Coming Home

There are certain problems that go along with moving eight hours away from home ... and another hour and a half away from your original home. One of those problems is that when you're done being angry at everyone and everything, it's no easy task to just go back, to blend in, to make it like it's the good old times again. Because it's not the old times again. It's something new and unfamiliar. All the sudden you all live in different cities and know different people. You pay rent and have sex and go to bars like it's no big deal. Because really, it's not ... until you realize that you're doing all these things without each other.

I realized this coming back home for christmas. For the first time in a long time, all of my old high school friends were going to get together for a belated christmas-esque dinner and drinks. Everyone was going to be there, a rare occasion that happens maybe once a year. Everyone except you, that is. But that's okay. Seeing you again would have put me on edge. I would have been stressed out, I would have had more to drink, I would have tried too hard. So maybe the silver lining is that you were in the States, so I didn't have to think about you too much. The keyword there is 'too much', because deep down I wanted to see you again.

Anyways, I was the first to show up. I had bought a 40 (or was it a 60) of gin, because it was all my (new) small town's liquor store had in stock. I felt foolish, especially since everyone ended up bringing wine. I lost my taste for wine after this past summer, when I had far too much of it far too often. I was a beer person now, but beer didn't seem appropriate for what was a 'family dinner' of sorts. So gin it was, though it was equally out of place.

Slowly the old gang trickled in. We all looked the same, for the most part, which was kind of reassuring. It made grasping at old straws easier. We all laughed and talked about our crazy roommates, who had a drinking problem, which people from our high school were already pregnant...all the cliche shit you think is just for the movies but actually ends up happening.

Eventually, sitting all around the table, we ate, drank, laughed, remembered, predicted, and soaked each other in. There was something endearing about how easy it was to joke with them again, how fluid the conversation was. I was fearful of long pauses that thankfully never came. Looking around, I thought of all the other times that we had sat, drunk, around this same table. Who was there, how we had looked, what we had said, how we felt, what the occasion was. For a moment I was on the outside looking in, happy that after all that time and all those miles, we were still sitting at that same table.

Later we watched a slide show of pictures one of us had compiled of times we had spent together this past year. They were sparse, mostly occurring in the summer time. Some of them though, were individual ones of us snatched from our facebook profiles, of us away at school. It was jarring, seeing each other be ourselves with other people, strangers. I realized that I would never know those moments. Unlike in high school, I wouldn't know all the details of that night. I would be unable to remember them later and make you laugh, because I wasn't invited. My life was somewhere else now, as was yours. That moment was yours and someone else's. Not ours.

When the music came on we didn't dance. No longer were we excited to be drunk, drunk off the sheer thrill of having obtained alcohol. We weren't as lively or as silly or as naive as we had been. Our bodies required a certain setting and social pressure to dance, and this was not it. When the music came on we did not dance.

At the end of the night I crawled into our hosts bed, along with another friend and tried to fall asleep. I wondered how often this would happen. How many more times we could come here and have it be this comfortable. How many more times we could fall asleep in each others beds and cover ourselves in each others blankets and feel at home. I could feel us slowly becoming adults. I was quietly drowning in nostalgia and dread at the same time. For the first time in a long time, I desperately wanted to be back in high school. I wanted to have stupid house parties were we all drank coolers and hugged and talked about it for weeks afterwards. I wanted to be close again, both geographically and emotionally. I wanted this to be a weekly event, not an annual one. I wanted more than anything to wake up and go to the local diner for hungover brunch and then go our separate ways, but still see each other on Monday.

But as I write this I realize that can't happen. Time moves ever on, and moves all of us with it, in all different directions. I'm having a hard time grasping that. See, no one gave me a crash course in growing up. No one told me that I would see my parents as people with flaws, that I would see my friends drift away, that I would feel myself getting older. But it's all happening regardless of my preparedness. So I'm left running to catch up, saving nights like that in a box for when I'm old, and trying to put on a tough face like the rest of you. I'll miss you guys.

Let's Try Something Different

Untitled

Everything decays
Everything crumbles
Everything breaks down

As it always has (around you)
The difference is
I can't feel it anymore (around you)

This pillar I'm standing on keeps rising up
growing, soaring, leaving
Farther away from the turmoil of your earth
soggy & dark & dank & dead

The pillar rises on - made of stone
I am made of stone
Hard marble, smooth granite
Protecting and coating, fixing and mending
Isolating me

A splendid isolation

I don't want to come back down, this facade might snap, might crack
And the last thing I want is to let any bit of you in

So I'll stay up here
while you die at sea level
crumbling, decaying, breaking
Bringing it all down with you
because it's all you have

But not me
Not anymore
I'm too far gone, too high up
Up in the air.

To your diseased fingers, I am
untouchable.

Chloe Barker on a Monday Afternoon

Chloe Barker sat drinking away her problems in a white, middle class condominium in a pristine beach town in the middle of August. What the pristine beach town did not know, however, was how much Chloe hated it. It was completely unaware that Chloe wanted to write all over it with paint, and then burn it all down, preferably while she was naked and shouting anarchist ideology about the terrible bourgeoisie. It’s probably a good thing the little town had no idea, because it would make it very sad. And there is nothing worse than a depressed tourist destination. That’s why Chloe saved all the depression for herself. That’s why Chloe drank wine with ice cubes on a Monday afternoon.

As she sipped the sadness, she realized the irony of her situation. While she hated her mother for trying to drink the pain away, she was attempting to do the exact same thing. Jesus Christ, Chloe did not want to become her mother. She did not want to adopt the characteristics and catch phrases of the failure in the next room. But luckily, her mother was currently in bed, passed out at five in the afternoon (as per usual). So Chloe concluded that she still had a leg up on that sloth she called her mother.

Chloe had an inkling, though she realized how juvenile it was, that she might perhaps be adopted. Unlike most people, Chloe had not cultivated this idea as a child or as an angst ridden, perturbed teenager. It had only recently dawned upon Chloe that she could, potentially, be adopted. It was well known that her mother had had a difficult time conceiving...countless hormone treatments and trips to expensive specialists had been regaled to her many times....a passive aggressive guilt trip, Chloe supposed. ‘I went through THIS MUCH to birth you, and LOOK AT HOW YOU TURNED OUT’ was the subtext to each conception horror story. Anyways, the moral of this paragraph is that who is to say that her parents didn’t turn to adoption in their quest for offspring? It’s totally plausible. They had the money and the desire. And who white people in ‘love’ with money and desire can buy and achieve just about anything. Even an emotionally defective hand me down kid to call their own. That’s some branch of the American Dream, right?

The sun was too bright on Chloe’s back.
The wine was too bitter on Chloe’s lips.
The world was too heavy on Chloe’s shoulders.

Chloe closed her eyes.

Me & Wanting to be a Ghost

Around 365 days ago I wanted to be a ghost.
I wanted to turn into mist. To leave the small dirt encased town I had been merely surviving in and putting up with for so long and disappear to a big, nameless, anonymous city so I too could become nameless and anonymous.
I wanted to slip out of people's consciousness and stop existing in the present tense. I violently needed to abandon everyone and everything, because I felt like I had already been abandoned. I only needed geography to catch up to me.
When the time came I packed my small, retched life into big boxes and left. For good, I said. It was a grey day when I spit on the place that had so many times spit on me and took off without any apologies or goodbyes or explanations or reasons. As I watched that shack of a house, my prison, disappear behind me, the relief of being gone forever washed over me, but didn't mask the resent I still had deep inside.

But even the best laid plans do not always work, and I did not entirely become the shadow that I thought I so desperately wanted to be.

And I'm kind of happy about that.

I'm happy because it's exhausting to hate an entire place. So instead, over the course of 365 days, my hate boiled down to just one individual.

I'm happy because I figured out that growing up doesn't always mean blowing away. And even if it does, there's always a train back to where you started.

I'm happy because instead of feeling chained by my past, I feel reassured. There's something peaceful about knowing that everything that has happened can not be undone, for better or worse.

I'm happy because the people I still talk to and see from back home are my friends, so it is easy to forgive. I'm happy because despite my slight departure from life, we are still friends. And we are young, which is something I've missed feeling. I've missed singing at the top of my lungs and sticking my head out of sun roofs and remembering old times and dancing terribly and laughing too hard and living with the people who have shaped me the most.

So yes, I am happy. Which, in the end, is what I actually wanted. I just didn't know how to get there.

Him.

( It's so hard to write about him without feeling cliche and cheesy and ridiculous and idiotic. But I'm going to try anyways. It's not very original, it's not very clever, but it's something. )










I love him.
I love him when he's just waking up. When the grey morning light creeps in and pokes at his un-spectacled eyes.
I love him when he's about to fall asleep. When I can feel his wonderful body slowing down, and giving in to dreaming.
I love him when he's standing next to me, making perfect omelettes for un-perfect little me.
I love him when he's sitting across from me at a tacky restaurant on the side of the highway.
I love him when we skate along the canal at 11 at night.
I love him when we walk through the camp grounds at 5 in the morning.
I love him when he wears his leather jacket in the winter.
I love him when he wears his jorts in the summer.
I love him in 140 characters.
I love him in 10 page letters.
I love him when we drink coffee together in over priced cafes.
I love him when we drink beer together beside impromptu fires.
I love him when we're holding hands.
I love him when we're wrestling.
I love him in Ontario.
I love him in Saskatchewan.
I love him when he whispers into my ear.
I love him when he screams into a microphone.
I love him when we're watching foreign films in an old movie theatre.
I love him when we're watching 1990's spiderman in his dorm room.
I love him in his purple saturn.
I love him in a white and red bus.
I loved him yesterday.
I love him today.
And I'll love him again tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow....

I Hate The Idea That...

Girls are so much more complicated than guys. Everyone has this idea that men are simple and only need sex and food and sleep, and women are infinitely intriguing creatures that will forever be a mystery. Fuck that, that’s reverse feminism. At the end of the day, we’re all fucked up human beings that have flaws and a subconscious and a tangle of thoughts that cloud our mind. Some of these thoughts are small, some of them big and unanswerable. I want to be a secret, a paradox, an enigma, a perplexity because I’m a human, an individual, not because I possess a uterus.

PS I have a tumblr. Sorry, blogger. www.everydayislaundryday.tumblr.com

Shadows of our Formal Selves

Seeing you again was like seeing a ghost, some mist from my past that was back again to remind me of who I used to be, of what I used to be.

Sneaking peeks and avoiding glances all night, we never said each others names or talked to one another, out of fear that verbal confirmation that we knew each other would send this facade we had silently agreed upon crumbling.

No, we never acknowledged each other despite the fact that everyone else knew about us, and our cliche sordid past full of luke warm trysts in stolen, half forgotten nights.

It was less than a year ago that you picked me up on the side of the road and whisked me off, driving too fast for this small town, our hearts beating too fast for this small town.

There had been many nights that had been like this, but you immediately realized that this one was different. As I cried and trembled in the passenger seat, we both realized just how broken I was.

I fumbled over words, trying to contain them despite the fact that the dam had all but burst. My emotions spilled over. I talked for the thousandth time about how I was dangerously and violently frustrated at being in this cage. About how I felt trapped and suffocated. About how, if I didn’t get out soon, if it turned out that the grass wasn’t greener on the other side, I would die. We both knew that this wasn’t a threat, it was a fact.

You parked in the abandoned lot near my house, and then, for the thousandth time, you thanklessly brought me back down and explained why life was worth it. As I sat shaking, you did what you had always done for me in my moments of defeat. You reassured me that it was this town, it was like an anchor, that the longer I stayed the deeper I would sink. You told me that once I got out, I’d be alright. Everything would be alright.

But would we be alright? Despite all that had happened between us over the years, you said yes, that you would always be my crutch. That we would be there for each other in ways that other people hadn’t been able to. That bonds like this didn’t break.

But a few days later, over stale coffee, I couldn’t admit to either myself or to you, that I had made the most mistakes, that I could have been better, that I knew what I had been doing, that I didn’t want to share you, that I had been the one to run us into the ground.

A week later, I left for good.

And now, months later, here we are again. In the same town that almost killed me, amongst the same people who knew about us but really didn’t, acting as if we have never met each other before.

I suppose, if you would listen, I would tell you I am sorry. But perhaps I’ll never get the chance, perhaps you’ll never know. Perhaps we’ll both continue on, as shadows, as ghosts, as mist, aging until our bodies catch up to our souls. Perhaps that’s life, but I don’t really know.

After all, it was always you that could explain these things to me.

Me & Francesco's: Does Growing Up Mean Selling Out?

This coffee shop is infested with adults. These are the worst possible kind of adults, too. They’re not old and curmudgeony and bitter to the ways of the world. They’re not 40 somethings that are taking a break from their lives of soccer practice and PTA meetings and mandatory sex for a quick latte to numb the pain. Those are the adults I can handle. While they’re full of shit just like everyone else, I can at least sympathize with these old bastards a little. They have been in the game long enough that any and all light inside them has worn out, leaving a husk that I can put up with for a few hours.

But no, these are the worst kind of adults: young adults, a term so paradoxical that it almost betrays the amount of terrible nonsense that these packages of faux-enthusiasm contain.

They’re all fresh out of college: done with being the vagabond artists that they once were, ready to be a part of the norm. Armed with bullshit degrees, they’re all to happy to be off into a bullshit workforce, smiles wide and ready. They prattle on about their prospective new position working for Corporation Incorporated, doing Office Job #472, boasting about how their parents are so proud. I bet. Finally, Suzy took out her piercing and is getting a ‘real job’ (whatever the fuck that means). How does it feel to be just like everyone else now? Apparently, it feels pretty damn great. But not quite great enough, judging from the at home enhancement of their tans and teeth. Keep reaching Suzy. Keep reaching.

These people don’t seem to care about making a difference. For some reason, any and all creative desire for change and revolution has been replaced with power suits and pony tails, all too-perfect and too-perky to be real. With style plucked straight from the pages of Drones Weekly, they adorn themselves in the same overpriced shit as a thousand other desperate 20 somethings, all living, breathing commercials for The GAP. Two blouses and a pair of pumps later, welcome to the rest of your life. Business Casual: The New Everything.

Never mind the fact that mere years ago, they were touting the merits of ethically made clothes and picketing outside of malls, bursting at the seams with a desire to re-design the system. That’s gone now, replaced with fantasies of business meetings and blackberries. They’ve abandoned their dreams of changing the world for a dream of driving a sedan during their hour long commute, ideas of carbon footprints long behind them.

The pair of friends sitting in the window at the front is busy patting themselves on the back for getting promoted within their company. Congratulations, you’re still one of thousands, but now there’s a few people below you on the totem pole of bureaucracy (never mind that you’re eons away from ever cracking management, the impossible to reach summit). Let the accomplishment wash over you in the form of a no foam, no fat chai latte. You deserve this, trooper.

Do those 80 hour weeks seem all worth it now that you got a corporate mug and a slightly bigger cubicle? We all know that success is measured in the amount of shit that you have on your desk, so keep it up until you’ve gotten that complimentary potted shrub you and your idiot co-workers have been drooling over for months. That’s the dream, isn’t it? The perfect desk accessory means a perfect life. Or so the higher-ups tell you. They’re not distracting you with meaningless trinkets and titles, they’re encouraging you to be a better you. Because obviously, they care about you. You’re not just a number to them, you’re a friend. At least that’s what they told Todd, right before the canned him and 300 others during the layoffs. Wonder whatever happened to that bailout money...in unrelated news, your CEO has a new yacht.

I guess that the reason why these people bother me so much is that I can’t tell if I’m looking into a mirror or not. My biggest fear is to become one of these dolts, one of millions that are happy to slowly die under fluorescent lighting as long as it means that they can fill up their houses with shiny, high priced stuff before they finally kick it. If six years down the line me and my friends are commiserating about commutes over coffee, I’m going to jump in front of the first sedan I see.

Me & Woody Allen

Everyone romanticizes themselves.

Some more than others, but at the end of the day, we all have this idea of ourselves that is fairly rosier than reality. I feel like for most of us, we fancy ourselves as characters in a Woody Allen movie. Especially us, the college kids. The one that toss words around like 'avante garde' and 'troubled' and 'fundamentally'. It is this demographic that would like to see themselves, would like to be the very absent-minded, intellectual, complicated, romantic failures who say terrible, witty things and make reference to old Swedish films. Who have neurotic tendencies that come across as endearing, who are old souls, who write novels, who seem 'above it all' and live in severely cultured cities where they see a therapist twice a week to deal with the weight of their own genius.

Sadly, there is a problem with this illusion comes about when you realize two things: firstly, these characters, these fantastic pillars of taste and knowledge and modern living, are in and of themselves idealized versions of Woody Allen, the creator himself. We're constantly trying to make things come out perfectly in art because it's really difficult to do that in life. The characters you see, especially the male leads, are Allen's romanticized versions of himself, brought to life through snappy dialogue and celluloid. The difference between me and Woody Allen, is that Allen is able to project his romanticized self to an audience, who then accept, fall in love with, and eventually aspire to be that version of Allen, even if they don't realize it. Basically what I'm saying is, Allen gets away with it, where as, I don't.

The second epiphany is that ironically, almost brutally so, the characters that Allen creates wouldn't even know who Woody Allen is, let alone go to see his movies. Except for perhaps Woody Allen himself, and even then I'm sure that he probably wouldn't enjoy them, and would go on about how the main character was unlikable.

Woody Allen in 'Annie Hall' would have fucking hated 'Annie Hall'.