Tag: relationships

having a long day

A burnt out electronica kind of day. Every one of my steps seems to synch with something, even the rain, while the clouds upside seem stitched onto the sky in fast forward, a time lapse capture of crumpled white. The lights shift at the corner with an audible click.

Things are shifting in my home. As the rhythms finally arrive, so we drift apart. David’s finally on the dole, which helps us, but not him. At my insistence, he’s finally begun talking to me, what we worry is that it might be too late. What we worry is that he’ll fall to far inside his head to ever climb out. I am doing my best to wait, but my best is a shaky thing made of fragile days. I feel abandoned underwater, under pressure. Words catch in my throat, ready to burst out as an explosion of pain at the slightest thing.

I find myself awake in the middle of the night, my cheeks wet, with no clear explanation for either fact.

My warm core today is made entirely out of Saturday moments cut up and punctured, clipped together like magazine pictures, inspiration to reference for later. Curled in my seat in Waterfront Theater, singing along to a pop song famous when I was born, recognizing the lines I helped write on stage. Sweet treats of contemplation, pop culture, and intrinsic appreciation. How much has stayed the same, in spite of change. Johnathan’s daughter is in Kindergarten now, he says. I haven’t seen her since her fist was the size of my eye. The soothing song of machines.

things more important than “by the way, want to sleep with me later?”

Over my shoulder, the message lands, beginning with “Happy New Year Lady” and ending with “My love to any animals frozen in your freezer.” What else is there to reply but, “I love you too.”? We were a disaster in Toronto. We’ve been a disaster plenty of times. It is okay that I am Atlantis. Yes, I can see the forest for the trees, and these trees are shaking, waiting for the rain that falls to break them, waiting for the day when your hand takes my hand and we run into the ocean, laughing.

The Queen has a YouTube channel.

I touch both my eyes, and hear the real question, “what is romance to you?” It’s been a question he’s been skirting, trying to fall into step with me, but not having any idea what I might want to expect. I dredge my memory, easily splintering a few emotions, and call up past relationships. Riffling through the options like thank you cards. The day I collected all the light strings in the house and taped them into a giant glowing heart on the wall above the bed. It lived there for over a month, crookedly falling down regularly, charming and gentle. The cookies I baked iced with naughty poetry, the candles I left in a trail like flower petals, she loves you, she loves you not, she loves you, she loves you not, something to count on the way to the bed. Notes left in clothing, under books, inside his wallet, inside the lunch bag. I like your eyes they might say, or you make everything worthwhile. A magic trick recorded at four a.m., exhausted, but glad. The chocolate I made, then left in a tin at the front door of his office, with a calligraphy note signed in invisible ink.

I thought everyone expressed themselves like this, moving through the world with poetry, an unspoken law, but I can see by his tightening smile, so sad, he does not.

explaining heart strings

http://fauxfire.com

A restaurant in Gastown burned down this week, scorching my friend William‘s apartment into ashes with it. For now he’s staying with me and some other people, bouncing around as he tries to pick up his life, while he searches for a more permanent residence. Does anyone need a roommate? $500/month, comes with a cat. He’s clean, he’s tidy, he’s even sort of cute in a blonde looks-like-Jesus sort of way, if you like like them young and sweetly idealistic.

Playing with the moon.

Shuffling facts like piano keys, trying to play this history in the right order. This is how it all went down, this is how the penny dropped, how the worst occurred but the patient survived. I try to keep it light. We’re Talking About Boys as we walk through the rain. Coats slowly soaking through as we make it to a gallery, everything splashing as the words pour out of me. “He brings me clean laundry like a valentine, when I would rather the time was spent folding origami roses.” She is also troubled, someone who should have missed her did not phone. Someone who loves her, but only in sections of time, sliced like wedges of cake iced like a clock. My problems are more and less ephemeral. My heart’s not a mess, it’s simply too clean, too drained of colour and left to beat untroubled like glass.

I’ve waited with her for a bus, then turned in my own direction, continuing as the rain. He is walking toward me, then stops, a stranger, says hello, turns around to walk me home. Unasked, he tells me how his father died and refers to me as a female, leaving me conversationally in the cold. My guess is that he’s been drinking, a faint perfume of anise and something less particular but just as sharp. Mark says hello from the doorway of Falconetti’s, a temporary rescue. We make plans to see each other Sunday and I leave when the strange man’s back is turned. Half a block later he’s there beside me, taking my arm, enduring the rain. We see Jess, wave to her, make more plans. The stranger is taken aback, does not understand how I know all these people. Makes guesses that fail. When we reach my apartment, I make him wait outside. When I return, I am holding an umbrella. “Here, take it,” I say. “Happy holidays.” I do not expect to see him again.

we’re half awake in a fake empire

flyinghousewife: an etsy shop that sells handmade, handwritten letters in different flavour-genres.

I slept on the couch last night, rumpled as a blanket. Lying in the dark living room, trying to absorb the sounds of the rain, the rabbits, and the cats, despairing at sleep, my memory flashed of when I would wear blood red and midnight black stockings, wear them down the street just to the corner store, as if I might as well. Late at night, how do these things happen? I am exhausted, tired of being intimidating. I know what is coming. This is as predictable as pain. He stands in my way, “I won’t let you.” as if his resistance will prove something, as if this is somehow the ideal. I think about how I’ve been trying to make the apartment into somewhere to come back to, a place of colour and grace, looking at him standing in my bedroom doorway, and refuse to simply push past his hands. This is meant to be my home, and so I will make it such, and in this place, I will sleep where I please.

under the floor are the rats and mouse

affirming

We held hands on the bus a lot our first day, as we travelled into unknown relationship territory, glad, fried, tired, and scared. As I said before, our trip back east was truly make or break. We would either come out of it with a lot of our problems fixed or we would come out of it as single people, ready to give up and go our own ways, understanding that we were just not that compatible.

Today we got up, and David made French toast for us while I processed pictures of our trip. Nicole came over, then my mother Vicki, then Ray, to share breakfast, to give presents, (I gave Vicki an orange keyhole scarf for her birthday), and paint the spare room. Our home is ours, and it is a social place, vibrant, with cozy pets and enough comfortable throw pillows for a small army of interior decorators to attack an encampment. (I have a bit of a problem, actually. I just can’t say no to awesome little pillows.) We are a we, stronger for having been forced together with no escape, stronger for spending some days inescapably without any contact. Whatever uncertainty we had was blasted away by the proof of our survival. There are a lot of reasons we shouldn’t be together, but not enough reasons or strong enough reasons to break us apart. Looking at him now, as he examines some of the terrifying things in the fridge that Karen left behind, while our friends are painting in the other room, helping our apartment become a home, and we all listen to my mad, wonderful ex-boy on the stereo sing and play an electrically wired cowboy boot, I’m glad he’s here. I’m glad I found him, and I’m glad I found me.

hold it down

Moonhead, by Andrew Broder:

did you hear the one about the day the moon fell to earth?
it had a crater exactly the size of a human head on it
and it landed on my head and now my head is the moon.
or the one about the day a thousand lives from now

when we return as a team of archeologists
and discover fossils of ourselves in a former life
on the day we spurned our nervous twitch
and found our yearn to hint at winter bliss.
on the day the stars sang the national anthem of sweaty disbelief,
of coelacanth teeth, to scream loud enough
to shatter the roof of a coral reef
and the shrapnel ground up into paint
for robin’s egg colored dream and root beer float,
second hand flavored drool absorbers
and the words “hope” and “home” that sound the same,
smell the same as the day the doe caught a sad snowflake on her
tongue and melted it in an instant
and it tasted like the blackhole’s wild-eyed longing for light,
whether from the starts that radiate
or the planets that reflect it or the eyes that reflect the reflection,
or the eyes looking into those eyes and seeing the reflection of the eyes,
which if all goes according to plan,
will outlast the universe itself.

..::..

Lung is talking about bussing me down to Las Vegas to meet with him and Natasha somewhere near the end of November, and then traveling with them to the Salton Sea, finally to pick up the letter Kyle left there for me sometime last year. As November closes around me and the sun drowns in fallen leaves and crowns itself in flash flood puddles that mirror the endless gray sky, it feels less like a blessing and more like a fairytale already told, like somehow I missed it between one blink and the next, as if these places never really exist, but only hover over pages of books and mimic the careless sheen of photographs, haunting our collective conscious in a waking haze of forgotten days as long as winter dusk.

Out there is the storm, strangely calmed, another twist in the river, another chapter of life. Here is a pool of known days, painting, adjusting, David job hunting, tinkering with very little, watching a movie at home every two days. I’ve said yes. Of course I’ve said yes. I’ve missed Lung, his crackling humour, sharing our puzzle-piece twin set of anger and frustrations. There is no other answer. Now it rests on my workplace, if they will let me leave for a week, to work away for five days. If it all works out, I’ll bus down to Seattle after work on the 21st for Robin’s party on the 22nd, then catch a bus to Vegas from there on the 23rd. My fingers are crossed, my fingers and my heart and my bones and breath. My hope is an elephant living deep inside the cage of my chest, pressing against my skin, forged out of a cello’s long humming strokes of sound, invisible until an answer arrives.

Until then, I won’t know myself. I’ll be a string of notes without direction, as crazy eyed inside as unexpected blood on the hands, a tight rope walker with her lover on the other side and a den full of sharp toothed, hungry lions below.

Meanwhile, Antony and I are e-mailing back and forth, a piano falling from the sky. There’s nothing quite like home. Apparently he arrived in Montreal just over a week after I left, and he’ll be there until half-way through December, far after I would return from the south. Tag, you’re it. Unexpected, how life plays these games of just missed, all the way through, both directions. If he sends me his address, I’m going to try and make sure he gets another palm tree, to keep in touch.

Some times I am lucky and an entire week can go by without missing his laugh. I wonder, occasionally, that I am so changed within since we met. Given all that is fixed, will I ever want to be able to walk away again?

echoes, pretty little thing

SleepyCanSecWestJhayne, by Julia

“I made tea.”


So sweet, I stand in the doorway, looking back over my shoulder, an image from last year, why do they all sleep like that? One thin arm thrown over their face, head attempting to burrow into the mess of silk pillows that cascade across my bed. If I took a picture, it would seem almost identical to pictures I’ve already taken, heart warm in my chest, smile a permanent part of my skin, the camera a friend and confidant, recording like I love you, safe in this moment, embedded forever, or as long as my digital media will keep. How does life repeat like this? So slyly, so quietly, to perfectly the same, yet with different props, a different body, another frame of mind over reference over history over name. The division of minutes a lie, fabricated like music to make myself feel better about getting older while staying the same. I want flowers to fall from the ceiling, red and orange, a snowstorm of petals to announce this is new, define a change, to create an unreality in the midst of the repetition, floral scents as solid as mist, as solid as my feelings seeing this, as I look over my shoulder to see him in the bed, arm up and over, time traveling stock still, a year ago, a different man, yet still here.

when you’re jonesing, you’re jonesing

Stephen Fry video birthday card to the Free Software Foundation’s GNU project

Tonight I leave for Seattle, which might not be the most clever thing I’ve ever done, considering that next week we leave for back east, (for which I have barely prepared for), but the ticket is bought, the plans are made, and I can’t help but look forward to it. A group of us are going dancing tonight, there’s ANACHROTECHNOFETISHISM tomorrow, then then Nicole rides into town with her imaginary boyfriend in time for Eliza‘s solo show on Saturday which we plan to follow with a night of sci-geek concertry at the Funhouse.

Next week, David and I leave for Montreal, (on the same bus as Karen New, coincidentally enough), and make or break our relationship as we travel together, nonstop for two weeks, six days of which will be spent on in transit, knees together, prairies outside. We’ve had a lot to work out since he took off on me at the folk fest, which hurt him more than it did me, and as he finds it significantly more difficult than I do to communicate, my patience has been eroded away, until I can’t bear to bring anything up anymore. I suspect that being trapped together in a bus will be, at least in part, a last ditch attempt to see what intimacy we can bring back from the ashes of his insecurity. Heavy, annoying, and heart-felt, I know.

Thankfully, there will be little stop overs in Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, and Ottawa! Yay!

In Calgary, Gavin and Michael might track us down for tea, in Winnipeg, my cousin Francis is going to swing by, and I might be lucky enough to reconnect with Darren in Ottawa. One thing remains, however, does anyone here live in Regina?

I’m just twisting inside, uncertain how I will ever sleep again

(I’m not giving up. I don’t feel like crying.) My restless heart is awake tonight. The love of my life so far called up from Los Angeles where he lives and works in Hollywood, tonight fixing the green screen behind a mechanized animatronic badger some pool soul created for a Wisconsin lotto campaign, because that’s just how the world is some times. He moved a few months ago, changed apartments, because his roommates were having a baby, and tonight she’s gone into labour. The father was text messaging him the scale of dilation as the news came in as he and his wife prepared in the same room Angelina Jolie gave birth to her baby twins in. Strings to my heart from his, I’m not sure how tonight I will sleep. David lives here like a knock-off imitation of the real thing, flushed with sleep in the bed behind me as I chatter, endlessly, joyfully, down south, a river of miles away. I wake him, briefly, when Antony’s iPhone runs out of batteries, and he’s grumpy with me, annoyed, red-eyed, and I wonder if he feels as displaced as I do. I still think of Tony as my boyfriend, my skinny mad lover too rich and too clever and too handsome for anyone to live up to. He’s a couple of weeks recently only a month begun dating a performance artist, some woman named Michelle, I think, with a mad friend he doesn’t like. He didn’t tell me before for gentle worry it would be cruel to send a note. Deliriously, he is right. (We are declawed, yet holding back our teeth, soft like cats, cinnamon and sweet.) He tells me that she isn’t very attentive, a whole week went by without a call, without contact, and I feel justified, while I laugh with him about fallacy, how we get caught in these dramatic traps like early twenties, just teens, just out into life. Before me, there was no-one for ten years, a decade alone, and all these details, streaming through my blood like jade in my arteries, not jealousy, but something more mundane, a sallow sadness, not very good at expression, that loves him like the sky, oh loves him still, and stronger than I care for anything else in my life, the one here I have been trying so hard to build, so keenly, like he’s a knife I hold in my hand to keep myself safe, the city nothing to me, the distance, the far flung dreams of walking, of taking one step after the other, until I find myself there, waiting at his door, flowers in my hand like a scream.

what I’ve been doing for my birthday

My birthday wasn’t very much of a birthday. There was breakfast with Jenn, who had stayed over the night before after going to Sam‘s script reading with me, and Christina, who’s staying here until she moves to Montreal on Sunday, the wild girl, and tea with Paula, then some people I don’t see often enough came over for cake. It could have happened any day of the week, a day like that. It was almost an accident that it was my birthday at all, a slip of the calendar.

Today, however, was completely crammed full of lovely unexpected. (Friday gets extra points because Friday is the day David and I have to sleep in, swearing off the alarm, we lie in bed like it’s a favourite song on permanent repeat.) Dominique called saying let’s go for lunch, with Lung calling almost right after to say he was coming over with a birthday present. As we waited for them to arrive, Christina, David and I had the rest of the birthday cake for breakfast, starting a sugar theme that was to last the rest of the day. Once we had everyone in one place, we went over to 7th for Chinese food, then out to Kitsilano for something called The Unicorn.

The Unicorn is a dessert offered at the first Vera’s Burger Shack. It’s every kind of ice-cream and every kind of topping they have, all at once, for thirty dollars but free if you finish it alone. It has a reputation of defeating grown men who think they have a serious capacity for gluttony. Be that as it may, it’s been on my List Of Things I Have To Try for quite awhile. I didn’t eat it alone, however, as we all took a spoon, but even so, we almost died. Five of us, and we couldn’t manage to eat the last peanut butter cup. It sat in the bottom of the pitcher like a soggy accusation.

After that, there was very little we could do but sit, so we gingerly picked our way to Kitsilano beach and sat in the grass, laughing at our delicious folly, holding our bellies, and sitting as still as we could. This, of course, is when Lung decides he has to try and sit on my head. Hooray for Lung, picking on a poor little woman like me. My favourite photo of this sad, sad debacle is not of Lung cradling his not-quite-sprained finger as I sat on him instead, a knee in the middle of his back, but when Christina just about fell on top of him trying to wrest his camera away as he insisted on using the last shot in his camera to take her picture. Her t-shirt, as it clearly shows in the next photos, says, I PWN BOYS.

Next we went to PLANET BINGO, the mysterious, very large building at Main and 11th, that I had always wanted to explore. David and I had stepped in once but had immediately retreated, overcome by the over-powering feeling that we had gone through an airlock into a muted David Lynch scene, as if we would discover a midget dancing backward with a bright pink ink dabber. The idea of going as a group lent us impetus, made it feel safer, (as it happens, Dominique had always wanted to go too), a sense of security which almost immediately proved to be false.

The place was an anthropological experience, through and through. Rows of vacant squares filled with meaningless numbers, blotted out by hands moving almost automatically as a soft, harmless voice recited numbers over speakers set into the walls, as if thorazine were free at the door. There was no natural light. The bottom floor was resident to a hundred people, easy, lined up like refugees, hopeless, frugal, and addicted, there for no other reason but to be there. As soon as we discovered there was an upstairs, with electronic bingo, we fled up the institutional, darkened stone stairs. Computers would be less of a threat, somehow, familiar, and requiring interaction of a sort we didn’t have to buy markers for.

We entertained the notion of trying out the second floor just to be surrounded by more weirdness, but it was too full, we wouldn’t have been able to sit together, and none of us felt comfortable being isolated there, so we went up to the third. (Hurried whispers, “There’s three floors, they said!” “Three??” “Three.“). The third turned out to be perfect. Miniature disco balls hung from the ceiling, explained by a sign on the wall that said Planet Bingo’s Lunar Lounge. It was possible to see that the windows had been spray-painted black sometime about thirty years ago, a time measured in how the paint had flaked away, showing a slight snow of sunlight in the cracks.

Not knowing what we were doing, we were reduced to the hive mind collective of the lost tourist, trying to pool knowledge in an effort to over-come the cultural language barrier. Eventually we figured out how to buy cards on the computers, play the games, and decipher the names the games were given, smiling nervously the entire time. Running out of cards was a relief, as if it was an escape, rather than a sad thing, bring unable to play. It was evident we didn’t belong. Blinking into the sky outside, away from the casino false lighting, was wonderful.

Thankfully, PLANET BINGO is only a couple of blocks from where David ostensibly lives, so next came a visit with his bunnies, Fido and Emerson the emo bunny, and a welcome, brief sit-down at his place to catch our breath. The ice-cream, even hours later, was still defeating us.

Dominique left us after that, and our plan of going out to Jenn’s BBQ fell apart as soon as Lung, Christina, and David and I got back to my place. Any movement felt like too much effort, so instead we dropped our left-over’s in the fridge, bounced up the Black Dog where we picked up Lars & the Real Girl, and settled in for the night.

The movie was bloody good, and that brings us to now. Christina and Lung on the fold-out couch, quiet in the dark except for the occasional furniture squeak, David asleep in the bed behind me, and me tapping at the keys, listening to TV On the Radio and happy to be the only one awake. The cats were checking in on me every once and awhile, but I’m pretty sure even they’ve settled in for the night.

Tomorrow we’re all going up the Drive for breakfast, to pick up cat litter and groceries and hit up the bank. (Exciting, I’m sure). Then, yay, double-yay, triple-yay, we’re going to Playland to ride the rides and eat cotton-candy and truly atrocious hot-dogs! (David’s promised to ride a roller-coaster too, for the very first time, for my birthday. I’m very pleased. I love them dearly and want to share. I think Lung’s going to maybe be convinced to try it too. I don’t know yet. He’s a tougher nut to crack.) In the evening, after all the thrilling I’m-going-to-die-on-this-ride/stop-crying-you-sissy excitement has had a chance to wear off, we’re going to the Richmond Night Market for street food. It means putting off job-hunting for a weekend, but somehow, I’m finally all right with that. I didn’t send even one resume off today and I don’t feel guilty at all. I can catch up Sunday, once my friends have gone, and the birthday weekend is over.

Goodnight everyone. I hope you’ve been having a very good week. I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch much. Thank you for the birthday wishes. It’s been mild, but it’s been nice.