Let's Try Something Different

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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....