Author: Sydney Honsberger-Grant

Believing in someone:

Enjoying them. Liking their ways. Relishing the reliable and savouring surprise, when it comes. Feeling spongey and soft about the things they do for you. Feeling just as sentimental for acts that are of personal impertinence.

Blooming a wispy shade of annoyance at their small protuberances of habit, those that impinge on your own twitches, and carrying on without issue, still. Choosing to abstain from quarrel when their movements are not just as yours might be. Recognizing opportunity for self-reflection in the placid waters of their character. Coming around to the idiosyncratic; appropriating it, furtively, for your own flip book memory.

Sharing the fractal aftershocks of whatever pain rattles deep to their faults, clinking and calling out in tinny echoes on the way down. Knowing you can’t heal much but not letting that scare you; displacing the fantasy of panaceal ability to allow for empathy. Providing in proprietary fashion, be it with comfort or patience or distance. Reserving predictive judgement when their senses fail them, again. More than anything, maintaining certainty that the winds will shift, that their lightness isn’t lost to shifting tides, not for good. And when wheat-coloured sentiments sweep back over aged plains: doing your part for the earth, which waits to be tilled by tenderness.

But also. Showing no signs of fear when wracked with it, for them, for their purpose and contentment and worth and struggles. Sometimes plunging your heart to anchor a ship whose pitching is churning up acid. Standing ground when the panic blisters the barricades you built out yourself. Treading the blanched sidewalk between the lawn of bitten weeds and beetle shells and then the somber asphalt highway, hot with friction and exhaust. Creating from air, as trees, the sustenance to go on without love lost or faith forgone even when every root of your own is bone-dry. Seeing sanity as something that must be passed up and back and forth always, shared continually. Knowing when to wait your turn.

Then seeing afresh the face that implored and has waited and now offers in kind. It’s funny how belief takes its time to uncrush you. Wiring up the emotional billboard to the city supply and displaying what you feel. Morse-coding in tea lights scattered around the house that you will not stop loving, please let’s not add that doubt to the receipts. Relying. Trusting. Thanking. Going on. The accordion of it breathes and there’s air at the blood cells, there’s goodness restored, there’s hope again renewed.

I do things I do not want to do. Tug at chains attached to vessels out of sight, preying behind peach fuzz fog. Cargos of delayed onset trauma, graffitied epithets in neon green tacked all up and down the corrugated faces. My arms are strong, I believe as I pull, sweat pleasantly seeping with the efforts, endorphins blooming up in the foam like overturned seaglass, transparent but softened. No symptoms for miles until mist splits at the fall of some atmospheric axe and I catch sight of the ghost ship leaking in.

I do things that feel like reward then feel like sneaking then feel like guilt. My sunken heels bruise the clay far beneath. To savour is to place a limitation on pleasure but I often scrap the bookends just to enjoy it all the more, as if time and consequence bend both at my intention to extend goodness just for myself, for no other purpose than to keep the dopamine slick as oil cast over water. Surface level hedonism in its most reductive form.

And for all the indulgence braided with self-scorn, I do wonder: can my tendencies get any more banal. Like the swilled tenderness of looking out over the ocean, like photographing a sunset on a fucking phone. Spit me out as the wine offered as blood and the bread as flesh and go find something of substance to consume below board. Treat whatever else as the spoil, the furtive escapist headrush taken in silence at the gate just outside the building. Nothing reliable for me to say as both the criminal and the punisher, one pocket filled with uppers and the other loaded with leaden repercussion. I am better off scattered to sand upon which the barges will inevitably run ground. Every day I wear my feet to bloodless sludge at the mortar of impulse. Happiness as single photons raining erratically through coastal grey. Seagulls hack endlessly overhead.

Two sea-sawing actions, the consequences of which I have been wracked for as long as I can remember: chasing the dragon of whatever small opportunistic pleasure is available to me, and regretting the consumption of it. Calories. Ethanol. Self-indulgent sorrow, and then daydreams. Someone tell me to get a better hobby. I keep going after these razor-edged ideals thinking they’ll provide some splendour and even when they do, what they offer each is never enough to satiate the longing that lingers/languishes in my brain. Neural tissue is difficult to appraise as part of one’s body – compared to muscle, which fatigues, or flesh, which scars – and I despise whatever electrical frizzling of my physiology makes me reach out for second helpings of no-good charge. I can’t control myself around certain whims. I do things that I regret for the sake of momentary movements on a needle measuring units I can’t read. I feel like I’ll never ghost into the body of the pure and demure person I want to be, for at every shoreline is the next best disaster on which I will always choose to imbibe.

He says to me, with one eye ready to rupture – literally; his retina has detached once again and he describes his field of vision as a 16:9 shrouded by a precipitant grey curtain of nothing – in his paternally scolding tone, gentle though it is, “and so tell me. Since we last spoke, did you go get your iron checked?”

Can never lie. Can’t make excuses, either. I have not done what I’d promised to do, and this disappoints him. Despite the triviality of my predicament (which I’d never try to explain outright, as there’s no back pedalling on anything you’ve mentioned to a parent), and the ironic disparity between the columns of health on which we both rest in our gurneys, he chides me. It’s in my best interest to look after myself, he says. Reminding me always of the thinness of human paper; our scrolls could unravel well below our knees, or we would be blessedly scrawled upon by inky import, but we are all of us susceptible to dog-earing, to little irreparable tears if pulled at too quick. My known weak spot is my hemoglobin and, again, I see that parameter as a negligible one, but to my dad it’s the fulcrum entire. Or at least it’s a touchstone, and the only one the two of us can reference without shame (because never could we converse about stranger matters, the barometers that record shifts of mental winds). I tell him, tomorrow, I’ll do it, sure. I believe myself when I say it. The clinic is just past a coffee shop and that sweetens the deal in the pallid immortal brain I possess. As if the sun has to rise just peachy enough for me to draw blood, to make it worth the hassle of waiting at the clinic for a requisition, and then further finding the lab that will allow me to eat at all in the sixteen hours prior to testing. All the while I’m on the phone with him, thinking of his eyesight, the cancelled trip to Portugal which he’d been planning and looking forward to for months. I’d hoped to offer him suggestions of cliffs from which to gaze seaward, aged wine to drink in thoughtful moments, and instead I’m hearing his exhausted recount of procedure.

If they gas his eye tomorrow (don’t ask me what this means in medical terms) he can’t drive for three months. He can’t traverse elevation grades for that will cause the injected bubble behind his retina to expand or collapse and it hurts like all hell. He’s confined to his newish apartment which has been decked with the furniture of our old family house but I know can never provide the comfort that he needs, times like this. He’ll have to lie on his stomach to sleep with his head just a little off kilter for the pressure in his skull. His friends must be hailed like taxis when he needs groceries or a ride to the medical offices at the mall. Not sure what meals will be like for him. Want to cry at the idea of phone-ordered pizza or beef and broccoli noodles every night, while his cherished Paderno pans sit cold as granite behind plywood cupboards.

For all of this, he’s cheery, though he has choice words for the doctor that dawdled on his diagnosis. He says once he hangs up our phone call he’ll see if he can’t finish the movie on Netflix he started three nights ago. He tells me with excitement of the “near-meat” product he bought at the organic market on the block over from his place, how he was able to finesse it into a sauce for pasta and it hits the spot okay and he wouldn’t mind if that’s all he can muster reheating after his surgery tomorrow. For an instant I remember the bolognese he’d make for lasagna and how he would call me over, equally clandestine and proud, to implicate me in the addition of heavy cream to the sauces, whispering that I not tell my mother about the secret butterfat. The wonderful things he can do for one’s soul, however likely to pierce or rip or shred. Fortification through calories and through humble, tartan-splashed panache.

I tell him what I’m eating for dinner because he asks. We talk a little about the Volvo station wagon we might inherit. Idle catch-up for two people far too distant for the love between. Then a return to the tomorrow, the impending, as I struggle to find the placations to apply for his malaise. What do I say to him – hope your day goes good? I recognize my frailty as a well-wisher but he catches me before my own falter, as he would have when I was small, and reminds me that this is okay. This will be manageable. It’s his certainty on this that holds me aloft inches from sandpaper pavement. “I saw this guy at the hospital today,” he begins. “He had just had a stroke. His one hand was all gnarled and he walked with a limp.” So glad you’re not worse off. Can’t imagine not having you sentient; where would I go to learn the things that make me better. “And I knew when I saw him that that guy would trade places with me in a second.” Want to ball up and scrap-bin the page of me for his insight. Profundity I wish I could have inherited. For all the moping I’ve done in my silly life, for the total laziness of my privilege, there’s still a person here that believes I’m cogent enough to understand his lessons, and kind enough to hope that I’ll implement them.

We’ll aim to go on a make-up trip in the spring, we decide: New York, when things start to look green again. He’s long wanted to see a Broadway show, and I know that no matter his vision he’ll have the ears to catch harmonies that break hearts, rouse depressives from their self-mortared caves. Plan for it. Reaffirm that yes okay, I’ll actually go get my iron checked tomorrow. It’s a matter of living, is what he implies – not exactly life or death, but making beautiful the roll of paper you get. Even if it comes to you pockmarked or already scribbled on. I remember that he never wanted kids until he decided it might be selfish not to, and if I were to exist as the child of any other, I’d agree – how dare he conceal this wisdom from me, I a lowly, anemic, feeling-burdened girl, and he the person with limbs outstretched to turn my head to all the goodness in the world, regardless of how little of it I can see.

Do you like yourself? Or, rather, do you hold yourself, let’s say as an out-of-body person with hidden thoughts but demonstrable behaviour, in good regard? Would you want to sit across from yourself on the bus, both of you riding into work as the late February sun splashes in a sweet but unremarkable way out across the water, the view of which one of you can see but maybe the other can’t, maybe one is instead plugged between pillowcase headphones or soaking in idle time quiet as moss? Would you want to be in your own presence for a stumbled moment: just long enough to notice an interesting wrinkle or to question a choice of apparel? Could you go as far as to have a conversation? Would the voice of you reaching out into your space have something to say, something that would make you think for a little bit more than you expected you would, or do you think it’d be more like keeping the trees dry in a rainstorm? Would you have anything to say at all? Would you want to befriend yourself in a happenstance way where the two of you like leaves flutter forth from opposite ends of the park just to land in the lap of a reading babysitter, who has spans of time to allow pleasantries to be exchanged, companionships to be conspired? Swinging interlaced hands at the end of the afternoon. Maybe it would be harder, somewhat jagged at the seams where you and yourself are conjoined; but with benevolence and patience could you find the sewing kit to knick the threads at these places, to make decided stitches and knots at your leisure, as the good grace of time plays itself to mute and each of you grows fond of either canted reflection. Perhaps not, though, not ever. You might hate the sores on your body where they so obviously bleed through the cotton, hate the boorish banter you project in splintered verse. You might see yourself anew and sadistically so, no glass panel to bewitch your brain which houses lenses on every floor, and want in the end in equal quantities to vandalize the figure before you, and to hide from it. Maybe that’s why you’re outside of yourself in the first place: to maim, to reject. Phantoms leering at the portraits in the hall.

Do you like yourself, as you are? If you do, would one of yourself be so kind as to elucidate the method.

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.