I dream a dream of white hair shot through black. A smile I’m not used to being turned on me. You move like I do, that wary look around all at ease. It’s disconcerting if I think about it, but I have yet to bother to. Your eyes, they speak to me of the same things I used to remember that mine were interested in. It’s a judgment call I made without me. Elemental lying back and letting the world happen, there’s a bright shadow drifting across the sky with my name on it.
If this were somewhere else, I would be less ready. Tying into someone in a foreign city, I can’t explain it, I’ve done it, it might have happened anyway. There’s so much to see that it blinds me a little. I forget that we don’t know me.
I’m glad we went to see the play. With me was Andrew, Ray, Ian, Ethan, Graham, Matthew, and Dominique. I cried when some of the music came up and I chuckled remembering which jokes were mine to claim. John can be brilliant sometimes and I remember so many days of him sitting in the kitchen glued to our phone. Canada Day was attached to the Jesus Murphy Band. Bill on drums, Johns on guitar, friends gathered together to play music in an old what used to be a church on the north shore. Gonna burn that steeple to the ground, oh lordy. Wandering down to the waterfront, hoping to see some fireworks and running into Ace. A partially wretched day, but one I filled with different flavors of love. I was comfortable there and bored, but glowing. This was my time and my people. I was at home in this drafty empty room with stained glass windows and theater humour.
I called him today. He sounds happy. He opened a show last night and was acting in a Yeats while I was gone. I wish I’d known. I would have flown back for it. My time in the rain versus seeing him on stage? No contest. I would have left for the airport that day. I’m taking him for dinner this week, his birthday’s on Monday. It’s so precious to hear him smiling. I want to be there for him and with him when he flips over to fourty-one. I think one day when I’m older I’ll learn to fall out of love, but until then, he’s still intrinsically attached to me. It’s been forever since this time last year, when people came over and Bill Devine covered for me so I might sneak out to get a cake. We lived in the big house then, the homeless home on 53rd with the mural on the wall in the basement. The shower which had it’s own room in a dark corner, where the lightbulb exploded and studded me with little pieces of glass all down my body. Mishka played the violin and smiled so wide I thought her face might break.
