a gradual curve

logic and reason.
they are two forces by which i have so rarely been ruled. they float around my consciousness like so many bits of dust and debris; their influence more often overshadowed by the force of my heart. they beg me to go slowly, to take care, to think through each word before it leaves my lips.

but my heart works so much harder.
and my heart has so many other plans...

since the first day, since the first moment there was a clarity from which i couldn't disconnect, to which i couldn't relate any reason. and so instead of being patient and quiet, i memorized the sound of your voice, the shape of your hands, the movement of your eyes, the pauses in the conversation that were already striking me like lightning.

logic and reason dictate to us that these things take time. they take years to stretch and grow and ebb into a gradual curve. like old, silvercoated photographs that blacken in the natural light, things that happen too quickly can vanish just as quickly.

but...
my heart works so much harder.
and my heart has so many other plans...

never cut what can be untied

it was somewhere between eastern quebec and edmunston where we lost an hour and i saw my first east coast sunset. the highway 2 runs through a section of new brunswick that is largely untouched and there was little to distract from the streaks of pink and orange that stretched across the horizon.

i find it hard to sit still at the best of times, if nineteen hours in a car teaches you anything, it's patience. the highway provides the ideal circumstance for a captive audience and so i sat sideways in the back seat and watched through the rear window.
perception... is such a funny thing, like every sunset that starts off as a full expanse that then focusses into a single point of light before flicking away like a light switch.

and like darkness blaming the absence of light for it's condition, those excuses that you carry around with you are little more than redundancies. the things you do and say, that move you along and fill up the hours of your day are written in your own ink and no one else's, whatever else you might claim.

i have a heart that's working all the time, feeding every inch of me and repairing reserves along the way for additional employers. i got a sense, from time to time, of your inability to do the same, of an alarming disconnection. bits of soul and light and thought and all of those internal organs like so many links of chain that wound themselves slowly into knots...a complicated mess to be sure- but believe me when i say...

you should never cut what can be untied.

the nature of recovery

For my eleventh birthday, my Uncle gave me a book called, "A Glow in the Dark Guide to Decoding the Night Sky". The pages were filled with maps showing the movement of major constellations throughout the year. Since I was born in the early fall, my constellation was Virgo. Looking at that arrangement of stars, it was bewildering to me that someone could have ever deemed them to contain the shape of a woman. I remember standing outside that night with a flashlight, running my fingers over the raised dots and their eerie, chemical glow...trying to compare them to the bits of colourless, old light in the vastness above me. For the life of me, I couldn't find that damn constellation and I guess you could say that it was my first lesson in that happy, old adage, "just because something looks good on paper..."

Every year since then, on my birthday, I go outside and look for it. Admittedly, I've never actually found it, but I've learned to be satisfied in simply knowing that on this day the sky looks, and will always look, exactly as it did the first night I arrived underneath it.

When I moved to Hamilton, the stars seemed to burn further away from me. The lights of the city suffocated their glow and so, two days after my eighteenth birthday, I had the shape of the constellation tattooed on my back. I know it isn't the same thing as finding it for myself, but being able to feel the ridges of colourful scar tissue with my own hands offers, if anything, a comforting familiarity.

It's funny, this mass fascination we have with looking above- be it to the stars or something greater- for comfort, for familiarity, for explanations. In a way, we're biologically predisposed to it. After all, eyes are designed to look in every direction but inward. It so wonderfully facilitates the laying of blame elsewhere, the avoidance of self-analysis and accountability.

Today, I'm twenty-five. For fourteen years, I've attached so much meaning to this constellation. I have a history with it, with looking for it, with wondering how much of me would be different if it were different. If I were born two months earlier, would I understand you better? Would I have learned, as you have, to detach my heart from the rest of my body in order to meet some physical need? Would I have traded in my present attachment to human emotions in order to regard people as disposable and interchangeable? Maybe I would have been less naive, less willing. Maybe I would have cared less, shared less, worn less of myself on your sleeve.

But maybe not.
Maybe there is nothing in me that was destined by my birthday. Maybe I would have been exactly as I am now, only two months older.

Now, despite earlier evidence, earlier symptoms of intelligence, every inch of your disregard is coming out of the woodwork, and as prescriptive as it may seem, your eyes could certainly stand some inward gazing.

And I know... we are who we are who we are, but at the risk of sounding completely ironic, you can't tell me it was written in the stars...

like some desert mirage

time flies.

that midpoint benchmark of summer has passed with little notice, save for the recent glut of smog advisory warnings and the freezer at shopper's drug mart being perpetually sold out of creamsicles. a tragedy of greek proportions, to be sure.

weather.

it has the strangest effects on people.

gets me thinking it's a good idea to walk around outside when it's so hot out that waves of heat cause a glare on the pavement which wrinkles and folds before me like some desert mirage.

city heat has a completely different feel than country heat and even after the years and years that i've spent here, i've never truly adjusted. all those miles and miles of cement landscape magnifying and melting the wads of discarded gum into sticky piles of peppermint and aspartame that ooze their way into sewer drains.

city heat.

it slows the blood in your veins, causing you to move around in half-time and extend every breath into a sigh... causing you to lay awake at night making plans...

the first line drawn

i'm prone to nightmares.
things have a way of staying on my mind and multiplying in my sleep and that's why i don't watch horror movies, talk about growing old or read the toronto sun.

the littlest things...

i have this recurring one that never feels very nightmare-ish at the time, but when i wake up from it my heart is constricted from agitation and my hair feels softened and damp against the pillowcase and i am utterly terrorized. it's the kind of thing that she warned me wouldn't cease without due attention to the issues from which it stems- but as ever- i would rather chainsmoke and talk about something else.

it's the middle of the night- but i'm somewhere so far north that those rays of seemingly perpetual sunlight fall down all around me, in their perplexing unnaturalness. i am so caught up by it, then when he first sits down next to me i don't notice that he's wearing the wrong glasses. not the semi-rimless ones that i flicked cigarette ash over when i was leaving but the thick-rimmed ones he had when we first met, the really expensive ones that benny later chewed the left arm off of.

i'm never upset that he's there, but i do generally say something like, "i always knew the english were bastards." and he is never really offended by that because he secretly concedes that it's true. and he always says at some point that he's a "philosopher". and i laugh so loudly and outrageously that people stare and mumble about canadian manners and i think to myself about how sick i sometimes am of europeans. and he says, "economics and philosophy aren't so different..."

and i am incredulous.
and i am laughing in a way that makes me think that i will never stop laughing, but then he grabs me by the wrist and says, "i've said a million times that the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. but you never get it, little girl, and you never see it coming. i'm not the last well you'll fall down, i'm just the first line drawn".

and i say, "those aren't your glasses..."

and i wake up.
and i hum the live version of 'out of range' by ani difranco.
and i write down what i remember of those incongruous statements and stick them to the wall and pretend that later i will give them some proper consideration because i know that they're really my own incongruous statements but like so many ostriches before me i just bury my head in the sand and return to bed.

it was around this time last year that we had a conversation about bad habits. about why people continously subject themselves to horrible situations even though they know that they're resigning themselves to a life of misery and insecurity. he said, "pain is intoxicating. destruction is intoxicating. and once you're wrapped up in it, it's harder than it looks to downshift back into normalcy. people sabotage normalcy because madness makes you feel so much more alive".
and i disagreed vehemently.
and i was oblivious to my own adherences to that philosophy.

and now, for all of the time i spent convincing myself that it was an anomaly and not a life long addiction, it just seems all the more tragic that i'm continuing to usurp myself in my sleep.

well...

just like a siren singing me to shipwreck, there is something about that kind of chaos that is both seductive and hollowing, even i can admit. but at some point, we have to decide to wake up.

when i say that i know
about indecision,
frailty and unease...
it isn't permission.
it isn't an invitation.
it's a warning.
just a claim laid
to understanding.

something so divided

it's that time of year again.

that time that i live for when the air is chilled and scented and wet with decay. i walk around my neighbourhood at night just letting my skin absorb it all. this change of season always leaves me feeling a little divided. it has to do with being a fall baby, i think. this strange sense of entitlement rolls over me in waves and i start to feel like everything belongs to me and desire claws its way into my bones and commandeers my thoughts. the fog flattens my hair and mats it against my forehead and i want new hair. my apartment feels damp and basement-y and i want a new apartment. my clothes feel worn out and foreign and i want new clothes.

and he's there...lurking in the corners, winking at me, telling me black is the new black is the new black is the new black, that he is and he IS and if i hurry i might still find him in someone before winter hits and i just settle in with my eyes shut and my heart boxed and my soul on simmer until next fall.

live your life like you're one

on sylvia plath and daniel day lewis

i hear that one of the marks of the onset of depression is a decline in personal hygeine. as i understand it, the common claim (of the depressed) is that it feels pointless to get oneself up in the morning and wash their bodies or their hair or their clothes when they'll only have to do the very same thing all over again the following morning. the action has no real meaning, as it requires such repitition- getting up and doing it the following day in some way indicates that performing the action the previous day was meaningless in the long term, as though that day had never happened at all. the whole tedius affair, they say, is enough to make a person suicidal- if they aren't already.

i think, however, that a more alarming characteristic is the sort who takes the most immaculate care of their appearance. they're harder to pluck out and examine because they blend in so well. and that's the idea, after all. they put in that extra effort so that no one will catch them. there are those who seek healing and there are those who mask disease with hair and makeup and fake tans.

why though?

why not seek healing?

healing. healing is such an abstract concept. to one person it could indicate a salvation, a freedom from darkness but to another- it's something altogether different.

a burden. the burden of light. and of lightness of being.

to many- lightness of being is the death of creativity. after all, you can't be a tortured artist if you're not tortured. and there is a need. there is a selfishness. there is a desire to hold onto it in order to set yourself apart.

and so you go on- traversing in and alongside these dizzying lines and formulae and outwardly, you're one of them- ironed out and painted and propped up in high heels but inwardly- you've set yourself apart. and they float and dance above you, ethereal and mindless like so many mayflies sprung forth from the sea in springtime.

but not you.

you, who lays in wait underground to one day lay in wait underground. you, who balks at the idea of healing because in your secret heart, you know that lifelong depression is the warm blanket that wraps around you- that holds you to the earth like so much gravity. and you go on because you know that that kind of darkness is the only thing that will always be familiar to you where all other things will come and go. and you go on because you know that the minute you stop washing your hair, someone is going to come along and impose a cure on you. and you go on because you know what that would rob you of and what it would leave behind:

that unbearable lightness of being.

that trailer trash pedigree is callin'

for the love of zeus- where've i been?

here, right here. there, and elsewhere.

broke it off, worked it out, swam in a lake, swam in a pool, laid out in the sun, tanned under the neon lights of the bar, went to england, stayed up all night drinking, slept all day, got sick, got better, sang some karaoke, practised in the shower, signed some school forms, wasted some time on facebook

and to cap it all off, like it needed to be capped off

matthew good released a new album just to dry any tears in my eyes.

it's called hospital music.
it's beautiful.
buy it.
buy it and support my need for speed*

*by speed i actually mean more mg, naturally.