"why don't you put it on the blog, rocking like this is my job"- the black eyed peas
Been having some writer's block... so heres something I whipped up today, the first thing I've written in a while that I don't hate. Ironically it is about nothing specific and talks in circles.
I pulled the star and the sun. And from the sky I drew them into the cupping of my palms. Letting them blister the faces of my fingers with their warmth. Letting them burn away everything except for paths my palms hold. Making them clear and unfurling into roadways and forest trails that I know how to follow. I’ve been struggling to make my words sound like they came from my own mouth. This tongue has learned to mimic instead of speak. Like the Starlings that line the cracks of the sidewalks and sit on telephone wires.
Are relationships really complicated or do we make them this way, so we have something to stimulate the otherwise greying matter found under our skulls? I have been feeling and not feeling many things. And I’ve been talking and not talking about many things. How many times can you walk in a circle until you have to call it a hobby? The rumination, the fantasies, the back and fourth, the limerence. It’s a favoured pass-time of mine. But how can you enjoy anything real when you are cyclically bound? How can you really be with people when you talk the same things into the ground, while using the wrong words so you never actually feel them?
Last night, a mason jar shattered on the tiles of my kitchen floor, its tone like a parent. The pitch like a cassette played for me in June, of my mother’s childhood make-shift radio show. Causing me to take a moment's retreat into the mossy-ness of my living room couch. I hear my mother in my marrow, I know how to pull myself out of this because I know what she would do for me. So I put on the skin of a mother, as I do now that I am so far from the true tinge of her voice, and I go to the corner store to buy eggs.
I go looking for myself and can only find growing pains and newly forming rings of xylem. Here when I return to an unkept space I can’t recognize who I was when I made it. Often I feel like my own mother. In July when I returned to Halifax, to the unwashed sheets that he slept on, I gathered everything that she couldn’t bring herself to wash. And in true motherly fashion, I couldn’t understand her or why she didn’t wash her sheets the second he left her apartment for the final time. Laying in my fresh sheets I dreamt of him. His warm hands found their way up my back and to the crook of my neck. In real life my friend jokes that back rubs are the way to my heart. I guess this is true in my dreams too. He says something about loving me. And then I wake up. I glimpse understanding when my muscles remember the softness his voice sometimes had.
I’ve started asking the universe for unrealistic things. Like a child would. Like how I asked Santa for a real human baby when I was seven. I ask for signs to bring me back to where I am supposed to be. To who I am supposed to be with. Geographically speaking I know my feet are planted in the right place, I can see many saplings in bloom even though autumn approaches. But my wandering mind is lost. I think I left it on some bus, between Inglis and Windmill.
It’s only when sweeping shards of glass that I take this handmade disappointment and hold it to the sun. To try and mingle with the gravity of letting go of the things that no longer serve me. The rain hits my bare back, coming in through the window that hangs over my bed, the 15 metre lamp-post on Barrington falling over halting traffic until Halifax feels like Toronto, the stomach ache that I can feel up into my chest, Elise finishing the carton of eggs, the glass shard in my sock. I am not sure how to listen to the world itself and not the people who live on it, but I am trying. Here I reach station in the metaphorical Bedford Basin of my mind. And I come to remember the trust I have in my muscles to remember how to hold me up.
It's true that you forget how things are, how they once sounded. How the waves sizzle after they crash. The crack in my nana’s voice, my nana’s voice in general. You forget the strength of the shore when you haven’t been thrown around by water since you were a child. I think I have so many regrets about belief and about how I've seen the world as black and white while telling people it's grey. Halifax used to be black and white. It used to just be people from Toronto and bad juju. Now I feel like I know what home means separate from my family. Everything I have been through up until this point was worth it. I crack 12 eggs, two of which have double yolks. I burn the bacon. There is balance.
Over a bowl of mussels my parents tell me of when I was 3 years old and devouring them in PEI when neither of my siblings would touch them. Braided blonde hair and freckled face, refusing to wash off the salt water after the beach. That sweet thing was always meant to be on the East Coast, hovered over a bowl of mussels or playing in the waves at Lawrence Town beach.
Recently I’ve been using the word complicated too much, specifically when I talk about intimacy. The palpitations, the promises you break with yourself, the embarrassment of someone really knowing you, never knowing exactly what the other is thinking, or has thought, the constant hope but lack of belief. I think on a baseline, no one is complicated and everything is very clear, but wherever anxiety, the things that go unspoken and the things that should have been left unspoken come from– that is the birth place of complication. Then again it is my belief that any relationship worth having is a nuanced one. I guess I am complicated.
I wonder if people ever feel complicated about me. If they agonize over the feelings I share or don’t share, over the way my hair falls. I don’t believe they do, I have found this to be a very lonely belief.
Today, when I feel like a child or like nothing, I take comfort in the scientific truth that the shore affects the ocean as much as the ocean affects the shore, even if it isn’t as obvious. Please know that I feel affected by you. By the songs you have listened to at pivotal moments in your lives, by the strain in your voice when you try to speak while laughing, by the doodles you’ve made in the margins of worksheets, by your newly printed but old film photos, by your belief or lack thereof.
I hope you are as affected by me as I am you.