Month: September 2019

She commands me not to leave yet. Stay at the party with her, with dad. She glazes my retreating figure with blown-glass eyes and her voice breaks over her knee when she calls my name. There is only this night, she entreats: this, then when again? December? When I’ll return with my fixations wrapped around some fable of a life that excludes family and about which I boast, I brag, I brandish. I wasn’t there last Christmas, she provides. Nor ever when our game of telephone tag ends; through the wire she must listen to my exaltations of a windswept romance that to her is just babble in ignorant jargon. It’s like she’s telling me I chose to get older when I could have remained a kid with her, always.

But wouldn’t that have been wonderful? She and I lounging catlike on our yellow sectional, pawing at some air of mutual annoyance yet sharing the unfolding of our day in furtive harmony. Hopscotching each other from room to room, seeking space but fearing loneliness, knowing somehow the privilege of being fed up with your sister. We floated out from feuds as quick as July clouds turn to hail. Idling in the kitchen over torn bread and slapdash morsels just to spend time. Falling asleep before afternoon reruns. Keeping each other safe on walks across the neighbourhood while the alleyways’ rabbits bolted at our singsong gibberish. Laughing at silent conveyances so foreign to anyone else we received admonishment many times over for our rudeness, which only served to stoke our twin fires to heights that singed chaperoning firs, bronzed skies that never aged. Looking up to those moons we felt like spirits of a picture book, like mirrored looping letters bound firmly by the spine and parted only by the opening of the pages.

Sadness slips over her cheeks and falls to the lake-damp grass. Sadness and anger, working together in ways that the two of us cannot. She writhes in trying to find better words to employ for the loss that shadows over her, has been darkening her figure for months now. And I never knew; spoiled by firstborn impunity and given the two-handed boost at my shoulder blades which sent me west, while she stayed at the foot of my childhood bed sensing it grow colder each day. I didn’t even look back to find her, she says. Well, I say, the earth is an ellipse and gravity tugs harder at different points in its belly and I’m sorry I got stuck where I am trying to be big, be my own, and now there’s a fortune of reason that’s keeping me planted and I get water here where I am I get love and I can offer it and why don’t you ever visit me don’t you think I miss you all the time and it can’t be all on me or is it just that way because, because. She looks around the lawn to field the incoming party guests, to make sure they don’t perforate the bubble. We deny a stumbling inquirer in tandem and for a second sympathize miserably as we watch him retreat. She has words for me, yet. She starts once more to stutter through her sorrow and I feel the rattling in her spine make its way over to mine. Neither one of us wants to plunge into this place. It’s just like we’re in snowsuits again, wedged both in the barrel of the plastic toboggan, and before us is the slope that will swallow us whole right as our stomachs reach our throats.

You know, you think you have an idea of yourself: you are this tall, you are this complexion, your problem areas as prescribed by sisterly columnists since you were twelve are these, your BMI fluctuates between this number and that number, your pomological body reference is ____ which means you need to wear outfits shaped like ____. And then suddenly, the mean and tessellating mirror steps out before you and your punishment of existence is to look upon its aluminum recomposition of your corporeal impedimenta. Ghastly, is it not? The shock of azure veins and little dents in the dermis, craggy as maritime patterns cast on low-tide beds of rotted sand; the hunkering mass of flesh above each buried notion of a kneecap; the swelling beneath the ribs that refuses to be displaced by better posture or absent breath. Is this always how it’s been? When did I start looking like this and does everyone else see, too?

It’s stupid and it’s vain that this feeling is provoked by bike shorts. I wanted this certain style of short not for biking even though I do a lot of that in earnest. I wanted bike shorts because proper female women sporting their feminine womanly wear decided bike shorts are valuable now: these fragments of attire regulate hormonal trajectories and lustful inquiries and judge whether or not one is deemed worthy of beautiful assignment. I wanted bike shorts despite never once ever feeling any amount, no inch, no ounce, of love for the legs that have grown as stumps from my hips. I wanted bike shorts to prove I was, like the women that navigate ferocious feral tides, an asset to society rather than a defect, of whom there are supposedly many, and against which the preventative terms are so vague and strobing that it’s near impossible to note what’s relevant, aesthetically, just as it’s near impossible to stay sane while updating your aspirational dream log on the daily as you perform check-ins with Instagram and study exiguous sirens on the street in order to grasp what it means to be seductive/insatiable/allowed, only then to lose hold of it all against the sickly sea-surface which foams up to drown you no matter how furious your paddling. I wanted bike shorts to be good enough and does it surprise anyone that I’m not? I plump out like proofed dough. The flesh above my hamstrings is shingled and translucent. I had no good reason to buy them yet I did, and they came to me folded beneath diaphanous tissue, and there was no looking back because to at least point towards a status-based ideal must be better than refusing it. And I fear what would happen to me if I did – refuse it – as in how unseemly would I get, how fine the lattice of cellulite, at what point the jump from pear-shaped to apple, how brutal the objective and conclusive rejection? And if it’s not this season’s bike shorts, it’s winter’s denim or next year’s sundress. It’s anything that meets my body at the juncture of performance and purchase: I weave my way through trends and I ape the style of prettier people, deciding whether or not to drop cash and shed breaths of self-worth at the till in order to continue my aimless pursuit. Stupid and vain, and for the life of me, insurmountable.

Concrete cracked in parallel places and repaved over and over and over again, melting down the sloped road onto Knight Street on which pedestrian vehicles and mammoth cargo alike course onward to their garages, their loading bays, each carrying a tune that from here sounds like the ocean when sequestered by a conch and released at the ear. Gradient blue hills and their precipitative toupees washed behind the foreground bungalow as it dries out from disuse, brittle stems the colour of beechwood planning their slow colonization of the doomed lot, ascending with a tactic uninterpretable to foreign kind. Ancient, aching trees cracking their knuckles and sighing to themselves – with age comes not just wisdom but weariness. Spider webs between every vertices. Hedges as organic address markers. Wheezing from idling cars brushed downstream by gusts crawling through iron gates of lavender, soaked wholly by scent and sound when it rolls past and beyond, approaching pear trees and fearful of rose bushes which snarl at any acknowledgement at all. Slowness abound. The passage of time hides under laminated tracing paper stained as weak coffee and bleached where the graphite sunned itself on the lawn, and the history of it feels like common grass beneath bootless, brazen feet. Stay a while, study the neighbourhood, or don’t.

We live in the kind of municipal pocket that seems mostly unconcerned with the people on its streets. Trees are old; roads are imperfect; we in our dwellings have no say on these details. It’s not malevolent, though, this obliviousness towards us. There is a calming stillness that collects when the sun starts to slant out of sight, as if the streets are on their way to bed and are content to know they’ve left things just as they should be. I get the feeling that we come and go just as neighbours decades ago came and went. We’re more like ants poking around a noble root system, or bivalve shrapnel shored up with every lap of a tide. We exist in numbers but are incapable of leaving any trace. Perhaps part of this idea comes from the circumstances of our living here: by surprise, we settled happily into a house so winsome as to be unsettling. Will we be lucky enough to stay another year? There’s almost no question of whether we deserve to be here, because this place doesn’t deal in matters of should. We are below that consideration. Again, not unkindly. I think that’s just inherent to our smallness. We can sit on our porch and look at the decorations of time, the emotions of locus, and feel our own personal surges of joy or wonder or tenderness, but what we’re experiencing has looked into many more eyes than ours and has stood stalwart against all slices of season. It remains; doubtlessly changed in increment ways, but still. It presides and thinks only of its own vector of existence as nightfall blooms fully and the promise of tomorrow is affirmed. It’s humbling, and it’s enticing, and it’s not at all mine to claim but I’ll surely keep note of the deference I offer, unsolicited though it is.

Remember when I thought we needed two doors between? That two doors would be a sealant on our separate little scrap lives so that love could not tarnish our own heirloom silverware. Two doors and two beds and only a few nights spent saturated in euphoric companionship. In your presence I felt boundless but I couldn’t get straight the arithmetic, couldn’t loosen my grip on the abacus. Mysticism and flowering advances versus reason. Strip me first of desire and leave convictions and axioms intact. Two doors meant keeping safe all the parts of me that wanted, privately, only to be held, healed, hoped for. Two so that twice I’d have to weave through a vacuum chamber where I was at one end with myself and on the other, with you. Even now I think there’s value in the thrill of unlocking doors, leaping over gullies, gaining purchase on tree bark knowing you await me in a spill of leaves. Tumbling upwards and upwards into parts of the troposphere not yet shown to me through love or care, despite all love and care previously known, kept close, wrapped away. Behind my door. And that door and the next were a necessary instalment to protect against exposure, whatever that meant. Don’t grow tired of me, don’t grow frustrated. Please, never bored. If that had meant disparate kitchens, separate living rooms, mirrored pillowcases, I would have owned it outright our through installations of quiet mortgages. But the folly of my conjecture lies in you and your unrelenting permissiveness of effusion. You are the sun-cut space on the hardwood where I sit cross-legged and think and am alive, all my misgivings tucked away with intention but behind lockless robin’s egg cabinets. The duvet we both tug at stretches infinitely at either corner and you whittle room for my daydreams at your dozing belly. Two doors not needed but respectfully granted if ever. Two doors, I don’t think, would make me happy, besides. Two human spaces, more like, and one home.

I think I write most freely when picked up and carried by moments that might be called “tone poems.” Local habitats supplemented by sounds that draw acquiescence from my marrow. Small visual aids that speak. Evocative subject matter is around and boasts of a singular capacity to tap whatever nostalgic nerves are strung up and down my spine, of which I imagine an oak loom wrapped erringly with silk. There is the need to be romanced by the world. Winds free dust from old feelings and the smell of new flowers excite not-yet-known memories. A window’s true glance into bed linens drums more furiously than imagination ever could. And I sometimes wonder what it is about extrinsic participles that convince my brain to give them first rights. The streetlamp at the corner sprouts limbs and with grace flips through prefaces and epilogues to thumb the exact right emotion: it asks me in sepia hues if I remember the drives, as a kid, to go pick up my mom when she worked as late as she did while the portioned dinner my dad had made sat tepid in the microwave, my sister beside me reeling in tandem at every bend my dad took at speed through the night, and I see her face as candlelit in waxy tones each time the sodium of the streetlights falls into harmonic resonance over our car. Why am I struck like this by a recollection so old, and what do I do with the fragments? A path padded by rusted pine needles tempts in vestigial babble, a diamond-mailed fence at its back, the yielding trees watching over like stalwart parents offering genteel supervision to whims. The certain scent of a tended garden springs to kindergarten life and I wonder after the mother of a friend – her second-hand depression, her appropriation of my care which I could never appreciate fully, and now praise. A field of blonde grass under a wind fan, groomed in places where other children learned with their dads how to bike distances, down hills and inevitably back up, and if you listen close the grasshoppers murmur in tune with cotton white dandelion tops destemming themselves; the symphony sings of early fall’s benevolence on sleeveless limbs. There are back alleys that announce on local street signs that the chase of these scraps is feeble where practicality is concerned, and from the futility itself grows a sadness: a cut tie that could have traced back to maybe knowing myself best, whenever that was, wherever I was standing then. Who am I without these intangible touchstones of place, of time, of disposition? How do they piece together, and what grounds lay underfoot in present day.

Will it be this happy and effortless when the cold draws near. We’ll doubtless find beneath auburn foliage little nonpareils of summer’s joy – all we’ve experienced these months, distilled and pipetted into tear drop gemstones, no larger than freckles of sand. We’ve walked distances I’ve not dreamt of before, not all at once, not with a partner. Wet ground and pine litter will welcome us forward into nibbling air and supple evening moodswings. The fall will be fine, the sun ambient and sworn against departing until half asleep and obviously flushed.

More for the winter, I worry. Rain that strikes back small inchworm optimism that dreams of evening patio, evening perch, and halved tall boys dispensed between wineglasses. Trading those summer fruits for the stores of old hurt sitting dusty in the cellar, cobwebs cable-thick with last winter’s sediment. Among the rations: the bleak inevitable state of me as I repair my anemia with unjoyful, unlovable somnolence, resting my eyes beneath a crushed velvet blanket of 4PM ultramarine until restless ringing bursts my viscera and I rise to mime autonomy under electric lights. May as well be the kind of analog clock that gets forgotten each daylight savings, adjusted in retrospect by sunlight running back to scoop up that single hour left behind. Should be planted in April soils but plucked rapaciously before the frost. Barren and wasted in the cold months.

You say we’ll pull out the dutch ovens, the felt blankets; trade beers for bourbon when it’s time. You see the hallways in our house cast over in vignette but right dead centre our mirth will throw light, because our goodness we can soak in kerosene and ignite against the winter’s hunger. Do you say this just to mollify the edges of my threnody, or will you trudge out in the mud to prove that within the basins of your bootprints grows something green and hardy and patient. Will you open the door to pluck vestal snow with your bare hand, calling me over to watch it die by the heat of you. Can you do this winter and winter over, and would you want to, and would the dutiful trips into the cold not seize you at the lungs, at your cheeks lush with capillaries. How much more likely to look out our aerosol window and see the frost sweeping over your jacket’s shoulders and your legs moving forward no more in a final refusal to abide my requests, my shapeshifting sense of safety, while from the pocket of displaced chill air the empty space of me laments further, and forgets warm nights, forgets ease.

I grew up on the foothills, knowing winter as the patricidal successor of all before. Even if romanced by whiteouts and sweet silence under skies haunted by rictus snow, I’ve learned well the merciless ways of the season. Pleasures must be stoked with forethought and fortitude must be sewn into your mitts, your scarves. Seek daylight when in its mercurial benevolence it strikes ground. Sequester vulnerable flesh beneath layers. To idle in the elements means death on your knees, but so too to pine for the lost summer that hears not any mortal calls. To find your hearth I’ll have to stray from my sad-soaked bed and through steam on the river I’ll spy you. The fear is you’ll hear nothing but wind at your door, see nothing but swallowed light staring back.

My first morning on the job the only men above age fifty that I spoke to were better groomed than any human I’d ever seen, and I was shocked that I could feel so minute and beholden to them, these complete male strangers. The women were much the same, but they frightened me.

Subjects of this broad customer base – affluent businesspeople flitting in between meetings or before elevating up to their ocean-view offices; inexplicably surgeried my-aged women strolling up with their lips and nails, wanting almond milk mistos only, all of them; all ranges of the vapid and devoid, the distracted and distant, consumed by phone or by self or by the smallness of me in their shadow, the sight of which I know gives some people elitist fortitude of a special, lonely kind – are certainly not representative of everyone I serve in a day. They do arrive on consistent enough a basis, however, to expect to feel the weight of their wonder at some point during the day. Sometimes the burnout comes later in the afternoon, when sanity dictates a break from any activity; other days, you can see the line forming out the door and you know it’s just a deck of teetering dominoes that by the fancy of the wind will tumble each in your direction, where you stand on your mat in your work boots brushing coffee grinds onto your legs.

For a long time I came to see this tidal wave of personality as a power gradient which favoured me least. Most customers treated their daily (read: horribly stagnant and predictable and boring) trips for coffee as a right, an entitlement. Coffee to people like this is as integral a part of their morning as is brushing their teeth: their day does not really begin until that box has been checked. They’re not fit for the world until they’ve been caffeinated. They can’t imagine embarking on their noble quest of vocational contribution until the americano they hold in the paper cup that will be expedited to the landfill has been consumed, diluted by just the right quantity of cream (oat milk, if vegan).

But let’s allow for an interjection of compassion. Paying for coffee is likely the first chore taken place outside the home in the morning; it demarcates separate realms of heavenly privacy and societal obligation, to the economy, to one’s boss, to the sphere of relative influence refracting sun’s light around a body. The cafe is not unlike a demilitarized zone for the proceedings of the day. You are safe to order coffee whether you are in fact wearing a suit and have paid for a hair treatment in the last week and have a car that could pay my rent. But you are also safe if you’re running late, or unemployed, or depressed. If you’re extracting every delayed second from your morning until you absolutely have to be somewhere. If you’re perfectly friendly and interesting. If you really care about the coffee I get paid my own share to make, or if you do not.

I’ve started to think of an inversion in power. I’ve started to recognize the privilege I’ve had as a witness, the access to these surreptitious minutes spent in a line, exchanging money for goods, presenting to the rest of this neighbourly bubble the form you presently inhabit, for better or worse. A barista’s position is static, meaning limited omniscient: we have eyes on the room but the room is itself our bounds. I can only guess at the frequency of your meetings or how much of the water you can spy from your desk. I don’t know why the attitude, some days. I do though see faces returning, on end, and at each encounter I feel the crystallization of some tacit understanding, between me and them, me and you. One that begets some semblance of appreciation for one another. You see me in a dirty white shirt with stained fingernails, stress-sweating off makeup applied well before dawn; I see you in moments of vulnerability before entering into worlds of decision-making, tactic-enacting, cash-printing. I know you’re not here for too long but it’s where you place your foot before the leap. You live on the other side of the ravine and your fields are groomed and verdant new and make me sigh in my own moments of clandestine contemplation. But I’ll stale and expire if I don’t come to terms with the views. I’ll dial in my shots and somehow find solace in the fact that my home’s already built, underfoot, overhead.