What it comes down to is that I stopped writing.
And then I think about birthdays and sitting in the back of streetcars and listening to people talk about someone I know and getting it all wrong but staying silent anyway, because those people are their own social machine, and I am a stranger and content to stay that way. Interaction would change the dynamic, would have to give me a voice and a face and an opinion and above all, I would just be breaking in to say that someone else is bloody wrong, is wrong and smug and possibly an asshole, smearing his own dirty politics all over someone I even loved sometimes, when I remembered not to feel terrified or betrayed. In the back of the bus, I am an apparition, a ghost, and I think, then, where will I be one day when I remember this? Not knowing now, not knowing what city I would be in, what comfortable livingroom, in whose borrowed pyjamas, how that day would destroy so much that was beautiful, when now I can look in a mirror and count the scars scratched in lines across my forehead. Does he realize? Does he listen?
Curled up here in this city I’d like to move to, shedding the skin of my current worn out life, I am annoyed at the job I worked at that’s delaying my EI application, the job I worked for a year and a half that dropped me like a one night stand, that barely noticed when I was there or just never bothered to care, except when my desk was convenient, right next to the new fridge where the Friday beer was kept. The only nice thing was being paid to be ignored, but there’s only so much of that a person can do before their soul starts to atrophy. What happened to being useful, to making the world better somehow, being a force for change? I used to look out the window at the bright shiny office blocks, the extra tall buildings that house EA and Vancouver’s poor excuse for newspaper publishing and think about shattering the glass just to feel some wind on a sunny day.