Author: Sydney Honsberger-Grant

Cool blue afternoons and their slow drowning in evening solution. Riparian reflections in cloud matter that glimmer ever so meekly. Gritty, tiny sediment in the caverns of hemmed fabric. A butterfly pea and lemon cocktail precipitating pigment in little eddies of sky. The scent somewhere of smoking glass and the sound of candlelight castanet. The flexing and creasing of aluminum vesicles relieved of their ballasts (New Zealand pilsner). And after hours and hours of this, the porch lights turn on.

A lonely war: a world’s worth of soldiers, each in their homes. Summoned to shut doors, abandon walkways, deny the instinct to embrace. The enemy is at large and lurking. Panic traipses from city to city dropping rose petals sewn with toxic ideology. A sociophagic rot crops up in backyards behind white fences and rattly gates, all. The safest camp is the one you keep; barricades are door frames. By the grace of some pantheist god there are pleasantries to be felt, still. A jovial sunburn where the window’s slat of UV has traced its persistence, hour after hour on idle arms. Kitchen herb boxes never better cared for, and pantries never fuller. Bedsheets never more unkempt. Chickpea pebbles awaiting their soak. The last of the milk wiped away at the back of a hand. At four o’clock there’s a siren call of restlessness, and on good days it passes with mercy. Up and down the ranks, there are messages of goodwill. We are not far from each other, though we tell ourselves we must be. A man in his lavender housecoat steps out onto his balcony to observe the eight-ish strawberries and cream of the sky; his semblance refracts into silent counterparts, each in their living rooms, their driveways, their no-windowed basement units. Duty and deference for the many. The plastic of a pasta bag fluttering before salted steam. Ornery can openers teething themselves with rusted gums. Liquor closets never better cared for, and beer fridges never fuller. The last of the Rittenhouse wiped away at the back of a hand. For all the change, the war motive is clear: stay away, fight together; do whatever you need to find the peace in both initiatives. They are not opposed.

Day 5: normalcy opposes essentialism. Today I was trying to describe my discomfort at giving business to select small “grocery stores” which to me seem actually quite non-essential (the ethical butcher, the high-end alimentari) from the passenger seat of an Evo while my boyfriend sought normalcy at the gas pedal’s depression. We don’t ever fight, I maintain, but it became an argument on the drive. I tried to colour-correct my own occupational misgivings by appropriating other employees’ experiences into my own, as in, if I needed to stop going to work for my health, mustn’t these people feel the exact same way? Withhold your patronage, I expounded from my high horse, make do with the ransacked aisles of the Safeway and hold your privileged tongue. But this begged the question of what do these businesses need? Are the clerks and cashiers truly beleaguered by customer existence? Shouldn’t we support them now, while we can, before we dive into the cavernous catalogue of closures, which hovers above our heads every time we refresh the news? These were good points, made by my boyfriend, so I did the look-out-the-window-say-nothing thing for the remainder of the drive. And this was shameful because it became more evident how little I knew of the diametric struggle we’re all facing: how to be normal vs. how to limit ourselves to the essential. I put up a fuss for some reason and what? One particular man was made to feel ashamed by his pursuit of a regular old day cruising around, running errands, his girl buckled in beside him. The hope in this excursion was punctured, irreparably, because I was sad. I shook all the rest of the afternoon like a flayed sapling and let him see the tears in my hair. I said sorry a great many times. I still don’t know what how to weave ordinary goodness into this new life without pricking my fingers.

Old world: the people wake from restful sleeps and recall dreaming of block parties. Kids turned loose on residential alleyways, a row of paternal barbecues blowing blue smoke and the smell of sizzled franks. There’s a soccer ball that keeps weaving in and out of frame like a talisman, a reminder of location. Vibrant northwest poplar leaves usher hushed white noise up and down the street when a wind comes through. Smells, sights, sounds making up meaning. University kids back for the summer, too green to be involved seriously in neighbourhood politics, stand at the edges of their respective driveways pretending to enjoy the Budweiser they’ve been offered by someone’s mom, being sure to remain visually available to the crowd in case the subject of their lonerness is to come up later, at home. And everyone’s homes have been frenzied all afternoon, from the front lawns receiving a hasty tidy to the garages enduring their annual spelunking to retrieve the frisbee that must be buried back there under one of those boxes. Kitchens have been overrun with last-minute potluck import. There are burgers and hot dogs, of course; there is a ping pong table appropriated as a chip/salsa station; there is potato salad and store-bought coleslaw and blackened, butter-lacquered corn-on-the-cob; there are two kinds of summer berry pies and a generous pail of vanilla ice cream set into a cooler of runny ice cubes. Someone had the ecological prudence to go out and get compostable forks and knives (although inevitably most people mistakenly allocate their used cutlery to the garbage, much to that one neighbour’s chagrin). After the cookout act is more or less over – nothing but salty sand at the bottom of the chip bags, one or two propane tanks spent in valour, the minimum number of helpings so as to be polite removed from the platter of ambrosia salad – there is an earnest attempt to get a baseball game going, over in the park next to the school, just a few minutes’ walk away. Some parents jump at the chance like they really have been waiting all summer for this. Some need to get their mucked-up kids washed and to bed, and they say their goodbyes with pragmatic decorum. Some exchange little winks and say yeah we’ll meet you there and then go off to someone’s house to quickly share a joint. The cleanup team moves in like a parade of volunteer ants, doing their best to hunt down stray napkins and return lent dishware to their corresponding street numbers. The alleyways still echo with cacophonous running shoe rhythm. The sun doesn’t plan to retire just yet. The evening of this dream only melts when sleep loses its hold over the restful, wandering heads.

Welcome, mirth: there are three wine bottles on the countertop and two are open. The spirits are high – eager, almost – with dinner frying up in coquettishly sparking oil, with the Amazoned board game at the ready atop the coffee table. We blame our reckless joy on a scrap of old lore: “Thank god it’s Friday.” The most menial things can be so wonderful, can’t they? As in, we can’t help but tease out vestigial import in a time of now-meaningless calendar days, and though we’ve suckled beer like guileless calves all week we can now dip shamelessly into full-on inebriation. We can emulsify our diminishing acumen with the warbled and confusing picture of our world; like dissolves like.

Breweries are rolling out vans, outfitted internally like beehives of cardboard and aluminum; the sharpest of the Apoidea couldn’t produce liquid so sweet. Wine bars are rescinding their closure-announcement heartbreak, now rallying bicycle fleets weighted with panniers that clink. The search term “quarantini” reached peak popularity on March 14. Media content is extolling the home-alone libation, pontificating about the bottle of $9 rosé, heralding old fashioneds and negronis as glass-bound, minimalist piety. Never has there been a better time to indulge in drink.

In our home, there’s been an evacuation of guilt – for the hangover, for the gradual ethanol poisoning, for the induced delusion and forgetfulness sure to confuse our next-day reality – and that alone is levity of a novel age. How fluidly we embrace the lack of badness, when we can. Cheersing friends from last lifetime through twinned phone screens. Pre- and post-dinner tipples at the work-from-home dining table. Saying “one more” at least twice. And languishing, languishing, languishing until all the week’s restlessness precipitates sleep. Tossing and waking in the night, yes, but with pleasant anamnestic glimmers to put us back under.

7: It is from the safety of my duvet that I may soliloquize. It feels selfish to stale on my own faint little woes, but I’ll be the first to say I am selfish by nature, and it turns out I’m even more selfish mid-pandemic. I oscillate between unfounded merriness and sweltering discomfort, relying on the hour-by-hour presence of dread to influence my behaviour. These times are not normal; we know this. We all understand the loneliness of keeping apart, the spoiled sincerity of missing our favourite bars, the frantic fear of impeding the personal space of another human in the outdoors. I just don’t know how to reconcile what we know with what I need in order to keep existing.

There is said to be comfort in that we have no choice but to assimilate into this new culture. The platitude dictates we are all in this together. It’s just that, selfishly, again, I tend to fixate more favourably on the brain and body I keep than I do the big picture, and I can’t help but wonder of the micro-crisis that threatens to really snap the spine of this situation. Put plainly: what if you very much dislike yourself and you also must be isolating? Your brain, your body, are the only companions allowable. Today’s bespoke strangeness was just a blooming blue bruise under my skin; a preview. I extrapolate the losses – of work, of routine, of purpose – and it seems that the sadness really could get much worse.

Time gave up on its march and has taken a rest. All afternoon I might remain in bed, air-tight in my feelings, watching a hopeless sun poke in and out of the world. The floor of our house creaks with the action of braver roommates, who wake up to the same weird reality and quell the misery long enough to start their work days, however altered, however disheartening. Or they move around the knickknacks on their cerebral shelving, slicking dust into atmospheric mist, take up an old artifact – a hobby, a lesson, a novel – and involve their concern in their discovery. And outside there are families out for a walk, toddlers in step with the whistling metric of stroller wheels; maybe there were pancakes for breakfast, a rare treat turned necessary pleasantry. The platitude dictates. How to catch this sentiment and keep it fluttering within my fingers, though. How to stack all the water cups left near the bed and levitate them to the sink. How to be good, and be safe, and be normal.

All afternoon and then evening. Yellow panels on wooden siding, where the sunset tarries. My room still a safehaven of inaction against the turbulence beyond. But then percussion, of a sort, clatters upwards and invites itself in at the window. Tin or aluminum, crowing with glee. And voices of neighbours and their kids, and clapping from the house across the street. An inexplicable horn, a rusted, beaten dinner bell. My half-crooned elegy softens, fades, before the happy and unexpected music. Strangers shouting thank you! Utility trucks braying, their operators leaning out the windows to be caressed by the shimmery sound. Very far away, tankers’ calls harmonizing in their imperfect consonance, swelling to meet actual cheers in the city’s salt-washed bays. Hand-made posters with smiley stick figure faces hanging in street-view windows. Police vehicles in praise outside the hospital, blinking their triptych colours like they were fairy lights. Sentiment rising with the relief of a candle just blown out, at ease and still warm and no longer suffocating.

I thought joy, in these times, had to be predicated by sorrow, or else be irrational. As if tenderness doesn’t count right now, as if my sorrow alone could achieve any higher-order meaning. There is a lot of darkness and we each get our piece; mine is real, yours is real, each claim varies but all are strung together by validity. There is no patchwork cloth extant, though, that doesn’t also have room for gratitude. And I forget this all the time – selfish by nature – but there are better people out there living, listening, posting up in their homes all alone for the initiative, walking into hospital wards where they will show courage and fight for the dying, recruiting supplies for those without, distributing goods free-of-charge because their liquidity does not outweigh their morals, giving aid through whatever channel and in whatever currency, calling, checking in, remembering to smile especially now, performing essential duties despite the mounting risk, writing reports and compiling statistics because knowledge is paramount, researching, inventing, waiving rent, leaving notes at doorsteps offering help getting groceries, arranging group chats to see make sure everyone is okay, sitting on the patio ringing a rusted dinner bell to say thank you with each sonorous spark and making sure to pour a little beer for me and shaking me out of my sheets to come down and join in. So down the stairs my body goes. Out onto the porch to clap. I don’t act in jest, nor to play a role. Part of it is big and wide; part of it is intended for the handful of faces keeping me lucid.

And I do not know what more to say now than thank you. Thank you, and it’s still very hard sometimes, but it’s better to see familiar faces through the fog. The platitude dictates in honesty and with love.

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Something beyond is bad enough to wake you, which wakes me. Groggy, half-blind, whipped to worry, we peer into the slipping blindspot at the horizon, blink through a sunrise aching with terrible cold. The haze of the corona is magnetic and we are paperclips, little malleable gizmoids of function lost. Few intelligible phrases for what’s swelling at the margins. A bleed out of maybe misted rain but all that’s come yet are the gales. Tarps on back porches play with the force of lift. A rapping hales from unknown origin. Is it worth shutting the windows this early? Not quick enough: out flees the sweetly stagnant bedroom air, without pageantry or promise to return. It’s so early still let’s just go back to sleep? Turning over and passing water back and forth as if the glass’s weight will pin us down. Naive, we are. No lulling anymore. An inverse gust is sucking us into vacancy, neither of us dressed, a sheen on your troubled skin unlike any satin I’ve seen. The fog lays its hand on you first.

Into that current and the last thing you hear is the first strand of my promise, dwindling through thick air slow and weary. The words are gulped down by cloud cover, a silent mandible with scary teeth. I chant it all again like a hex as I plunge for the window: you will not go without me into this upswell of season. I’ll be just as windbroken as you, spooned up and sublimated to be showered down, butchered over storm drains, icicled in a cold sea. Snow, somewhere, as if this were a fatal state. Surely we’ll see spring again, and what then? A part of you will fuse to the knees of a pollinator. A pixel of you will blaze a tropical pink, late late late in an evening’s retirement. Your neurology can’t dissipate so hopelessly, I won’t have it. There are planter boxes in your friends’ backyards. If a granule of me is seeded there, I promise you’ll be, too.

A cyclothymic approach to hosting: absolute maxima, local minima, inflection points, slopes corresponding to varying tangents. Sometimes it feels like I could make a grocery list for all the different joys I could behold, all of the jarred ones, artisanal ones, plain ones beneath recyclable glass and shelved at the supermarket. Shopping around in endless bliss. Embarking on a trip to see the butcher, the baker, and you know what? The fucking candle stick maker. Tote bags sliding off my shoulders but total euphoria propping upright my busy body. Hours writing over dashed lines in the kitchen, marking my trail between sink/stove/surface. Things to be prepped early and refrigerated. Things to be minced so as to be added to things diced. Things to be assembled only at the very first knock at the door, the whining of the old hinges availing historic friends that enter before the hostess’s voice can pierce the foyer, beckoning come, pour yourself a drink, I have all the world’s love to offer you.

And at other times, it is inability. A human-sized vat of inadequacy trying to articulate a chef’s knife. Don’t arrive. Don’t you dare, I don’t have it in me. There is so little left of me that hasn’t been appropriated by sour self-hatred. Your venue will be marred by social obligation and despair; the food will be salted with tears. Please not today, not this week nor this month, when the reality setting its own place at the table has already vocalized its authoritarian needs. It has dictated the courses and the beverages to be served, exploited the help in white gloves standing anxiously before the rapidly cooling entrees. I cannot contribute, even as a pseudonym, in this circumstance. My approximations to love – food, drink, service – have been muddled by a brash bat with heedless aim.

But still there is so much virtue in the washwater, scalding and cleansing and real. Unless I really did fuck it all up with poor taste, with bland despondency, there will linger in my brain some mathematical formula that renders every night a success, however protracted, however tiny. This home is at worst a place to be fed; it can be wonderful when the galaxies graph themselves just so. Perhaps it’s not solely my work to extrapolate what seems good and to turn every pressure point into pre-nostalgic glory, as in maybe that’s a form of aggrandizement that cannot be deliverable without effect. There’s bread in the oven but you’ll have to wait. Let us all sit and imbibe and nurture the elements of humanity that have nothing to do with hosting and appreciate the lineage that led us here. Talk about our trajectories. Talk about our fears. Neglect the origin of the offerings and put forth, as a collective, the scraps and sustenances that proliferate friendship. Fuck the pageantry. Embrace the voices carried rainward inside to be lit over indigo stovetop flame.

Pull out the pixels of snow under the streetlights. Cross-reference their hex codes to an image search. Find colloquial names for the shades. Peach? Fulvous? Jonquil? Champagne? Imagine the many nights before that snow has landed just to be illuminated by man-made photons, permitting crude interpretation for letters like these. Watch cautious car beams slither over the road, conjuring Cosmic Latte on the slickest strips. Think wishfully to a sunny morning, hope for blues of unimaginable character. New whims at a new dawn and a crystal crunch underfoot.

Tonight you spoke about the colour of our skin under the neon red lights of the bar and how one half of my face was swallowed by algal green of shadow. You name-dropped Colour Theory and reconstructed an exchange with a professor you’d had as a painting student, when all your woes lived within not knowing what percentage of Cobalt Blue you needed to describe flesh. I could listen to your edification until that precious Robin’s Egg morning perforated night. We walked back to our car on snow so vibrantly lit as to be itself electric. You stick-handled our way out of an alleyway rut and drove us home out of sight of the wind. Pick a shade and follow the route that matches best by the blessings of stoplights, of business signs. Transform predicated hues into the way back. Ache to a halt over wheel-churned slush. Dimgray, Gainsboro, Silver.

Now we mime sleep beneath a lamp licked by gold. Olive waits for things to happen in her blackness. You shine to me from a bed of rusty pink and an ivory that’s been through the hot cycle. Warm me up for always. Choose me in your crosshairs. Tell me about your first memory of snow. What exact colour was it by your recollection? Tomorrow, salt the walkway and note the absolute absence of hue.

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There are very few things I remember about our kitchen pre-renovation. Oak or else some other very bland wood panelling. Awkward crevasses above cabinets into which our cat would wedge himself tight. An oven with strange doors. I remember birthday cake at a central table much too small for the space and childish play on the seventies flooring. What did I know then of space or decor? Anyone with eyes could see how dreary it was. Yet the kitchen had synonymized itself with home, and I was attached to it, and I was uselessly frustrated when word got out that it was to be gutted.

I was eight or nine when my mom took my sister and I on a harrowingly long road trip to the south east industrial district to consult with the woman who would become our designer. Her name was Patricia, and she had a smart pixie cut, bleached blonde. She seemed to hum with the electricity of an artist. She made me feel very adult when she shook my hand, my other arm cradling The Prisoner of Azkaban. The consultation was either very long or very brief, and I was keenly aware even at that age of my mom’s fastidiousness (not to be mistaken for indecision) with design – I thought maybe this woman, as high-voltage as she was, would be refused like the several interior decorators before her.

My mom proved me wrong as she was/is wont to do, and Patricia became a scheduled presence inside our house. Eventually we’d exchange Christmas chocolates, and she would predict my astrological sign with a savvy I attributed to her artistry. She made decisions to which my sister and I were not privy, but which glinted tactically off our girlish proclivities. When she was invited to redo my bedroom, she delighted me by suggesting we colour wash the walls my very favourite shade of lilac. She permitted my entreaty for curtains around my bed and snuck my mom a fine-glitter spray paint to mist the ceiling where my lamp’s light would hit. She hung silky green drapes that would flit like columns of silhouetted leaves when summer wind exhaled through my windows. Whatever target practice she’d taken made had her keen. And more seriously, she beheld my mom’s own wishes like they were hers. She loaded my mom up with fabric swatches for late-evening deliberation in the TV room: dozens of colourful scraps needing to be touched to be understood, needing to be rearranged and rearranged again to be heard. My mom found patience and peace on these nights, kneeling before them like they comprised a textile shrine. This image of her is one of my favourites; it speaks to her gentle, thoughtful handling of beauty.

The renovation itself, once it got going, made it like coming home to a theme park where everything was sawdust and tarp. Carpenters and contractors were given keys to our front door and I imagined befriending these otherworldly labourers, developing an amiable kid-and-adult routine in passing. This was fiction, as it turned out, since there was not all that much to do in a kitchen upended, and the tradesmen were busy with their work. In the months the project took, I’d instead retreat to our reassembled family room downstairs, which in hindsight looked a lot like a dorm common area. Our microwave was relocated down there and heralded as the sole appliance, its throne some makeshift prep-table. We drank milk from plastic cups robbed from a patio set, and rinsed them in the bathroom sink. No memory whatsoever of the food we ate in this interstitial period (likely for the best), but in that halfway room our family managed to eat together, as we always did.

Near the end, there was a whole week we got to stay in a hotel while the hardwood floors were installed. We ate continental breakfasts before school like we were haughty tourists spending the winter abroad. We slept in two queen beds and kept oatmeal bars in the humble kitchenette, and it felt like slanted freedom for a moment. Though, there were several practical hiccups that made me yearn for our usual mundanity. One night, absent of our amply-supplied kitchen drawers at home, my dad had to sharpen a pencil with a pocketknife so I could finish my homework. And I remember the TVs in the hotel lounge were cycling news snippets of a tsunami in Indonesia. My parents talked adultly of the thousands of families displaced from waterlogged homes, of houses ripped from their foundations, of cars and belongings bobbing in the leftover waters. A grown-up imperative to be grateful seemed to swell in our rented room at dark, and so when we returned I tried to enjoy the smell of varnish that was everywhere, tried to find more profound appreciation under chandelier light.

There was no unveiling like I thought there might be, having seen my fair share of Trading Spaces. No Paige Davis to hold our hands, to mirror our expressions of shock and happy gratitude. Things were finished in piecemeal. We transitioned slowly back upstairs and I learned through touch and visual stimuli how our home had surpassed mere familiarity. It had already played tricks on my lexicon, merging bits of language to evoke informed comfort, but during the nights of our sabbatical it sublimated its importance into necessity. We as family members were facets of its corona, each strung together to embody its purpose. We belonged to the home now. My mom had picked the intricate backsplash behind the Wolf range and the matching indigo interior of the ovens. There were cupboards for every boxed snack our bellies could conceive of. We had a fridge that beeped (!!!) when it was left ajar too long. My dad resumed his cooking and I remember sitting at the remarkably large kitchen island, watching him stir frozen peas into macaroni (this preeminent dish would eventually be hailed “kitchen sink casserole,” a family staple). We had nice plates and cutlery that matched, and on more urbane occasions we’d pull out a drawer of all my mom’s chosen linens. It was an injustice even to call it heavenly, when the four of us were granted utility to our home’s transcendent treasures. We’d been given access to territory of the infinite; we felt somewhere in the ground wire of our family how the current predicted love in this room. We’d have an uncountable number of dinner parties with neighbours. I’d haul canvasses into the kitchen to free my nascent grasping at creativity. We would use the space for its intended purposes and wander after meals through the whitespace of limitless amenities. And stern conversations, at the dinner table, when appropriate. And raised voices between daughter and dad, each standing ground on opposite sides of the sink. And fifth-grade handwriting on my sister’s stationary, taped inside the cupboards, dictating which foods were “allowed” and which were not. There was happiness in this redecorated infinity, but inevitably sadness, smallness, guilt. The kitchen was our proxy for a love resistant to human quantification. All we could possibly do and feel, for ourselves and for each other, filled the space through an invisible leak which neither Patricia nor her contractors had the certifications to appraise.

And so my frustration at the onset of this project, this exposure of family care through ivory crown moulding, fell asleep and never awoke like the child of me did when I turned fourteen, when I started wearing eyeliner, when I no longer needed the window-adhesive birthday decorations my mom dug up every year and stuck on the glass of the kitchen doors. And this is okay; it was a girl fearful of change that resisted amendment to the space she thought was hers. She had very little residential imagination given how much her mind mellowed in fictional thought, never considering the possibility of comfort through a conduit of disruption. It seemed like all at once I turned into a semi-person and realized the perfection that had befallen us, went from worry to wonder. How I loved the kitchen for what it was for us. How within it, I grew.

Much later, on my summers spent away from university, I found a greater solace in my place around the table. I worked tens and had Fridays off while my family, now somewhat splintered, was distributed wide; my sister would be at school or at summer school, my dad would be out on the field in some obscurely-named Albertan town, my mom had her own kitchen in her rented apartment while divorce proceedings played themselves out. There would very often be no one around from the time I woke up to the lateish hour approaching dinner, when I’d hear the garage door open (its exact timbre one I can hear to this day) and my dad would come upstairs, a dejected part of him left elsewhere, to deliberate over what we should all make for food. On these Fridays I would languish selfishly in attempting the daily crosswords and make muddy French press by the litre. Leaning over the table, pen in hand, I’d choose between smearing newspaper ink on my elbows or letting my scant flesh surrender its meager heat to the granite countertop; depending on my choice I’d let myself out the kitchen door to sun in Calgary’s unwavering morning UV, or I’d shower and dress for the sake of being presentable for the walls that asked of me decency. These mornings were wonderful for their quiet. For lunch, I’d rustle around the kitchen and snack on Safeway croissants or sandwich meat, not particularly intent on fixing anything special. Then I’d do some more reading outside, or I’d nap in my lilac room, or I’d oscillate between the two. I felt more grown up being alone all day, though eventually I found myself wishing for a little noise, for familiar voices to echo through these chambers in the excellent way I knew was possible. The kitchen could foster solitary reflection and could house tangles of chatty spirits; it needed both to be optimally full. And it was nice to behold this comfort in times that were equally trying and exciting – the house came to know a family unit that was different from exactly how it was at its onset. The room could adapt to the spiritual changes us humans could assault on its fixed form. After a certain Christmas we were all skewed somehow, but from then on we were allowed the space to evolve. We could climb the steps from the garage and be saddened by the disparate narratives of history and present day, and we could peer blinded with optimism into the corners of infinity that had not yet been explored. It was a dwelling that took notes while we sobbed or laughed or got lost in fatal thought. It didn’t judge us outright, though it could have. And maybe this perception is mine only, with my benefit of choice to depart my home for transprovincial schooling, with my ceaseless hope for family that remained good. Maybe my lonely dad, my abandoned sister, my fleeting mom, each felt differently. But this room was still pure to me in the mix of torment. I didn’t have to endure half-full dinners or emptied cabinets; I got to see what I wanted because I held singular belief in the possibilities at a home that was never not there for me. It was around when I was there. We gave to each other for decades. I offered crossword answers and droplets of coffee. I partook in gatherings of all sizes. I might have wished for an invariable family climate but I didn’t determine my love on this basis. The kitchen was always hospitable, always inviting. I was beholden to it but it was in some part mine, too, and so I provided how I could. I hope this was enough, though I’m still not sure exactly who’s doing the counting.

My very last night in that house, we threw a small party. A few of my sister’s friends came to drink wine over the cheese board she and I had put together. The neighbours that still lingered, not yet divorced or moved away, came to imbibe and ask how we were feeling. My mom even turned up to say goodbye, and I got to watch her scurry around her old kitchen with deft familiarity in between fragile chats with bygone friends. My dad was outwardly heartbroken by the sale of the house and kept repeating what was clear: that this was the last good party of ours this kitchen would host. He lingered at the stove where he’d many times hit his head on the hood, at the sink where he’d done the washing up in blistering water every night for twenty years, at his titular seat at the table where he’d dined with family, with friends, sometimes alone. But for all the heavy-handed pours of drink my dad had put on offer and for all the distress of the last few months, I didn’t seem to sink into expected sadness. I don’t know if I should call it levity, nor do I believe it was ignorance of a reality that would grow all the more true in time. It’s true that I’d never be able to return to the same house, to idle in morning light over coffee, to test out recipes on the palates of the loving people in this setting. No longer liable to leave spills on the pricey tile flooring over which my mom exasperatedly fussed. Expired hours of restlessness, of conversation, of pleasant musing. This was the closing parenthesis on the infinite equation, and all that was left unexplored here would remain pristine. But the through line of home was continuing; I could feel it. Like 51° sunshine clearing ambient snow, the house was radiating a certainty that replied in white reflection to the moon. This back-and-forth, this glimmering ember in the settling quiet, enunciated at last the few phonemes I could truly parse. I felt the kitchen’s scripture sink into my ever-aging skin, transcribed its tracings in my ledger of family meaning. This was no photo album, implacable and tangible; this was every force that kept blood flowing in circuitous rhythm. We had needed the space to breath and we would not be without, wherever we went next, whatever other parcel of universe awaited our humble arrival. Little atoms of the kitchen were everywhere: knit into the suitcase half-packed up in my room and lifted from dust on the last of the wine bottles retrieved. It would come with us and effloresce in abstruse dining rooms, grease the hinges of new cupboards, amble between us with familial polarity on all future occasions of celebration. My soft-hearted dad, my particular mom, my amiable sister, and me. And the kitchen, a fifth family member, looking sweetly to the rest of time before it.

Who knows if I said a proper thank you to Patricia, or to my parents for their allotment of time and funds for the renovation. Maybe the aesthetic never mattered and my earliest conviction – that our unembellished home bolstered family – was in its own puerile way most true. Impossible to say, but thank you anyway, thank you for bestowing upon us this endlessness.

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There were a few days when I was sure I would be fired (reason: problematic fucking mice). I started to consider my earliest customers – the ones I find myself talking to most, the ones that offer closeness at a rate that seems to diminish from others as the day progresses – and I wondered what I’d say to them if I knew for certain this was it. What would they think/what would they care. Would there be anything to miss? The routine, likely; the familiarity of every Tuesday for four years and it being me somewhere behind window glare and steam wand sigh. Reliable disposition, reliable back-and-forth. Yes, I’ve tracked the development of your chest piece; I’ve beseeched you for advice on sourcing marble tile; I’ve asked you how your trip to Japan was, how your weekend in Whistler was, how your run along the seawall at last night’s sunset was. Pleasantries abound, probably a platitude thrown in for every shot I lost track of or pitcher I aerated into the warm. The many slip-ups I cast on you, whether you caught them or not, if you were benevolent enough to trust they were accidental or at the least not careless; to some degree every mistake acquaints itself with my awareness and I find it less laborious to do the judgemental work of deciding just how bad the error, just how long that growing queue, than to re-pull or re-steam or re-pour. I think this comes of a safety between us. You can yawn instead of chat; I can forget that you like room in your Americano, because tomorrow there’s nowhere else I’ll be but here, and history hints you’ll be in for your usual. That is truly good. That’s a rare interactional kindness, I think.

But so what if no tomorrow? For the hands loosening the portafilter, the feet scampering up from BOH when the chit printer rattles. Coffee will be provided, doubtless; a face will appear at the far end of the counter, certain as there will be dawn. The nature of my job predicts high turnover but that doesn’t stop me from hoping you’d wonder after me, on future mornings, when you look down into your cup as if the answer to what you woke up fretting is sunken deep beneath crema and microfoam (the way every human does with their coffee). I get that that sentiment is mine and borne of nostalgia and existential dithering. I wouldn’t expect you to be so pointlessly contemplative. The things is I can’t taste what you’ve purchased; I can only pass it over to you, retract my offering hand, hope it’s been good for you in return. And really it has been nice to know you.

I also understand that coffee is coffee. Routine is routine. Even when I’m on the opposite side of the bar, I don’t necessarily project my thoughts, intentions, blessings, good vibes, spiritual tidings, sweet wishes, or agnostic prayers on the barista pouring my drink. In neighbourhoods of caffeine scarcity, I choose the best possible option. It doesn’t escape me that I can be a real judgy asshole about a cafe’s cleanliness/service/drink quality, and still I will return if it’s what’s available; the anticipation of mild disappointment is almost part of the draw. Especially in Vancouver, where coffee shops basically bump into each other, there’s a futility in curating the perfect morning cup, in sifting out that nucleus of comfort that waits singularly among the many other particulate grounds. It’s not to say that I never act on my preferences, but I know that sometimes I simply won’t muster the energy to walk the extra few blocks to the better cafe, or to get on the bus that will take me into Gastown so I can be seen reading an obnoxious book by cool people. I will instead trudge to the closest cafe and indulge myself in a deluded sense of professional superiority while I drink a coffee for which I chose to pay. Sometimes you just go with easy. And that this truth – while I rise at 4:15 and carshare to work and scurry around setting out the patio, sweeping mice droppings, prepping drip batches, and I eventually dial in – might pertain also to my customers correlates with a spike in my self-pity, for sure. I don’t know, do I just want to be seen? Appreciated on some deeper level for being there? I admit to making mistakes, handing over cappuccinos too hot and espresso overextraced; I admit also to being probably pretty unpleasant, some mornings, after nights that saw me mope and cry bad tears about my own lack of worth. And I admit how preposterous it is to ask of decent early morning people to at once engage with me, think about who I might “really” be, and to value my work as more than a transactional service ending in a product. Paid for in full.

Oh to know you. Feel the phantom tendrils of your forearms wrap me to death like ivy felling a tree. To pause at interludes of family and obligation while this episode of life plays to curtain close. Listen to thunder thrum from mountains away. A chinook season raising extant hairs and beating plains with hail let free from a slackening palm. There is understanding that endures such torment. Even under the darkest quilt, restless and solitary, it’s still just like getting mad at the weather.

Little grey hallway with no doors, just a room at the end and a window letting in light so brilliantly there’s really nothing at all to be seen. Baseboards are scarred from the multiple armchairs slugged down and back up from all the years’ moves; iterated velvet so gentle but each wooden leg barbed by shocking ability to bruise the environmental walls.

I think of springtime at UBC. The flitting neon green light of efflorescent fauna against a backdrop of concrete, concrete, glass. I think of the yellowness of trodden fields between cafe and dormitory; the inevitable impact of coffee on structure. A lot of fear in the tessellating negative space under rustled trees, if you felt you could stop to rest even at all. A lot of fear but that spring in step, that stretch of limbs, the gratitude of muscle fibre for having been exerted. And then of course the sideways-sliding self doubt that reworks the syllabi to achieve pernicious discontent, no matter how popsicle-blue that sky. So fuck it, let the fall semester do its worst, but there’s little else to do today but bare shoulders and clavicle, incur later-in-life joint damage in drugstore flipflops, hope April’s last winds hold sympathy. The carefree beach, it calls. Hot good sand upon arrival, a first texture to remind sallow brains of otherworldly bliss (mountains far and wide crumbled each to send themselves to us, by sea), but bisecting the scene ear to ear is that water so heartless and beguiling (pitching out onto the rocks, spraying siren song through lascivious teeth). No one ever called it hypnosis but how was it anything else? It was me and I stood right on the stitches of that seam, I saw the oceanic peril to the west, and opposite, the great uphill through Pacific Sprit, and what I chose to do was walk straight on, never teeter, never commit, return at nothing less than the phonograph’s revival of a play-school bell. It fired precisely when I forgot how tiring it all was, and then all the fretting about choice’s lust was rebooted. Patched in were new pathways, new notational schema, the cozy plaid drop cloth of decaying leaves to soundproof all the many footsteps attached to different people. Coffee, still, a surviving remnant between epochs.

There might be something to be said about determining the pitifulness of your life by your most frequent coffee order. In school I drank far too much Ethical Bean and nameless drip from the conglomerate cafes across campus, but I could still claim this shiny piece of privilege (my meal card) which (paid for by my mom) afforded me one (minimum) daily hazelnut latte from Starbucks. This was a treat, or maybe this was childhood and I was slow to learn what failing a class does to one’s morale, what physiological havoc three allnighters in a week can inflict. I was young. And then you complete your first year and you’re moved one more step up towards the goal of all goals, despite how nauseous you still feel about the whole process – recycling all your purposeless papers, is this a good idea? Passing seems more like the default, as if there’s some administrative spectre who’s had to pull up your file and spend max five seconds thinking of a good reason not to let you come back, and probably they said “I got nothing” and now you’re refreshing your browser at 2pm on a Tuesday in July so you can sign up for classes with scant descriptions and for professors with hopefully a chili pepper. This at year one.
Second year: a lot of instant batons of watery homemade coffee, hauled to morning classes in my prized 20oz tumbler. Less incentive to spend actual money on steamed milk, but insistence on the occasional entitlement to such pleasures, which meant microwaving skim milk in my shared kitchen, articulating delicately with the spoon so as not to wake the roommates. All the while experiencing a devastation of self-awareness re: intellectual stamina, fitness for the learning curve.
Third. I just remember I was “satisfied” with waiting twenty minutes at Tim Hortons for a small coffee, one cream, one sweetener. I do not know what brand of sweetener was used. Let us all forget this spell.
In my fourth and fifth years, I grew wise (I think I can say so now). I found work at a third wave cafe. I thought about espresso extraction. Suddenly Starbucks could not satiate; it was not for me, no matter its population on campus. Now there were places beyond the perforated borders of university that seemed worth experiencing, worth riding a certain bus forty minutes to taste. There was a newfound comfort in these explorations – most often solo – during hours so dearly fond of morning that hardly anyone else crossed my path. There was a life more broad, more expansive than the one I’d dreamed up, even when I’d figured I could guess at the most lenient and limber a mind could be and had set out to sear on that explicit endeavour my own monogram. I hadn’t realized the gift of cafes that served to not solely students, and I hadn’t appreciated that there might be people proud and elegant enough to stand staunchly behind their bars, devoid of terminal illusion. Such a foreign concept, in a way, at that time: that someone might be drawn to creative vocation the way many more knowable faces are drawn to their intellectual staircases. No one ever called that hypnosis but how was it anything else? To think for any moment ever during your four-plus years at school that the entirety of your worth was correlated to your academic standing, to your acknowledgement by professors, to the bylines baring your surname and inconsequential first initial. What irreverence to humanity. But even if I felt it like an itch, I couldn’t name it, the discomfort of being judged routinely by faces blown thin and brains paled, for the sake of erudite purity. Persistence. Proliferation, and not personality. How to then go on in your city, ordering drip you don’t care what variety coffee to make it into the lab shift that’s running you dry, that’s exciting you deeply, that’s seeing you pluck the crania of several mice from their respective thoraces (as an example). Here I speak for the souls unlike me, so valuable in their conquest of knowledge. A little vestigial nodule of me still has hopes that I’ll end up on a path of such glory. Hail to those that sacrifice, that swear feilty to their chosen journals. Listen, if I’d had half the nobility, I’d be branding my martyrdom through every PLOS entry from 2010 to present. Fuck the flesh of me, the personal brain connected to heart-shaped eyeballs; I am merely the embodiment of science, the pursuit of understanding, and be reckoned with I shall not. Or but actually whatever, there was more meaning in the sludge ghosting around my numerous empty coffee cups than there ever was in my crack at the big university world. My singular attempt at post-secondary bliss vs. the semi-daily reverence to a craft that insisted, when all others slept, that I would be awake.

And come September: reappear changed but not exactly. The waves, though peripheral, still lap with their shared incessant tongue, seeking to draw out the most impassioned or the most disparaging; thirsty for either. The towering institution of school, with some ingenious and proprietary and self-aggrandizing technology, boards up the water to uphold Quiet Hours. Steady are the strides but vapid is my headspace, zipped tight to the sheer greenness of arboreal fringe along colloquial paths. Self-awareness seems to bloom in the off-season, as the thousands of us emerge freshly turned by salted waters, newly acquainted with demise. Bad things in the brain here; at least there’s something sweet to be observed for every word typed, maybe even for each retyped. Abundant loveliness that could never be held up with both palms like an offering, like a thing any of us could have owned so as to give away. None of this is or was ours. It’s more like, to be folded into the duvet before a big nap, to experience exponential decay of personal thoughts and hazy twilight whisking frothy all ocular perception, but a value washes into the unknown. And spring happens again and again, chasing itself through cloud and gloom. The light will refract as it always has, splintering itself into millionths upon every stunning infliction of foliage on the mall. Between scholastic pillars will hang pleasure’s sap, crystallized by underuse and sunlight. Joy that springs from the unnamed fissure, the one unclaimed by faculty, is decreed a useless indulgence. Preferable to erode the mind with intention, carving a thriving culvert from cognitive clay. Scraps never meant for the kiln will stay behind and soften like acorns beneath those trees of archaic import. If a unique notion comes from the effort it will be its own kind of true.

Now, blessed with the generosity of time, that light in the room may be a thoroughfare to heaven. Only touch can satisfy the hypotheses, where there is abundance yet so much space to cushion. Sandpaper on an edge of fabric, metal bolts pierced to the underbellies of shelves. Rearrangements are made very often but it’s unclear what purpose proprioception serves. In a space so modular. Through a tunnel so grey, and it really always has been that colour.

Didn’t I say the winter would be harder?

I thought I saw frost on the road this morning; it must have been what caught me on my bike at the vertex of a turn. The poltergeist of my breath appeared in sinusoidal blooms as I skidded and steadied back onto 5th. I’d appraised the cold as something that could hurt only my bare fingers wound around the metal of their brakes, but never the road’s complexion, its virility. Always we are surprised by the first snap after a languishing summer, though these laws apply to us always.

I’m sorry for being feeble when I met you after work. I felt the silence of my reply abrade what emotional stamina I’d stored away since last night. If only I could reserve that capacity under a cap of lard, up cold against the dead brick wall of a cellar. Wouldn’t it be nice to pry open empathy at will. All I could offer you then, after you spoke, was my fumbled diction and sunsetting gaze. There was loss in your sockets where I should’ve seen the afternoon unfolding.

Sometimes I brush up against a rusted lighter in one of my pockets and find just enough heat lying stagnant in its cheap plastic cage to stoke the appetite for abstraction. The right hour strikes and ignites and from wherever we are we walk to the bar seating of choice to wait for one another, ideas and admissions and inquiries foaming readily, achingly, like fresh taps on the wall. This is sometimes, now. A practice approaching anomalous where four months ago it was axiomatic. Though I will try, certainly; I will exert the work on the system. If I survive the next deluge or the first pitch of black ice, I hope to find you in one of the same old spots. More than that I hope to show up unfrozen, not bad like I can be. Not spoiled to cold core by the insistence of thermodynamics, which sets free precious electrons to be spent in some material grave elsewhere, in another season that doesn’t matter now, doesn’t thrum radically enough to remind you why you sit across from me. Poor posture and a bust knee, thinking what if I’d really skimmed on my bike; would blood have done it? A split bone? How much more of not enough before the energy reverses its order and returns to me, out of sympathy maybe, or for mere kinetic balance, all subatomic motion slow and soft as moon-sent snow. And even then, I wonder if the input could hold the necessary charge. I imagine slinking spine-first into sapphire despair. A chin-high pool beneath the secret trees of the park in wintertime. A cryophilic mirage, erasing the matter with me just as the chill settles prettily into neighbourhood air, no trace left but my mirrored imprint, funnelled through to some black hole out of mind.

Yet for the day we’ve had, it’d be nice to shrug our collars up to our ears and embark on a stroll; tonight just cool enough, an opalescence to the pavement, an evergreen aftershave wind coming in tenderly. I go to get my coat and to call to you from the darkness, but there’s that almost-spill again, this time at my trachea, and I realize I have not the words to ask you.