voice is saying. That quiet and sometimes feeble thing. But I have realized now that it does not matter. Whatever choice I make I have been made strong enough to deal with. All the bumps and pot-holes in my life have made me capable.
I’ve been chewing on a pretty big idea. I don’t really know what to do with it because I have honestly never considered this kind of thing before. So, I must take a deep breath and try not to be afraid.
I moved 4, 500 km away from home. That was seven months ago. A lot can happen in one month (let alone seven). I have been tested in more than one way. At first, I was a blissful young girl who was so ready to start my adventure. Then I got sick, very sick and my life revolved around trauma. A side of myself (that I didn’t even know existed) had to step forward and take care of things. There were so many hospital visits and doctors. I became filled with abnormal amounts of anger, anxiety and fear. It was more than a low. I found myself 150 ft. below the lowest parts of my head and heart. I came out of it somehow, a little bruised but still standing.
Now, I have turned my thoughts back to me. This person that I know and don’t know. My boyfriend at the time said, “I’ve seen you at your worst and I can’t handle it.” There’s no use in explaining that it was more than that and instead something of a death or a violent upheaval. And nothing I could have done to coax myself up to the lowest of my lows, would have worked because I wasn’t on the map anymore. It turns out that trauma -both consistent and repeated- can do that to you. Now I am left to myself again and I don’t always know where to start. It feels strange.
I have decided that the rest of this year is mine. I’m thoroughly exhausted by the politics of relationships. By the sex. The love. The hate. The here but there. I guess its taken me twenty-two glorious, hard and weird years to realize that I’m not the greatest at people. I mean sure, I can be anything you want me to be when I feel like it. But largely I think I’m one of those … wait why isn’t she wearing shoes?! kind of girls. I act impulsively often which can be so much fun but it can also be something difficult to keep track of. I often meet men who are not at all for me. Engineers always. They are all men with broad shoulders, smokey voices and dirty hands who lure me like one moth to a thousand flames. I’m here but I’m there. And for a little while I’m happy. I’m jumping off couches, rolling around in the dirt, suck your face off happy. And everything is great. But then I get bored and I feel trapped by these broad-shouldered, smokey-voiced men. Then I do what I do best and I run. The last breakup I went through, I moved across the country. And soon enough, I will be backpacking through Western Europe. Run hard. Run fast. Get far.
When I’m off by myself I can do me pretty well. It’s the panic of having to add someone, bright-eyed and bushy tailed, that gets me sweaty. For this reason, I’m basically the worst person to want. I seem to like to be the girlfriend for about 4-6 months and everything is great and everything is good then everything is …? I start to feel like I’ve been dropped in a puddle by this point. Of course it isn’t always like this but over the past three years and four failed relationships, I’ve started to think.
Because I write, I gravitate to the pain of the whole thing. I sit with it in old conversations or in moments where nothing was said. I replay things over and over and over. I make myself say or do things differently with a little more perspective than I might have had at the time. I ask myself the same stupid questions, “Why couldn’t I be happy? Why wouldn’t I just ask for a little bit of space?” And I have come to the conclusion that … well, hell if I’ll ever know. I think my disclaimer should be, “Hey listen, we can date but you need to just let me have my space. Otherwise, I’m pretty skittish even though I don’t really look like it.”
I have romantic aspirations but I don’t seem to actively aspire to them. Even so, I still know exactly what they are and why I have them. So here I am at twenty-two and on my fourth breakup in the past three years. It makes me feel so old to be back here again even if the circumstances and the reasoning are both not as normal or as clear-cut as other break-ups. I think of how annoyed I was that I was hit on by a guy this week, another broad-shouldered engineer. And I would just like to stop. Not for the summer. Not for a month. Or a week. Or a day. But for a while. I have been sick for so long and fairly incapable of feeling normal things outside of said sickness. But it seems that I am well now and the time has come for me to start building anew.
I don’t know the person I am now – not very well anyway but I do recognize parts of her and I’m intrigued. I want to get to know myself again and figure out all the new (and old) reasons to love myself. This hasn’t been an easy decision for me because I would like to fall in love someday but I realize I only want to do that from a whole place, a bright place, one that attracts similar people to me and beautiful experiences. Not somewhere fractured, damp and cold or through convenience. I have been all too guilty of convenience over the past couple of years if nothing else but for the experience. I feel like being as sick as I have been has caused me to close my arms (and my heart) to things that would otherwise be so pure and so good. I don’t like that and I don’t think anybody would but I can understand why I’m in the place that I’m in right now. So I’m cutting me some slack or actually, quite a lot of it.
I don’t want to be that girl working out because I ate expired food. If I’m going to go for a run it’s because I just had a filling, balanced meal and I want to keep strong and healthy. I think relationships need to be the same way. I’ve had a “bad boyfriend” or two… or three, haven’t we all? But the thing is, none of them were truly bad. They were all people I needed to come across to get to where I am now and maybe it’s hard (ok, super hard) to have to restart but it’s always worth it. Sometimes, when you’re blind and hurting and you don’t know which way is up, it can be a struggle. I won’t lie.
Honestly, I look forward to it. The year I spend alone. Growing plants. Reading books. Going on adventures. Twenty-two turns into twenty-three and I’ll be surrounded, as people usually are, by relationships and love and it will be difficult not to compare. However, I know this is the right step for me now. After so long of not knowing the next step, the right health issue, the wrong time but the right guy or the wrong guy and the wrong time, I’m happy that I have this.
One day, I’ll meet someone who will love me how I’m beginning to love myself. Someone who will read my writing and encourage the best parts of me to grow even on my darkest days. Someone who will understand that sometimes I will have to go but I will always come back. Among all the other wild, weird and great things. Until then, I’m looking forward to being every bit that person for myself.
My dear readers, I really wish I could tell you that this isn’t a true story. Like even a little bit. Unfortunately, I can’t do that. This is the very real story of that time I went to a psychic (and some other bits and pieces of my life around that time and afterwards). I found it in an old blog of mine and spent a good 3 minutes laughing so I thought it qualified for re-posting, no matter how embarrassing.
*it was also written two years ago today when I found out so that’s pretty neat
March 3rd, 2013.
March 2011. One year after I had finished high school. Working a job I didn’t like much but kept me busy. Saving money, biding time in a town by the sea. It was before I knew that I’d know you and then suddenly you were there. Hey listen, I’m sorry I started that fire in your kitchen. I guess that’s what I get for putting an electric kettle on a hot burner.
I have decided that it is true, the whole thing about leaving parts of yourself everywhere that you go. I think of myself at 10, starting fights with boys in the school yard and getting dragged into the principles office for disturbing the peace. In my defense though, they were always pulling on my hair. I think of myself at 12, riding bikes around the neighborhood in Washington. All the palm trees in LA. The jumping beans that jumped until they died on the dashboard in my Aunt’s car while we drove through Mexico. And then summer last year, side by side in the kitchen. Your hand on the small of my back. While you cooked I rubbed my bare feet together, cranked up the radio, tugged at my slip, chewed on my hair. The kitchen door was ajar, the floors were dusty. I didn’t have any men in my life but I had you and the long, hot nights. Your hand across the table. A cold meal. A closet full of lace slips and a house to lounge in while wearing them.
I always write about people as if they were so important. The thing is, I can’t remember how important you were or anyone else really was. I forget 240 days out of 365 and what I do remember, I piece together. I keep thinking lately about the man who might come along at some point and how I don’t know him yet. I wonder sometimes, in bed alone, if he be made up of all the men I’ve known so far. I really hope not. For his sake and for mine. I confess that I have not had the best taste so far.
I’m not ready to face him yet but I know he’s out there. I feel him sometimes when I wake from lonely dreams. I know there is an embrace somewhere in this world that will bring me back to earth. Remind me to be salt always. First, I have to be my own hand, my own heart and then it can be his hand, his heart.
Everyone I know is falling in love. I am falling (literally) into books. Into myself. All things about me are still hypothetical but I pursue everything with vigor. I am particularly in love with my new tattoo. The flood, the flood and now suddenly all this rain. I want to yell and run through fields naked. Instead, I settle most nights for whiskey and my friends. Their warm bodies on my bed, talking while flipping through books or staring at the ceiling, hands on legs on faces on shoulders. Home is where the heart is and that happens to be somewhere in the tangle of our bodies after a bottle of decent liquor.
I will tell him about the summer I almost broke my foot after being dared to jump off the highest ledge of the pier. Still swam around like it was nothing. Hurt like hell. How the city was caked in heat and there was nowhere to run. Always at the beach, in the ocean. Watched the sand collect in my navel, down the sides of my sharp hips. How pale I was even underwater. I want to be moved. Not by a lover but by life. By the mountains. My own skin. Words. Books. Places. Everything. I have been so many people.
When I turned 18, I went to a psychic with a little bit of urging from one of my house mates at the time. I had been feeling so disjointed after graduating high school that she thought a “decent tarot reading” would do me good. Whatever that meant. It was hard thinking of things to ask the woman once I got there. Life stuff without getting too dark. I purposely avoided romantic questions. I wanted to know what would get me out of my funk and had no interest in love or romance. Still don’t. Probably used to tired, older women with someone in mind, she couldn’t resist talking about it before I left. I remember her grabbing my hands and rubbing her thumbs over the lines.
“You’ll meet someone when you are both too young. It won’t be the right time. You’ll fall apart after a couple years. Go off and do some growing up, it looks like. Then, you’ll find each other again in Newfoundland. Or he will have some kind of connection to Newfoundland. Something to do with Newfoundland. Newfoundland is going to be involved. Work? Family? Friends? Something.”
I had laughed, trying to pretend like it wasn’t directly at her. She dropped my hands then. “All my family is from Toronto and Montreal,” I couldn’t help giggling, “And this is the West coast. We live on the West coast. I don’t know a single person who has ever been to Newfoundland like even once.”
She sat back, pointing a finger at me, “Time’s up.” Then she stood and walked around the table to me, “Newfoundland. Just you wait.”
She did give me a tape of the session for whatever reason. It was like, thanks a heap lady but it’s 2010 and very few people actually have cassette players anymore. I did try to find it a year or two later with no luck. Sucked into the vortex of shit I didn’t care enough about to even bring home.
I wish I could remember more of what she’d said but it was all so ridiculous and stupid that I pushed it out of my head. Everything she’d told me had been vague but the last part was too specific. It had ruined the entire thing. Whatever man I was seeing at the time (or not seeing?) did not fit that description and had nothing to do with fucking Newfoundland.
I laughed afterwards. I cried. Not because I thought I’d find anything in Newfoundland but because I realized I’d visit one day, remember the psychic and feel stupid. The woman who discredited herself. I left that little room feeling more bewildered than I ever had in my life. For a week afterwards it was like someone had tacked an extra sentence onto a story I’d read 150 times before. Her room smelled like crushed flowers and she didn’t tell me anything with her tarot cards that I didn’t already know.
It’s the 3rd day of March in the year 2013. I am 20 years old. I’m dating the worst man. Literally. That is what my friends have nicknamed him. “How’s the worst man in the world?” My friend Nicole will say after he leaves our apartment or sometimes just before. She wants him to hear her. I skipped out on my first bar tab the other day, accidentally. Two years and two days ago you were standing in my door and how monumental that must have felt. I can’t really remember it now.
And then to think, one day I will meet someone. We will find ourselves on the same beach, in the same bar, library, house, backyard and find our way to each other. I want to warn him now that I am all trouble but I don’t think he will believe me. Even if he did I don’t think it would stop him from a single thing. Funny how life is like that, just a rodeo that keeps on going. And our memories, the things that stay with us, decide when and where to make themselves known, if ever.
It would seem that I am afforded the luxury of being young and beautiful. Full of talent. The same pale skin and blue eyes as my father, a french nose and a single freckle in the corner of one of my eyelids. Only noticeable if you really look.
Here I am. Tall like my father. Curved like my mother. Crass like my grandmother was though I didn’t really know her. I have hips like a body of water, thick bones, long fingers. I always wanted to learn piano but settled (partly) for french. Spilling words like they belong to me as if I gave birth to them, like they owe me something big in return for this page of paper.
When I was little my mother couldn’t look at me. It was like looking at my father, she said. My flat face and strong arms. Her own tendencies rested on drinkings lots of wine and sleeping her days away. Her delicate wrists and long night gowns. She was forever romanced by the deep, “unforgivable” tragedies of her life. I was another thing she could watch but never quite grasp. I used to run from her in public places. Grocery stores. Department stores. Malls. These are my earliest memories of her, vague but usually chasing me. Always soft, wilting into herself or some man. Name forgotten. Never mentioning my father and yet never leaving her sadness alone for too long.
She was the kind of woman who would never quite fit. She was beautiful like a painting and she knew it. Her dark hair kept long for decades and emeralds on her fingers. She was always adorning herself in jewelery even if it meant that we wouldn’t have as much to eat for the week. She was the kind of woman who felt that work was beneath her. Beauty was her only concern. She filled her closets with beautiful clothes and shoes and concentrated on creating a home for herself. Bills barely paid. Taking the odd job. Burning dinner. Sending me to school without breakfast or lunch but somehow always in the kitchen. At night she barely slept, she felt like the darkness was closing down on her like a lid.
I grew into a chubby teenager. All flesh. “You’d be such a beautiful girl,” She’d say to me, “if only you could lose 30 pounds”. I grabbed at my thighs. When she was home, she was never quite there. Always tanned as if she had escaped in her mind to some tropical paradise, leaving me alone in the house. She started putting all her make-up out on the counters. One afternoon and shortly after I turned 14, she insisted upon making me up. I took rare opportunities to be my mother’s pet. I sat still and very quiet as she caked on foundation and blush. Every few minutes she’d pause in front of me and I’d long to itch my eyes, watering from too much eyeliner. “There,” she’d said, “It’ll have to do”. Resigning herself to a job half-done. I don’t know what I expected to glimpse in the mirror but upon looking, I began to panic. I didn’t see myself. Reflected back were sharp cheekbones, hollowed out eyes, my freckles and beauty marks dusted out of existence with beige powder. “Don’t be such a wet napkin,” She’d finished, “You look great”. I ran to my room. Slammed the door. Laid down on my bed.
Where I grew up, we were always bracing for impact. A long over-due natural disaster. If there were to be an earthquake it would be so powerful that our tiny delta would simply sink into the ocean from which it had once come. It kept me from sleeping some nights. Counting the floorboards in my bedroom or listening to my mother sit in the living room, clicking through the channels listlessly. In the afternoons I listened to french music, watched french television, read the scripts of my favorite films and posted art on my bedroom walls. She started looking at me then, growing into a creature she couldn’t quite recognize. In the grocery store she would become frustrated with men at other check-outs. “She’s just a child,” She’d hiss, grabbing me hard at the elbow and dragging me off. I never understood why. Her nails digging into my forearm, cutting my skin.
Six months later, I slimmed out. It was as though my body had decided it was through stocking up for the winters of ancestors long dead. My family bought me new clothes. Gone was the extra flesh. I was suddenly all curves like a question mark or an endless river with long, slim fingers and wide child-bearing hips. Plump lips. The french nose always hiding in a book. “Why are you always reading those damn things?” My mother would comment, back from the store with a brand new pack of cigarettes, standing around in her nightgown. “Just like your father,” She’d added, lighting another one and leaning out the kitchen window. “He used to read a new word out of the dictionary every night after coming back from class. Books everywhere.”
As I got older, my mother paraded lovers through the house more frequently. She spoke more freely of my father. Still always as a ghost. She was always grounded in her magical world, somewhere far away from me. I imagined her as a girl my age. The thought didn’t last. Meeting my father at the local watering hole, a bar in the middle of the university called “The Pit”. All 6’4″ of him. Pale. Nordic. A basketball player with icy blue eyes. And lured into a corner by my mother and her long legs, her soft stare with empty eyes. They shared a bed for two years and I think my mother felt she had found something stable finally at 26. She tried her best to domesticate. Cooking, cleaning and buying a family dog. This was it. Where she had been leading herself for years. This comfortable small part of her life suddenly taking flight. And then, nearing three years together, she found out about me. My father was none too pleased. He left her. Broke her heart, burned her journals. She carried on. Built again. But he had left his mark on her. “And then there you were”, she always said. “Something I knew that I wanted, no matter what.”
I was still getting used to puberty. Jumping across the thin line into an unrecognizable youth. Running. Walking. Climbing trees. I met a boy. At night he would crawl into my bedroom through a large window, facing the back of a restaurant. The first night I turned to him in my bed and slowly undid my bra. I took his hands and traced them from my left foot all the way up to my right ear, slowing over every major body part. “Do you know what these are for?” I had asked, making his fingers graze my lips. He shook his head in the near darkness. “For kissing you”, I answered and then I kissed him. The first time I’d ever kissed anyone and I was red with desire. Too stubborn to admit it. I felt in that moment like I was a pane of glass willing to break, letting myself take on the shape of a woman.
Whenever the boy came around my room would smell like grease. He worked with his hands in shop class and later worked his hands on me. He smudged my books with blackened fingers. And still, whenever he touched me I was content. Such is lust. So bright like a firework, set up and burning and then all at once gone. My mother never asked his name but when she searched my room, finding a box of condoms, she’d taken them without a word. I found one, weeks later, opened on her nightstand. We never talked about it. I began to sneak out of the house late at night. And in my quiet neighborhood, whenever the boy drove up in his mother’s car, you could hear it. My mother knew about it and let it go on for a time before finally insisting we put bars on my window. Almost a challenge.
My mother was never good at much. She was personable when she wanted to be, well-manicured when she felt like it but mostly she felt only like she was something to be looked at. When I told her that I wanted to go to university she said, “Well why would you want to do that?” as if the thought had never crossed her mind. I was 18 when she started telling me that I was more powerful than I thought. “What do you mean?” I’d ask, though I already knew what she meant. “If you just wore a little make-up,” She’d sigh. I thought about how exhausting it must be to live in her world. A world of “if”. Short skirts. Men almost ten years younger than her in her bed for a year or two. Always if.
Over the years my blood became one part red wine and one part melted snow. My mother was often anxious, mostly angry and always tapping her fingers on things with her long, sharp nails. “Can you believe she’s my daughter?” She’d laugh at dinner parties, sloshing her drink around. I was too much skin, salt, blonde hair. Her ancestors started entire revolutions. Mine hung our gods from the trees. We burned and moved on while hers lounged in velvet parlors. She was precise and elegant but not quite finished. Whenever she was in a room, it felt like something was missing like a shoe or an earring. Always pushing and pulling.
When I was a child I had watched her obsessively pull grey hairs out of her head with a pair of tweezers. One by one. She had finally given up on the dark hair of her youth by the time she turned 48. Forever a faded beauty queen, half-awake and party aware of her descent into madness. She told me once that if I hadn’t been born she thought she might have gone on to marry my father or perhaps another man, shrouded in mystery. Somewhere out there maybe there was lover she’d never gotten a chance to meet. He could have been waiting for her somewhere on a street corner, her name in his mouth. Forever silent. But I was and she hadn’t. That was that.
When she turned 45, she started wearing my old clothes. Ones I’d left in the house when I’d moved away. Some new things. Different colors. Less muted and beautiful. She was grasping the edges of her own mortality, sloping quickly into middle age and screaming quietly for attention. Her clothes were tighter. She cut her hair. Dyed it. And I started to wonder if she was what people looked like when they were starting to vanish right in front of you.
Whenever she’d see me she’d exclaim, “What have you done to your face?!” Pulling me to her, cradling my chin in her palms. She grimaced always. I shrugged. “We need to do something about this hair!” she’d say, staring at the crown of my head. My mother treated her body like a temple. She wasn’t always sure if it was a place of worship or the perfect place for arson. Perhaps a little bit of both. To her, having a daughter that was not interested in beauty, shiny like a coin at the bottom of a fountain, was every insult. When she found out about my first tattoo, she’d ushered me into the bathroom and asked me to pull up my shirt. She ran her fingers over the raised skin and had said, “I don’t understand you”. It was the first and last time we ever spoke of it. But I knew when I visited her on the holidays that she’d slip into the bathroom while I was in the shower, leaving cremes and perfumes strewn about so that I might take notice.
By growing up I was doing the very thing my mother had never anticipated. Becoming all bone and muscle and leg. She was aging and it seemed like something she’d never really considered. The art of being looked at would be lost to her at some point. Becoming instead a woman that young men merely blinked at. She envisioned my life then, in one swift thought. A young woman. Heavy breathing. Hands on thighs. Hungry. And with a fire burning somewhere inside. Determination and hope like an ocean.
I was careless with the only things she’d grown to be careful with. Beauty. Grace. A wispy, half-awake presence. Instead, I was solid. A hunk of flesh. Wearing the red lipstick that she hated. Hair that turned white in the summer and copper in the winter. Not her hair. My flat and round German face. The french nose, the eyes of my father. Up all night writing. Honest. Laughing. My crooked tooth. Scars. Freckles and so tall, thinned out.
I wasted the attention that men gave me. It made my mother cringe. I could always see the cogs in her brain turning whenever we went out together. She’d corner me in bathrooms, insist I wear lip gloss and smile with closed lips. The men she met, the ones I took to bed, were not of her choosing. Gentle men. Stoic men. She hadn’t spent her youth the same way. She had wanted to be coveted. Adored. She couldn’t understand how I had had become someone often caught mid-way through another lover. How I got bored of each of them quickly. How I didn’t want lavish things in return for my affection.
“Stop pushing” she always warned me. I began to wonder, pushing? Pushing against what? I would always ask myself. I didn’t ever know if she was talking to me or at me. Or maybe neither. I supposed that was the mystery she always carried with her.
When I was three, my mother drove a station wagon. It was on its last legs but it had been her first real car. She felt as though she was being inducted into a blissful suburban life at 30. The almost model. The single mother with a young child. Whenever we drove into the city, we had to drive in a big loop. The car puttered along and the door swung open on the wide turn. I was sitting in my little car seat, barely strapped in. Suddenly there was wind everywhere. I had laughed loudly, grabbing at my mother’s long hair as it flew all around me. She had looked back quickly at me and fumbled helplessly with the door. She finally shut it as we pulled onto the highway. I kept trying to grab at her hair, even though it was no longer falling around me and she had turned her attention back to driving.
*still slowly cleaning out old blogs etc.
have always liked this piece for some reason.
Maybe because it’s so…. I don’t even know. Makes me think I can remember what
it’s like to be that girl again*
October 30th, 2012
What it might be like
the empty skin and sky so vast and soft like butter melting in a pan, in the morning on the morning of that first night we touched, where I tried and failed to make use of my words like I might make use of your flesh and bone and vein, held against me and holding down my wrists
with the book of your women and hidden packets of foil under the mattress, in the shadow where I could and couldn’t see through to the other side of a gasp
down and out, up with your full weight pressed against my stomach, worry not and trust me:
hands above your head hands above your head i can’t, i can’t
please, oh yes pull my hair, hit me for further bruises by rice paper bodies to explain to my mother the next time i spend the holidays in her house where none of the doors lock and she finds me often me in the shower, a 19 year old woman or girl with a body all my own now
covered in
clusters of beauty
marks instead of freckles
Evenings after lectures, Sunday mornings in your apartment outside that bar, inside my body and the hovering street lamps, all the yelling and your settling body with nothing to read but my mouth against your fingers, hand to eyelash to kneecap to missionary
god damned that approved position of our bodies, for centuries where
women gasped and thought of England and
I committed the sin instead of spending the night alone in your empty room
with the map of Algonquin Park and all your stories of wilderness,
east coast central
in a place with no ocean
I hum Smiths lyrics to myself while you sleep, once in a while asking what melody it is and when I tell you you say you’ve never heard of them so we both roll over and go to bed.
There is a light
and it does go out
sometimes.
At 19, I only know that I’ll never love you with your red hair
and your massive,
clumsy body
and some nights
in downtown Vancouver
in a building where you carry me
up the stairs most nights
I am young still, so young.
I sit naked, thinking not of you
or my ”prefect body” but of
myself removed from the moment
from the time
from the day as December draws closer
the end of the world looms
my 20th birthday leaps forward and
you pull back to check the condom
You insisted I meet you downtown
on my next day off
by the ocean
in the city we were both
born and raised in.
I’d already boarded a plane
and left the mountains
by the time you learned my name.
You settled instead for
everything else. I was girl
who left, got away somehow.
So you spent entire afternoons
retracing my steps, drinking
coffee in my favorite cafe
and eating waffles at the shit
dinner down the street from
my old apartment.
You fell asleep with my name
in your mouth
not knowing
or caring to
ask what it meant.
Soon you started to swear that
you had seen me one or twice
on the train or the bus
being embraced by an ex-lover
with my hands over my eyes,
laughing
while he pulled me to him
by the waist, you had watched
you said, and wished to be
us then.
You created entire places
where you could find me
after every one
of our conversations.
At 6am covered in dirt and damp
from all the rain on my morning run.
With hickies on my collarbone
From the “wrong” man.
Or in lectures all about books
you never touched, my hand on
my chin, red lipstick
white dress just how I was
in the photos you found of me
with our mutual friends.
And when I met a man
and took him to bed you were
angry because you said
it should have been you.
September turned into
October, into November
And suddenly I was
One year older.
By then I was with someone
new, a man who
fed me coffee in the
mornings and encouraged
my writings.
He and I could have
fallen into
a gentle madness,
had we the chance
to know each other
but
life happens as it always does
and I became half a person,
less and less
with every new medication.
Months later, when I spoke to you
again you were pleased that I’d begun
to hide away pieces of myself,
sad and struggling.
This way nobody would
Know me the way you had
And I’d be coming home to you
soon enough.
So you could scrub me off and
claim the slopes of my body,
draw your fingers over each
beauty mark because to you,
this was the only way,
We were meant for each other
And soon, soon enough
I’d see that.
I could only burn a hole in the world
If you were the one I let touch me
Before bed every single night.
The thing with most men is this:
They say they want a strong,
Independent woman
but when one comes
along they have no idea
what it is that they should do
with her.
Your solution seemed to be
your hands on me
Where you thought
Not a single other person
would be able to reach me.
Your desire was 15 voicemails
later, telling me you wished
You had been the one
to give me something that
would grow and change my body.
Again you said
it should have been you.
I changed my number twice
and have begun to know myself
again
and still, every few months
I cross my fingers
that you’ll keep
away.
(It won’t format properly no matter how much I screw around with the HTML so the flow is all fucked up but I’m the only one bothered by that so whatever 4 ever)
A Partial History on the Things We Don’t Talk About:
Having a little fun at nineteen
turned into having a couple drinks at twenty.
On my birthday that year, you truly
put your hands on me for the first time.
You said I was so elusive, very mysterious
and yet, too honest
how unsettling it was for you
after all those years alone
I was always talking, you professed
and never saying much of anything
with one foot out the door, beer in hand
and the only way you learned
about me was by really watching
and still, even then.
After making love, you’d turn
the lights on just to grab my chin
and look into my eyes those damned eyes
You’d shake your head
turn off the lights then
and let me sleep.
We were always meeting
in strange places
on the steps of the Art Gallery
in the middle of the city and
under it’s bright lights
you wrapped your arms around me
in front of a poem all about
lust you told me you
couldn’t understand the damn thing
and I laughed.
Then you carried me into
the elevator
with a nod to the curator
and dragged my feet across
the marble floors as soon as
we were shut away
as if to say, almost a gasp but this with you
I do know
to press me against the wall,
just for a second, one kiss
only to be released
from your grasp
once we hit the lobby.
Some time later and on
our last night together
you dressed me
so carefully the next morning
Pulling each button through it’s eyelet
up the base of my spine to my neck
and on the edge of the bed
twenty and twenty-six years
while you rolled my socks up my thighs. It was the first time in my life
that I realized people say
“I love you” in a million different ways.
Yours was, “This dress – only you would wear this” On the very day I told you
I wasn’t yours anymore.
And you traced the outlines of the flowers,
moving the dress up just enough
so you could grab the lace slip underneath
with bunches of pastel pink fabric
in your fist as you tied the
matching ribbon around my waist.
As I was leaving you told me
I was made for someone
who better understood poetry.
Someone to push me without
needing to tie my hands
behind my back first.
You were running out of rope
And ways to stick
mathematical equations
into my head.
This was more than two years
ago now and the last time I saw you
at twenty-one, in the middle of the summer,
I was visiting Toronto for only a moment
before flying home.
I sat there in the booth at Nirvana,
wondering whatever it was that
I could have seen in you
as a man
so full of things I didn’t care for
The nineteen year old heart wants
what it wants, I suppose
and you kept on staring at me,
waiting for the first word
to be history
while we split two pitchers
between us
(an old photo to go with an old piece and to fill up this post – sometime in May/June 2014)
A Question, A Word May 21st, 2014
In high waisted jeans, on a bed full of clean laundry I pretend I am not what I am
A woman, I try to think when it is that I could I have become that? With breasts and hips and an uneven number of ribs memories of lovers like fingers, pushing themselves inside of me, leaving the next morning or another afternoon to be away from me
And I decide it is most dangerous to want a man who falls for you like bored housewives fall for charitable causes in such vigorous pursuit of a meaning to life that all their hopes and dreams collide and fall, like tiny empires, across your body after you’ve made love
and I could write a book or two about the things I’ve seen and the ways that I’ve felt but is it worth it now? While you profess the same tired sentiments I heard last September?
Somewhere there is a man, his heart not so full yet but soon enough he will be ready to make new sentences never recycled that are just for me
And I taste the word again, woman as you pull your arms across your scrawny chest
I think again beside a mountain of my clothing, two hours away from a ten hour work shift
did you really think it would be you who could bring me to my knees?
I have not been blogging so much lately as I have been posting old poetry and new quips.
It was on my “End of February” to-do to organize some of my old work.
I can’t help but want to post some of my “better” pieces elsewhere so I’m trying to do that sparingly. Like right now. Writing can be such an intensely personal thing.
When I look back on it, especially a piece like this, I wonder what that time in my life was really like.
As I grow and expand on what it means to be a “writer”,
having an archive of my growth as a person, writer and as a woman
can be pretty dang cool.
Also, slightly embarrassing (as I find this piece to be)
but it’s also sorta feisty and I really like that.
I encourage you to art (a lot) and then save everything (twice)
so you can go back a couple years later
and thank yourself for being
a human being who grows and learns
and changes like a badass.
But also give your old stuff
due respect
for bringing you
to who you are today, whoever
that is or may be in the future.
Three years ago almost, an old series of photographs
to go with my dusty, old poetry.
I’m feeling nostalgic today. Particularly honest.
Most of this old work is ridiculous but it’s all
a part of me.
1.) June 27th, 2012
Sometimes, I really envy people
a glass of wine with dinner
you replaced your margarita in
my favor and sometimes,
I go months without writing anything
we must try, our school teachers told us
if we want to become anything
but I am sitting right now and
lamenting one of those days
where nothing and everything
are the same thing
five days ago,
I was sitting on the balcony
11th floor, warm LA
crying to my mother
over a long-distance phone call
I still cry and phone my mother even though
I am 19 year old woman,
I am,
I am
but sometimes she doesn’t answer her phone
and sometimes … I …?
2.) January 1st, 2012
Thy Flesh, Thy Bone
I don’t know where I am going or how
I will get there
but I know that I am leaving
before the sentence can finish itself
I have my fingers on the map
and my feet out the window
of the second floor building
in the room where we used to
slow dance in our underwear to a symphony of shadows
truth behold, I am always looking for a way out
before I have even found a way in,
oh how this restlessness used to bother you
to no end
I brought you to your knees
slowly until you were kissing the ground with the very
same elbows that held me, cajoled me so many nights
into sleep
this is the secret, small and barely recognizable
only felt in the evenings
when I am very much alone
I cannot throw you far enough away from me
I think about your body and how your muscles arched
to rise and fall
with each breath
like tiny roman empires
surrendering themselves fully to
defeat, the scent ever present, of lust
and in the mornings, too tired to say much
of anything, we excused
our flaws and let our eyes betray us
and you say I am so
full of secrets, that I am a language
you could spend lifetimes learning
but I fear lately and with age, that I have
become a magazine with missing pages
there is nothing of me worth knowing
the small of my back, the spine and its vertebrae,
are common features
to your average woman,
you will
find pieces of me now
everywhere that you look
oh the torture! but nothing useful
in describing
except the tact you use
when you are ripping out the paper from the
bindings
just for a tiny gasp from my mouth
to make me say the things you want to hear
and I am losing density, soon I will no longer be
strong enough
to hold onto this name, nor place and age
So that when you try to find me, years from now
You will ask yourself if I was
ever someone real
3.) February 2011
when you left me, I started writing notes to myself
little notches to measure the time in which
we were apart
first it was just a word, then a sentence
in pen on the palm of my hand(s) then to
my wrists
eventually, I understood that the silence
was everything and they became tattoos
without even really trying
I forgot your first name but every so often
at night, I’d wish to be something more
than a girl, my bones wanted to be called
woman, freedom
and I’d hear you as if you were right there
Instead of in another bed, far away
and with another lover
for another year, another lesson
I am the girl always leaving and never really
knowing how to say goodbye
4.) June 29th, 2012
I am sleeping on the wrong side of the bed
even though neither side
is really the right side
when you have the whole room and your entire body
to yourself, every night
a quarter pack of bobby-pins later
rain, dropping into
the ocean
in a town where everyone pretends
to know me,
the real strawberry blonde
five stray
palm bays later and your bow-tie
hits the soft parts of my thigh
And I want you to know,
that I don’t have much to say
about you, to you,
for you, anymore
and I paint my lips red
because a best-friend once said,
that the best colour
For a sallow girl,
is bright and reckless
just like all my summer freckles
I draw maps in my sleep
on your hands
in an empty bed
in front of a dirty vanity mirror
and I have booked my flights out of this country
with a valid passport
and a different first name
than the one you used to call me
5.) May 10th, 2013
The Great Lakes of Canada
On the fourth day, I begin looking for messages
in my cheerios, drinking almond milk
with tingling disgust so that the
boys won’t notice
how often my body trembles
alone in bed at night, like
a frequency, barely picked up
by the human ear and
although i have scrubbed your
name from my skin, sat long and
hard in the sun, dried out the
pieces like fruit, bittersweet
on the end of my tongue,
I still know where to find you,
at the edge of my bed, with your
hands in my hair
like hooks, digging into my flesh
I could make a map out of this
place with the consistency
of your bite marks
on my flesh
but,
today, your last bruise fades
from my shoulder,
today, you are in the wilderness
on the outskirts of a city I do not
know well,
will never come together
again
so, I am falling out of sleep
and into the daylight like a bird
flying toward the horizon
because I have no where else to
go, you are paddling the great lake
in Algonquin park
with nothing left of me in your blood
and I am pounding my fists against the
wall, the lonely whale in the ocean
who cannot be heard by anyone
but herself
yet still, I am eating my cheerios
quiet and slow,
floating in this god-damned almond milk
soaking up nothing but the way
my love bloomed
and was cut down
by the raging waters of
Ontario and how distant
your body is
in relation to my heart
6.) March 2011
I want to kiss you with my eyes open I want to read to you, lines from books that I don’t remember that have somehow pressed themselves like drying daises between my muscles and bone the same way you press yourself between my lips and hair, falling asleep as a boy that I am not loving with all my heart because my excuses for our escapades are tiny and quiet like the wings on a bird, so fragile and if our tongues were made of glass maybe we would be more careful with speaking but we are made of different metals fused together and could you think of all the jokes, we may or may not have shared over the years? how does it embarrass you to realize that we have spent many of our nights the same way, so in love that it hurt and pulled apart our veins, felt like nails in our skin, pressing down and onward used up all our declarations of innocence other snaps of identity that grew and displaced themselves flowers in jars smaller than their roots and as the years went by, I became less of that woman and more of my own with no one particular, an image, a smell swimming through my veins at the mention of late night binges on letters handwritten, you left by my window and secrets colder than air that seemed to stall our actions but all of these things are relative, somehow subjective and your diction isn’t loud enough, you’re too far away the truth is, I never wanted you as much As you thought
7.)
February 27th, 2013
I bought a pack of Malboro lights today
for myself, for emergencies
this isn’t really a poem, so much as it’s
working guilt into never opening the
pack of cigarettes that I have for no reason
8.) May 1st, 2013
Stay.
I have invented a new language
full of just that word
and my body begins
slowly at first, in the mornings
naked with your fingernails
tracing my ribs
to betray me
this compost heart
ragged
hums the word
over and over
the silent prayer
until I am made of nothing else
but for holy sorrow
and the way you kissed
my mouth
on that first night,
how our bodies broke together
like panes of glass
sharp enough to bleed
and now I’m jumping from cliffs
with my arms around
your neck
up in the early mornings
worshiping the sun
in your place, my bed empty
my arms outstretched, aching
I never wanted you
the way that you thought
until it was too late
to cash in the flights
you’re made of money
not of time
and I don’t want you to go
but you’re already
far, far away
even inside of me
that place sacred, your eyes
clouded with hopes
for a future
that does not include me
and still
this tired heart beats
stay, stay, stay
because it does not know
what else it could be
I’m exhausted, so heavy
with the things I cannot change
the men I will come to know
with fingerprints and tongues
I have no interest in anymore
just you
I am standing endlessly
back straight, spine-tip topped
pouring hot tea on your lap
and these life lessons, designed
to make my bones steel
my kisses lighter..
one after another, as I watch you
pack your things
and walk out the door, I wonder
the use of destiny, cursing God
or natural acts, sins
because I have committed many
I need something to make me weak in the knees,
it would taste and feel
so much better
than your body, on top of me
swallowing all the words
I will spit up later
People will always try to take the salt out of you.
The truth is, you can’t let them
no matter what.
Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light.
Forgive.
Write often.
Never apologize for your strength,
your beauty,
your potential.
Not everyone will understand you.
Not even you sometimes.
Sometimes I don’t get up for hours after my alarm goes off. I sit on the floor and slowly drink one glass of water. I play the Best Of: The Cranberries 1994-2000 on repeat. Eventually I get dressed, put on red lipstick and brush my hair. I don’t do laundry even though there’s a lot of laundry to be done and I don’t clean anything even there are a million things that could use cleaning. I wear lace because I can and I bundle up and I go outside into the bitter cold and I turn my face to the sun.
There are two places I will always find myself in on days like this: art galleries and book stores. I use change to buy a coffee and start wandering. I don’t know the streets yet even though I have been here for almost six months. The seasons are passing by and the days are getting longer. My hair has gotten shorter and I have already changed in more ways than I can see or feel. It’s some kind of wonderful.
I buy a book from a second-store, walk for miles and sit down to a solo dinner. For the first time in ages I turn off my phone. I am too content to ruin the moment with something else. The slow days are the best days. The cold fruit and the empty sky with corridors that smell of every old book you could dream of. If I could paint the slowness in all its glory then I would. Alas, all I can do is write in hopes that every word might come a little closer to the feeling of an empty streetcar just after dark, a bento box of sushi and the idea that I will finally start considering Lake Ontario a decent body of water.
Today I have big goals but I also have smaller and still important pursuits. Eating healthier. Getting more sleep. Getting back into yoga and morning runs. Climbing more trees. Moving into an apartment all my own. Adopting a dog. I am still young, this I know and lucky enough to hopefully have some decades spread out before me to see some more of this crazy and beautiful world.
So You're A Writer? 