to get by

I’m in a mall, standing in line at a chain jewellery store, while Boney M’s Christmas Album plays through crackling speakers.  Feet shuffling along a filthy red carpet, inching ahead about one spot every five minutes, we work our way through a maze of burgundy velvet ropes like cattle through a corral.  There’s a constant cacophony of Christmas shopper’s chatter hanging in the air, and my mistletoe-adorned travel mug brims with equal parts eggnog and black rum.  Thank God.  No-one can say I’m not making an effort here.

Mostly, the Christmas season makes me feel somewhat antsy.  Perhaps it’s the break in routine, perhaps it’s the pressing consumerism, perhaps it’s the underlying confused religiosity, but mostly, I look forward to January 2nd coming around.  I can’t wait for normalcy to return, to settle back into real life.  Me, I try to convince myself I’m not the only person who feels this way.

The girl in front of me, she’s maybe in her mid-twenties.  You know this girl.  Over her tights, she has one of those big red, white, and green Christmas sweaters on, with what might be a reindeer pattern knitted into it.  That is, if the supposed reindeer didn’t look so much like moose.  Her one hand grips myriad shopping bags, and her other grips a Chestnut Praline Latte.  She has mukluks on her feet and smells like Peppermint.  This girl is Christmas.  I look down at my own attire: my battered blue jeans, pink Converse high tops, and band T-shirt.  I pick a piece of fuzz off my pilled cardigan.

Taking a big drink of rum and eggnog, considering that maybe I don’t meet dress code, the girl turns around and asks me how long I think the wait might be.  At the front of the line, I see an exhausted hostess of sorts handing each customer a piece of paper with a number and the name of a sales associate.  Then they wait for a space to open up.  “Like, what are people even doing in there that takes so long?”

“I don’t know,” I say, “are we sure we’re not in line at a nightclub or something?”

The girl rolls her eyes.

I roll mine too.  “I know, right?”

“Why can’t they just, like, let us in to shop like normal?”

I shrug.  I have no idea.  Fire codes, maybe.  Fear of theft.  To build excitement.  “Your sweater,” I say, “those moose?”

“They’re reindeer,” the girl spits, looking at me as if I’m some kind of monster.

I take a drink.

“Ah, no matter,” I say.  “Both are simply varieties of deer; ruminants, from the Cervidae family.  What’s the difference.”

The girl crinkles her nose, sniffing the air.  “Do you smell booze?”

I sniff the air too, and suddenly the pair of us are like a couple hounds at a Louisianan barbecue.  “I think I do.”  I lean in closer so only she can her me.  “I think it’s him,” I say, throwing a thumb over my shoulder at the guy behind me, a frail octogenarian in plaid pants leaning on his walker.

“Disgusting,” the Christmas girl sneers.  “Some people can’t even make it through a trip to the mall.”  She rolls her eyes.

I roll mine too.  “I know, right?”

unactualized stranger

It sometimes gets so I can’t tell a memory from a daydream, can’t tell if a memory is from yesterday or twenty years ago, can’t tell if any of this is actually happening at all.   I write the word ‘sometimes’ in my notebook so many times it starts to look like it’s spelt incorrectly.  So strong is my suspicion that it is wrong, I reach for a dictionary to look it up. There, at home on the page, in beautiful, bold black on white, it still looks peculiar.

I get up and make myself a drink; two fingers of Scotch. Not the good stuff – the stuff I save for when guests are over – but the okay stuff, the stuff I save for when I’m sure I’m losing my mind.  I don’t sip, I drink, and it’s gone it three gulps, burning all the way down to my core.  I feel better.  It’s afternoon, and I’ve yet to pull the curtains back to reveal the outside world.  Outside, a cold, grey sky meets a cold, grey ground.  I can’t bare it.  My cozy study, it’s dark but for a small lamp throwing dim light into my armchair.  I balance the empty whiskey glass on the tips of my fingers. I close my notebook.

A gentle rustling comes from my bedroom, someone twisting in the sheets, waking up.  There’s a stretch, a yawn.  It sometimes gets so I don’t know if any of this is real.  I hear her call my name, a voice smooth in timbre, pleasant in tone.  “Hello?” she calls out.  “You around?”  That feeling you have after a night of drinking: like you’ve gone and misplaced your soul.  You feel a little lost, a bit out of order, slightly out of time.  She calls my name again, and I can’t quite place the voice.

“I’m here,” I tell her, “in the next room.   I awoke with a thought, and had to write it down, sort some things out.”  I set my glass on the end table, and place my notebook beside it. I can still taste the Scotch on my lips, can still feel the slight burn in my throat.

“Why don’t you come back to bed,” she suggests.  I hear her roll over, pulling the covers up.  She fluffs the pillow.  “This is the kind of day I know we wouldn’t regret wasting on our backs.”

That voice.  Familiar, yet foreign, it simultaneously invites me to stay and inspires me to flee.  I swear it sometimes gets so I can’t tell if a memory is recent or from decades past.  I shake my head.  “I’ll be there soon,” I say.  “Just finishing something up.”

From the next room, I hear a click of the bedside lamp followed by slender fingers flipping through a magazine.  “I’ll be here,” she sighs.

And I know she will be.  More to myself than anyone else, I mutter, “Just need to finish up is all.”  There’s always something to finish up.  Picking up my notebook, I turn to the page where I left off and write ‘sometimes’ once more.  Twice more.  Again.  I continue writing that word repeatedly until it looks like alien scrawl.  Sometimes it gets so I can’t tell a memory from a daydream, real past from re-imagined past, the figments from the fragments.

takeaway

Atop the railing, right in front of me, is one of those cats with the waving arm you often see on the counters of Chinese takeaway restaurants.  It’s white with red ears and a gold and green bib of some sort.  That cat, it keeps grinning in the dark, looking right at me.  One arm keeps going up and down, and the other holds a gold coin; this cat is lucky, they say.  What most westerners don’t know is this cat, this maneki-neko, isn’t Chinese at all – it’s Japanese.  What a greater number of Westerners don’t know is this maneki-neko isn’t waving, but beckoning.  Come here, the maneki-neko say, come into this shop, this restaurant, this drycleaner's, this massage parlour.  Come here, this one says, come right this way, over the railing.

This place I’m at, it’s not easy to get away.  In fact, following the maneki-neko’s directions would be the easiest way out.  I’m out on a balcony overlooking the city, fifty-one stories up.  The city lights spread out like a twinkling blanket before me, and the streets and freeways cut through it like stitches.  Crisscrossing this way and that, the stitches are a grid in some places, jumbled chaos in others.  The seamstress, she sewed this quilt while drunk.  Each patch on this mad quilt contains hundreds of people and there are countless patches.  Me, I want to get away, but I’m balancing on the tip of a sewing needle stood on its end.  There’s nowhere to go.  Trapped.

Reclining in one of those rickety folding lawn chairs, it’s the type made from aluminum tubing covered in woven, striped polyester pieces.  Frayed on the arms, the frame bent in places, this thing has been around since the 80s.  I take a sip from my drink, admiring its soft green glow in the faint light filtering outside through the French doors behind me.  This drink, my speciality, it’s equal parts gin, absinthe, and tonic over a full tumbler of ice cubes with a sprig of fresh mint for garnish.  It doesn’t have a name because I’ve never given it one.  Drinks, they don’t need names.

There’s a rattle from the door behind me, and it isn’t long before it opens, causing a toxic mix of music, drunken babbling, and laughter to spill out into the chilly winter night air.  I sigh and pull the collar of my coat up as if to shield myself from the onslaught.  A slender female figure walks out and leans on her elbows over the balcony railing.  Her back to me, she’s shivering in her light cotton T-shirt as she takes in the view of the city.  Then, not looking back, she asks, “Why are you out here by yourself?”  Her words briefly hang in clouds of frozen vapour before dissipating.

“Why are you outside without a coat?” I reply.

She doesn’t answer, but shifts her weight from one foot to the other, and rubs the backs of her arms, her triceps, in an effort to stay warm.  “You usually sit out your own parties?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say.  “Every time.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“Thank you,” I say, and drink down a full half of my green drink.

She seems to suddenly notice the maneki-neko beckoning madly beside her, and turns her head to look at the cat.  Her profile becomes a perfect silhouette against the three-quarter moon.  Her lashes are long, her tiny nose, upturned.  She’s turned into a cameo.  “What’s this thing?” she asks.

“A Chinese fortune cat,” I tell her.

“Is it lucky?”

“Define luck.”

There’s silence for a time while I watch this girl watching the maneki-neko.  With a long index finger, she reaches out and stops its plastic paw in mid-beckon.  “I know why you have parties,” she says, glancing at me out of the corner of her eye.

I consider that for a moment.  I look away.  “I know you do,” I say.

the cabin: a still-life

My grandfather published his last full-length novel when he was seventy-four years old.  It wasn’t his longest, it wasn’t his most intellectual, but it would become his most well known.  It was a work which would bring him critical acclaim, and it was precisely this attention which would ultimately push him all the way down the rabbit hole of reclusion.  He died alone in these woods, continually hounded by various media outlets, and a troupe of university students hunting him down for a where-is-he-now documentary.  They had it all written, all planned out, all they were missing was their subject.  He was dead and in the ground for about a week when the students finally located this little cabin in the woods.

Walking around his cabin now, the floorboards creak and moan in spots as I step, each plank cut and planed flat by my grandfather himself.  The walls are thick logs cut from great, old trees and chinked with a homemade cement of clay, wood ashes, salt, and water, all mixed and applied by his hands.  It’s all still in perfect condition.  As always, I’m struck by the austerity of the interior.  There’s very little here.  The walls of the living room are lined with bookcases, still crammed with the works of his favourite authors: Kafka, Poe, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Goethe, Bradbury.  There’s an armchair in the corner, its chocolate brown leather still supple and smooth after all these years, well cared for by the cleaning staff.  On a tiny wooden table to the side, his reading glasses, a coaster, and a plain white coffee mug.  By the front door, a black, iron wood stove squats, radiating heat.

The kitchen is similarly sparse, featuring an old stove, a bit of counter space, and a small table for two.  Past this, through the back door, one could walk straight out, around seventy feet, and come to an outhouse at the edge of the woods.  Though covered in a thick blanket of snow now, in the summertime, the caretakers keep the grass around the property cut, and the bushes trimmed back.  Flowers, an assortment of zinnias, Californian poppies, and daylilies, will grow alongside the house in handmade wooden boxes.  That outhouse by the tree-line, it hasn’t been used in nearly forty years, but the structure is still sound, its door still hanging straight.  Instead of the traditional crescent moon cut into the door, there’s a letter K.  No-one knows why.

The third and last room in the cabin is a combined bedroom and study.  The room is clean and still, smelling of lemon-scented wood polish and cotton.  The pale winter sun filters through the aqua chiffon curtains giving the room something of an otherworldly glow.  There’s a small bed in one corner, and a desk in the other.  The bed frame was handmade by my grandfather, and the desk was purchased at an antique shop sometime in the 40s.  Even then it was old.  Atop the desk is a typewriter, a baby blue Smith-Corona from the 60s.  It was with this machine that my grandfather wrote his last novel.

As I do every time I visit, I pull the little straight-backed wooden chair out from the desk, savouring the scraping sound of wood on wood.  Taking a seat, I open a drawer, the drawer still sliding smoothly despite its great vintage, and pull out a piece of paper which I stick into the typewriter behind the platen and roll into place.  Then, I sit, hands in position.  I don’t type anything.  Not a word.  I just sit there, still, at my long-dead grandfather’s typewriter with my hands on the cold metal keys.  I’m imagining what it must have been like to be him.  I don’t type because nothing I could ever write would ever compare to what this machine has already seen.

Existing in a time when the literary greats clustered together like algae in a still pool, schmoozing at fancy parties, lecturing at universities, travelling the world, my grandfather lived alone in these woods far removed from the intellectual echo chamber.  He was building this cabin, growing his own vegetables, hunting his own meat.  Perhaps his greatest work wasn’t his last novel, or any of them for that matter.  Perhaps his greatest work was this cabin.

My hands on the keys of this old typewriter, I look through the gauzy curtains to a large oak tree fifty feet beyond, its branches bare of leaves.  Beneath this tree lurks a craggy grey boulder marking my grandfather’s grave, at its base, a smattering of smaller black stones.  Perhaps his greatest work was an honest life; not a whirlwind, but a still one.

an impossible visit

The opposite of being inspired, whatever that is, that’s what these headaches make me.  And I’m not talking about simple writer’s block here.  No, that’s easy; anyone can work through that.  I’m talking about life coming to a dead stop.  These headaches, when I get them, all I can think about is the pain.  I can’t work, can’t write a goddamned word.  I can’t even think.  I can’t drink coffee, I feel nauseous.  All I want to do is lie in a dark room.  It’s the opposite of being inspired, whatever that is.

I’m standing in line at the grocery store when the lady behind me asks me if I’m all right.  I’m not, of course, but who really is.  I glance back at this lady for a second and find someone’s favourite aunt smiling back at me with the type of peaceful closed-mouth smile usually reserved for the deeply religious.  I turn up the corners of my mouth into a semblance of a smile and give her a quick nod.  I tell her I’m fine.

Unable to figure out why this lady would ask me such a thing, I look to my groceries for an answer.  Waiting in queue on the conveyor belt, there’s Sugar Crisp cereal, boneless skinless chicken thighs, a tube of original flavour Pringles, two Archie comics, a jar of olives, toothpaste, a loaf of wholegrain bread, and tinfoil.  Nothing to suggest I might not be okay.  I look down the line, and there’s some kind of hold-up two costumers ahead.  There’s always some kind of hold-up.  This time it’s something about a coupon.  It’s expired.  Or it’s for another location.  The manager is coming to attend, and all of us, we wait.

This lady behind me, she explains that it’s just that something doesn’t seem right.  She feels things.  She tells me how it’s not even that I have a headache, there’s something else.  I look up.  There, high up, resting against the corrugated metal ceiling, nestled among the painted steel beams and hanging fluorescent lights, is one of those helium-filled aluminum balloons.  It says GET WELL SOON.  This lady behind me, I didn’t tell her I have a headache.

It’s just that she gets impressions, she explains, and sometimes but not every time, she feels compelled to say something.  This time, there seems to be some insistence, she says.  I turn around to look at her, and I have trouble making eye contact.  She’s got greying black hair curled sometime in the last few days and now hanging a little flat.  Her blouse, a silvery thing, was given to her as a birthday gift from her tween granddaughter.  She wears practical shoes.

This woman, she leans in a little closer, necessitating a meeting of our eyes.  Hers, they’re lively, the fluorescent light dancing across her dark brown irises.  She asks me, quietly, if I’ve recently had a death in the family.  I tell her no.  She stands straight and looks me over, at my hat, my scarf, my coat, my pants, my shoes.  This lady asks me if I’m wearing anything belonging to a dead person.  I shake my head.  I tell her no, sorry.  The line starts moving, and I turn around to follow my groceries already moving down the conveyor belt.

The manager thanks us for our patience, and I’m now only one customer away from paying, two transactions from freedom.  The strange woman behind me, she whispers in my ear, close enough that I can feel her minty breath hot on my cheek.  She tells me, “He says he regrets he had to leave so soon, but there wasn’t anything he could do.  He was old and it was time.”  I don’t turn around.  This isn’t the kind of thing I believe in.  The cashier, she’s scanning my things, so I know it’s my turn.  I pay as quickly as possible and leave the store.

Walking across the parking lot to my car, I pull my coat closed against the cool winter breeze.  It’s this winter coat I always wear, the one that doesn’t need replacing because it’s still fine.  It’s the plaid one with fur around the collar and cuffs.  This winter coat, the one that’ll never go out of fashion because it was never in fashion, it was my grandfather’s favourite hunting coat.  He died before I could form any memories of him.  Nearly forty years ago.  In my car, I swallow two Tylenol and chug half a bottle of water.  With the key in the ignition, I stare through the windshield for at least ten minutes before turning it.

saturday night shoe

You ask what I do, and I tell you I’m labourer.  And it’s not far off, I suppose.  All of us, from the president of a cosmetic company down to that weird chatty guy in the mail room with the mismatched shoes, we’re all labourers.  We labour.  It’s what we do.  When it becomes clear you’re not satisfied with that answer, I add how I’m like a street photographer, only I don’t use a camera and I’m something of a misanthrope.  I’m joking about the misanthrope part.  I’m being facetious.  You’re not laughing, and instead, you regroup.  In your head, you’re rearranging the words in your question.  You, you’re a professional.

The name of this scene is When Interviews Go Wrong.  You pull your cinnamon hair back over an ear, and shift your slight weight in the chair.  Mustering for battle, you take a sip from your Toasted Graham Latte and ask, “How would you describe your method?” From the sly inflection and subtle smirk, I can tell you really think you have me.  You take a decisive bite off your Mini Snowman Donut.

I tell you how I create something from nothing.  It’s supposed to be impossible, a violation of the laws of nature or something, but I do it.  I go on at length about the smithy in my mind and the pint-sized me in there, a diminutive blacksmith, hammering away at ideas on an anvil.  He makes figments into the physical.  This blacksmith, he has all the rippling muscles I was never given.  He wears a tough leather smock to protect himself against the chimerical sparks exploding like supernovae off these rough thoughts.  When you cut me off, I’m in the middle of describing the beads of sweat dripping from the blacksmith’s forehead as he leans over the forge, heating abstractions to a more malleable, workable temperature.

This Starbucks, you chose the location because of its blandness.  You had heard how fanciful I could be, and you thought this might keep me grounded.  Don’t think for a second I don’t recognize and appreciate your moxie.  “Very interesting,” you say.  “I wonder if you could elaborate a little on the ‘creating’ part.  Where do your ideas come from?”

Where do they come from, these unformed concepts?  A lot of them, they are indeed from the everyday, borrowed from mundane goings-on around me.  A handful, I steal from private conversations between strangers.  Some arrive in loads of ore by horse and cart straight from the grand kingdom of Shambhala.  Others turn up in loads of ingots stacked in shipping containers aboard boats sent all the way from Lyonesse; these, these are among my most prized.

As I pry open each sizable wooden crate, the radiance of my flickering torch bounces off the kaleidoscope of hammer marks beaten across the beautiful faces of the oval ingots.  Down in the inky black of the ship’s cargo hold, my face is aglow, not only from light reflected off this newly arrived treasure, but in happiness.  Each ingot features the image of a majestic horse stamped above an indecipherable word of exotic symbols.  They’re stacked at least fifty deep in the crate, and—

You interrupt me again when, this time, you reach across the table and close the voice memo app on your cell phone.  The interview, it’s over.  “Sorry,” you say.  “I didn’t mean to interrupt – continue.  You were saying something about crates?”  The Mini Snowman Donut reduced to crumbs on the tabletop, you dab at the corners of your mouth with a paper napkin.  My mouth slightly ajar, the d from the word ‘and’ still hanging from my bottom lip, I’m trying to remember where I left off.  Crates.  Something about ingots.  With the side of your hand, you’re obsessively sweeping every tiny crumb on the table into a minuscule pile in front of you.

I tell you not to worry about it.  “It’s not important,” I say.  The one thing I don’t tell you about these ingots, as exquisite as they are, they’re fleeting, fragile.  Look at one the wrong way, and it’ll disappear.  Mishandle one, and it’ll shatter into infinite useless pieces.

I’m studying the tabletop between us, an intricate mosaic created of broken tile and sealed with some kind of liquid polymer.  The tile has been carefully broken in a factory somewhere so that it’s broken but not too broken.  The mosaic pattern is imperfect but not too imperfect.  The colours are unobjectionable.  The whole thing, it’s some kind of strange imitation of an imitation of art.  The table next to us features the exact same design.  Every table in this place is identical.  You, you reapply your lipstick.  A red, its name is Saturday Night Shoe.  It looks nice.  I’ll write a story about it later on.

superglue

I’m not sure how much longer I can keep coming here.  These meetings I mean.  There’s something about the buzzing fluorescent lights and the peeling industrial quality floor tile.  There’s something about the rickety folding metal chairs and the table with the worn wood veneer.  The tiny coffee maker brewing atrocious off-brand coffee.  All those mismatched, chipped coffee mugs.  Gag gifts, impulse purchases, radio station giveaways, these mugs, to them this is purgatory.  Cast off by people who couldn’t quite bear to throw them away, this is where they wound up.  The one in my hand, it has ‘QUEEN OF EVERYTHING’ emblazoned across the front over a little crown.  Its handle has been broken off and glued back on.  The hardened superglue, it presses out of the old breaks like blobs of ancient amber.

Each week, we sit in a circle and tell bits of our stories: our failures, our successes, our hopes, our fantasies.  Each person here, I only know them by their first name.  There’s Gene, who wears one of three Hawaiian shirts to every meeting.  There’s Aubrey, the colour of her fingernails always matches her shirt.  Dyson, she brings a bottle of Coca Cola to every meeting and shares a name with a vacuum cleaner.  Mathew plays guitar in a band and looks like a goth from 1994.  Astrid, oh Astrid, she sits beside me every single meeting.  She smells like sandalwood and only washes her hair once every two weeks.  Human hair is self-cleaning, she tells me.  From the funk, I know she’s full of shit.

Astrid is always talking about her chakras, self-empowerment, and the Akashic records.  Every Astrid I’ve ever met, they’ve all been hippies.  Seriously, I’ve known three of them and they might as well be the same person.  Best I can figure it, Astrid is here because she can’t master the Shavasana.  The Shavasana, or corpse pose, requires her to lay on her back, still, and relax for fifteen minutes at the end of each yoga class.  Executed well, she says, the Shavasana rejuvenates the body and calms the mind.  Astrid, concerned about the alignment of her chakras, GMOs, climate change, beauty privilege, the overuse of antibiotics, cultural appropriation, the endangerment of the golden-rumped elephant shrew, she can’t possibly calm her mind.  Like the rest of us, she’s here looking to fix that one broken piece of her being.

Me, in groups, I’m easily bored and kind of a troublemaker; a combination of qualities one should not take lightly.  When it’s my turn to speak, I’ll occasionally relay a bit of embellished personal history to the group.  More often than not, I make stuff up outright.  Other times, I retell stories previously told by other participants.  No-one notices, or, if they do, they don’t say anything.  They just sit there with those sympathetic smiles on their faces.  Some offer slight nods of understanding.  There’s the odd audible grunt or m-hmm of encouragement.  I’ll take what I can get; I’m a performer and this audience is as good as any.

The facilitator, he has the beard and spectacles of a patient man, and the tucked-in, plaid shirt of one to be trusted.  The pleats in his slacks are crisp.  His shoes are always shiny.  He tells us to call him Al.  We’re all here for the same reason, Al included.  Not because we’re broken – I don’t believe anyone is – but because each of us has a part or two that needs repair.  Me, I’ll come here as long as I need to.  To these meetings I mean.  Like those coffee mugs, cast away, chipped, broken and glued back together, we’re still useful.  We have potential.  While Mathew tells us about his latest gig, my gaze falls to Astrid’s mug.  Printed on the front: “I’M NOT BOSSY, I AM THE BOSS.”  Like these mugs, we all still have something to say.

with every kiss, a dream

The first kiss on camera occurred in Thomas Edison’s Black Maria studio in 1896.  It was around 18 seconds long and took place between the stage actors, May Irwin and John Rice, who were reenacting the final scene from the musical, The Widow Jones.  In an age where every third celebrity has a sex tape for sale it might be hard to believe, but Edison’s little movie, this quick peck on the lips, it drove the public crazy and was widely considered immoral, obscene.  The Roman Catholic Church, they demanded censorship.  Police raided many of the showings.  This was all very scandalous.

I sit in my car atop a lookout point with a perfect view of the glistening city skyline ahead, the crescent moon above sliding across the clear night sky like a buttery croissant.  Light pollution from the city drowns out all but the brightest of stars, and traffic crawls past me below, the occupants of each vehicle part of someone else’s story.  I’m not the only one enjoying the scene here; there’s a whole line of other vehicles, engines idling, headlights shining.  Eleven vehicles in total, each encapsulating a scene ripped out of a different film.

In the car to my right, a couple of teens are hooking up.  Like, actually making out as if they’re a couple of overacted characters in a 50s movie.  Their heavy breathing has completely fogged up the car’s windows.  Occasionally, a body part touches the glass, creating a bare spot in the condensation.  Me, I’m by myself eating Dunk-a-roos, reading comics, and sipping cold coffee from a paper cup.  I chew on the plastic lid, a habit, while Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 plays over the car’s sound system.  Ahead, most of the lights in a single skyscraper blink out all at once.  That building, it’ll sleep now.  The janitors have gone home; they, too, have stories to live.

In the car to my left, the silhouette of another solitary figure sits.  A large bearded fellow, the only real movement from him is his hand lifting a joint to his lips.  Repeatedly, the orange cherry glows dimly up to his lips, brightens for a second, and then drifts down out of sight.  After each drag, he holds in the thick smoke for fifteen seconds or so before exhaling.  Though both of our windows closed, I can smell it.  This bearded silhouette, he catches me looking in his direction, and the lenses of his glasses flash in the moonlight as he turns his head in my direction.  With his free hand, he gives me a bit of a wave.  He grins, his mouth full of bright white teeth.

It was the second theme from Allegro Scherzando, the third movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, which inspired Frank Sinatra’s 1945 song, Full Moon and Empty Arms.  Me, I sit alone in my car, this movement filling my ears, with the city’s lights spread out before me.  Juggling my Dunk-a-roos, slippery stack of comics, and cup of cold coffee, my eyes glance up at the crescent moon above, a gaping hole where its heart should be.  I shuffle around the words in the title of Sinatra’s song to arrive at the title of my current scene: Empty Moon and Full Arms.  It’s not nearly as poetic, but apropos.

That I spend so much time alone is more a testament of my ability to entertain myself than it is evidence of my inability to be around others. That’s how I see it anyway.  And no-one is here to argue.  Surround yourself with people who think just like you and you’ll rarely be wrong; keep no-one around and you never will be.  I dip a crumbling chocolate cookie into vanilla frosting, take a swig of cold coffee, and select a new comic to read next.  This is my story, my current scene.  In my peripheral, the stoner to my left, he takes another drag off his joint.  In the car to my right, a hand, fingers splayed, slaps up against the rear driver’s side window, leaving a print.  The car, a late model sedan borrowed from a parent, it rocks side to side like a ship lost amidst rolling ocean waves.

inside & outside

Physically, we’re in this boardroom, but none of us is actually here. I count the number of bog oak wall panels. Thirty-seven. Initially, that number gives me an uncomfortable, unbalanced feeling, like when I discover a sock missing at the end of a wash cycle. I think about it some more, chewing hard on the end of my Bic pen. The woman speaking, she drones, rattling off terminology I haven’t even thought about since reviewing my welcome package a decade ago. Thirty-seven.  It’s a prime number, I suppose. So, there’s that. Moreover, it’s a permutable prime with seventy-three. I relax. Deep breaths. We’ll get through this.

To my left, down the cartoonish length of the polished rosewood table, a middle-aged man named Brian sits hunched in his chair. He braces his elbow against the chair’s leather arm, and holds his 5 o’clock shadow in the palm of his hand. This man, Brian, he sits there in his slightly rumpled suit thinking about his collection of antique medical equipment at home. Just this morning, he put in a bid on eBay for a 15th century speculum and he’s eager to see if he’s won. It’s a real bargain. If he is the victor, he’ll own a speculum from every century from the 13th on. Brian can’t wait to get out of here. It’s no wonder.

These meetings, they’re tolerable only because there’s an end. That feeling you get when you walk out of a windowless boardroom after a four hour meeting, someone should bottle that feeling and make millions of dollars. It’s a revival.

We’re all standing at a bank of elevators, minds numb and crammed full of acronyms, and no-one has pressed the down button. We’ve all assumed someone else already done the deed. Brian stares down at his cell phone, annoyed he’s not getting any signal, the eBay web address sitting impotently in his browser’s address bar. With his bright white hair and pale, puffy face he reminds me of a polar bear. “Anyone else having issues with their phone?” he asks. The rest of us, cell phones in hand, we give them a quick glance and grumble in the affirmative.

The plastic elevator buttons, both up and down, they’re unlit, and the stainless steel elevator doors remain closed. At the same moment, we all seem to realize our lapse. We look around uncomfortably at one another, index fingers ready. No-one moves. Finally, Gloria from accounting, she stabs the button with the end of her cane. “What’s wrong with you people?” she asks. Her false teeth are as flat and straight as piano keys. Her hair’s been grey since well before it was hip.

The workday, most of us can only get through it because we know it can’t go on forever. That sensation you experience when you step out of your climate controlled office building into the fresh afternoon air, someone should find a way to synthesize that sensation and they’ll earn enough money to retire to a private island in Indonesia complete with a nice rumah gadang style house, a string of bamboo beach cabanas, and large support staff. It’s a rebirth.

Like butterflies emerging from our chrysalises, we all step out into the crisp December air, the pale sun warming our skin. We all take a deep breath; the air, it is good. It is actual air. Each of us to the others, we nod, smile, or wave our goodbyes. At home, we’ll throw off our ties, and shrug out of our innocuously coloured suits, trading them in for blue jeans, gym shorts, yoga pants, or maybe, just maybe, nothing at all. We will live our actual lives.

Brian, he’ll check his eBay account to find that he did, indeed, win the auction for the 15th century speculum in remarkable condition. It’s a real bargain. In his plaid pajama bottoms and tatty Genesis T-shirt, he’ll spend his evening preparing a space in his vast collection. The various specula, they reside in a glass case on a shelf above a large assortment of vintage tongue depressors and below another shelf containing myriad old reflex hammers. Tomorrow at work, when I ask him how his evening was, he’ll tell me it was all right. “I didn’t do much,” he’ll say, “just hung around the house. And you?”

work will wait

There are thirty-six panels in my office drop ceiling, and four fluorescent light fixtures.  The carpet, it’s commercial grade, featuring a benign pattern of interwoven blue and black circles.  These are circles like a coffee mug might make if the bottom was never dry and it was set down, randomly, over and over again forever.  On the wall, right across from me, is a painting of an orange butterfly, a Tawny Emperor, I think.  The walls, they’re a cool white, and scarred from the negligence of countless employees before me.  This office building, this isn’t our home; the sane, they don’t treat it as such.  From down the hall, past two other identical offices, just past the lunchroom, gathered around an almost empty water cooler, I can hear loud talk of the weekend.

A man, one of the executives if I’m not mistaken, he doesn’t think he can go to even one more opera.  That last one was just too long.  Five intermissions.  Five!  Who can take it?  It could be worse, I think.  Giacomo Puccini’s opera, Madama Butterfly, enjoys the distinction of having one of the worst opening nights in history thanks, in part, to having too few intermissions.  Puccini had misjudged the audience’s willingness to sit through a lengthy second act, and an already hostile crowd rebelled, the theatre plunging into chaos.  They laughed and jeered.  They openly mocked both Puccini and the cast.  They made animal noises.  The pandemonium got so loud the singers couldn’t even hear the orchestra.

I’m staring at the butterfly painting across from me, imagining the scene more than one hundred years ago in Milan’s Teatro alla Scalla, when a woman’s voice breaks my reverie.  From down the hall, this other person, she tells the executive how she went to this most amazing restaurant where the food was so delicious, and the portions weren’t too big, and the decor was so hip, and, don’t you know, the chef de cuisine trained for six years in Cinque Terre?  The area is known for its pesto, focaccia, and anchovies, she says, and one town, Corniglia, it’s particularly popular for its gelato made from locally harvested honey.  This woman, someday she’s going to go there.  This woman, she tells the executive how she’d like to someday take the train from Cinque Terre to Milan.

Transfixed by the image of the Tawny Emperor for so long, it almost appears to quiver.  I close my eyes, shutting them tight, and relax.  In the blackness behind my shut eyelids, a negative image of the majestic butterfly appears, its wings spread, its antennae erect.  Its orange wings have become blue, and the black dots on its wings, they’ve turned to white.  The spectral butterfly flaps its wings, taking off, looping and twirling through the negative image of my office, out the door, and down the hall.  My eyes, they stay closed.  Work will wait.  There’s no need to rush things.

It’s not widely known, but Vladimir Nabokov was an entomologist, a lepidopterist specifically, specializing in the genitalia of butterflies.  To this day, locked away in a dark Harvard University storeroom, is Nabokov’s genitalia cabinet containing his vast collection of butterfly penises.  Each penis, each aedeagus, was carefully separated from its host, labelled, and placed in a tiny glass vial for storage.  Squinting through a microscope seven days a week for hours on end, Nabokov stared at butterfly penises for so long that his eyesight was permanently impaired.  All of us, to put off working, we waste time with other activities.  I, for instance, eavesdrop on my coworkers.  Vladimir Nabokov, when he wasn’t staring at butterfly penises, he wrote the first draft of Lolita on the backs of his entomology index cards.

fall away

What they don’t tell you about getting older is that your conversations, they turn more to health problems and medications.  Every person you meet has something wrong.  All at once, you know a lot of old people.  The obituaries become very interesting.  For the vast majority of animals, with increased senescence comes increased complications.  Us humans, we’re no different.  Past a certain point, to live is to decay.  Past a certain point, we are all dying.

I’m out for dinner with a childhood friend and his wife.  Jane, she’s telling me about her rash and scratching her arms like mad.  They’re red, raw, inflamed, with pale nail marks zigzagging this way and that.  Flakes of dead skin fall like snow from her arms to the table.  It’s piling up in drifts.  Her fingernails, they’re caked with disease.  Her husband, Mark, doesn’t seem to notice or he’s trying not to, his eyes fixed on a television screen in the corner of the pub.  His wife, she’s falling apart one cell at a time, and Mark can’t take his eyes off the football game.

Antivirals, corticosteroids, analgesics, Jane is telling me about all of her medications when the waitress walks up to ask if we want more drinks.  Hearing the word ‘Tylenol,’ the waitress, she begins talking about how she takes T3s for her migraines.  She’s been eating them for years.  She says it’s the only thing that’ll take the edge off her pain.  “My pain.”  These words, she says them like she means really means them.  Jane scratches away at her arms, listening to the waitress talk about her headaches, her dizziness, her auras, her nausea.  The migraines have been getting worse as she gets older, she says.  As she gets older, she’s experiencing more pain everywhere, really.  This waitress, she can’t be too far past thirty.

Jane tells us Mark gets headaches too; stress related, she says.  All part of his generalized anxiety disorder and probably the root of his depression.  Me, I can think of other things that might make Mark depressed, but I keep my thoughts to myself.  I look over at him, and the television holds his attention.  The pint glass in his hand contains beer gone warm and flat, and Mark’s breathing is shallow, his face is a blank.  The football game is over, and an infomercial selling electric boots has taken its place.  SSRIs, benzodiazepines, opiates, Jane is listing off Mark’s medications while he’s mesmerized by a man demonstrating how to switch on the heaters in these amazing boots.  Mark, he isn’t even here.

What they don’t tell you about getting older is that your conversations, they turn more to health problems and medications.  Jane scratches at her arms, the table becoming a snow globe, while she and the waitress continue to trade symptoms and prescriptions.  Mark, he keeps staring at the television which is now showing a lengthy commercial for a cholesterol drug, a statin of some type.  The commercial shows us how taking the drug will improve our lives  We’ll go to the fair and ride the Ferris wheel.  We’ll snuggle with our partners on the couch.  We’ll go out for dinner with friends.

The commercial, it concludes with thirty seconds of side effects, the narrator rattling them off like an auctioneer.  Mark is more zoned out than watching.  Dizziness, irregular heartbeat, fainting.  Jane asks the waitress if she’s tried triptans.  She has, she says, and asks Jane if she’s tried itraconazole.  She has, she says.  Increased hunger, increased thirst, increased urination.  Jane asks the waitress if she’s tried ergotamine.  She has, she says, and asks if Jane has tried dexamethasone injections.  She has, she says.  Light-coloured stools, unusual bleeding or bruising, loss of consciousness.

Loss of consciousness, I could use a little of that.  I interrupt the waitress while she’s describing her nausea, and I ask for another beer.  Whenever she’s got a free moment, I tell her.  I ask her to bring one for Mark, as well.  Mark acknowledges the gesture with a barely audible grunt, his eyes not leaving the television.  Sweating, irritability, death.

During the break in conversation, Jane, she notices the growing desert of diseased skin spreading before her, and attempts to discreetly get rid of it.  I watch silently as Jane unceremoniously sweeps herself away, the fine powder of her dead skin falling to the floor like confetti on the eve of a new year.

in all things, beauty

I’m wandering around the mall, lost, as an Alzheimer’s patient might wander around a nursing home. I’m yelling less, of course, and I’m not insisting that every brunette strolling past is my long dead wife, but I’m no less confused. I actually check to see if I’m wearing a hospital gown. I’m not. When we parted ways, you told me you would text me when and where to meet back up. I check my phone. You haven’t texted.

It could be my mood, but everything looks ugly today. Gaudy signs advertise sales. Smudged glass protects storefront displays. In unlikely patterns, sections of stained floor tiles meet large areas of worn industrial carpet. People mill about the wide mall hallways like cattle working their way through the maze of a corral. Just ahead, a worn out mother drags two screaming kids into a lingerie store. Right behind me, a teenager’s ice cream falls onto the floor. I look back, and he’s staring down at it, cursing, his peach fuzz moustache glistening with vanilla. He has no idea what his next move should be. If I listen carefully, I can hear a Muzak version of Beethoven’s Zur Namensfeier playing over the mall’s PA system.

I find the washroom to wash my hands, but what I’m really wanting is a shower. Like mall washrooms all over the world, this one is populated by guys mostly looking to get away for five minutes; no-one really has to use the facilities. A young professional in a burgundy blazer leans over a dirty sink inspecting something on his face. A middle-aged man, his nose a mess of burst capillaries, leans against a brown-tiled wall squinting at cell phone screen. His wife, before she disappeared into a crowd shoppers, told him she’d text him when and where to meet up. This middle-aged man, his thick, greying eyebrows knitted together in confusion, he doesn’t remember how to check his texts.

A dishevelled college student bursts out of a stall, a book of poetry under one arm, complaining loudly about the unsanitary conditions. “There’s shit everywhere!” he shrieks. “Shit dried onto the walls of the toilet bowl and all over the rim. There’s shit on the seat. There’s even shit on the walls!” The rest of us, we look at the college student, our faces blank. I look up at the ceiling over the stall; there’s a constellation of drops splattered up there, as well. The college student, his face a scowl, flees the washroom with his thick tome under his arm. A long piece of toilet paper flaps behind him, stuck to one shoe.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had a scatological fixation. I’m serious. Immortalized in nearly forty surviving letters are scatological references from the composer of Requiem Mass in D Minor. Letters to his mother. Letters to his father. Letters to a cousin, his friends, his wife, his sister. One letter to his choirmaster. Mozart loved scat so much he even wrote songs about it. Canons, rounds, where multiple voices would stagger in, layering, repeating the obscene verse one after another, building to the coarsest of crescendos. Occasionally, he would borrow music written by another composer, changing the words to suit his needs. More often than not, he would compose original music as the vehicle for his scatological lyrics. Mozart, he would have loved this washroom.

I dry my hands, and head back into the mall just in time to see the college student meeting up with his partner, toilet paper still stuck to his shoe.  To her, he’s excitedly recounting the disgusting scene in the washroom, waving the book of poetry between them. His face is dark with disgust. Jonathan Swift, essayist, poet, cleric, he loved writing about human waste. Loved it. His best known work, Gulliver’s Travels, is littered with references to both urine and feces. He wrote numerous poems on the subject of bodily functions. In his final years, he wrote a treatise, Human Ordur, on excrement under the pseudonym Dr Shit. Jonathan Swift, he could have found the humour this college student missed.

My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I know it’s got to be you. You’re ready to meet up. Withdrawing my phone, I spot that kid who dropped the ice cream before, and he’s waiting for a new one in a long, twisting line. I glance over at the lingerie store half expecting to see the worn out mother dragging around two screaming kids. But she’s not there. I’m standing in the middle of the wide mall hallway with crowds of faceless patrons swirling around me, and playing over the PA system is a Muzak version of a selection from Handel’s Water Music. My mood, it’s brightening. Me, I allow the ugly to become beautiful.

the package part 2/2

Placing the package on the desk before me, I sit down, trying to remember the last time we spoke.  I rifle through memories as a 60s secretary might deftly flip through a Rolodex.  I grab one from here, one from there.  I find two old ones stuck to another, and peel them apart, inspecting each.  The last time we spoke, we might have been in that little café in Dar es Salaam.  I decide it was, and go from there.

“Are you sure you have to go?” you asked.  The inflection in your voice and the look on your face told me you already knew the answer.  I didn’t bother providing one.  Then you asked what I might miss most about Tanzania, and, thinking back, it feels like I took a long time to answer.  I find there’s usually little purpose in missing anything; we can always return to where we were.

I’m not good at nostalgia.

The small dog, she curls up at my feet, while the large dog cranes her neck to sniff at the package on the desk.  Like a child’s rubber stamp, her wet nose turns the brown paper dark where she touches it.  I don’t do anything to stop her; she knows what she’s doing.

I wonder now what I thought about after that question.  What would I miss about Tanzania?  Perhaps I considered telling you I would miss the beach, the ocean.  Perhaps your uncle’s hospitality.  Piloting scooters through crowded streets.  The chaotic bazaars.  The feeling of the hot sun on my back so close to the equator.  The way the stars in the night sky looked different.

“Coffee,” I said at last.  “I will miss the coffee.”  I raised the tiny ceramic cup in a mock toast and took a sip, the hot, acrid liquid eating its way past my tongue and down my throat.  It was the strongest, most delicious coffee I had ever tasted in my life.

You tilted your head and grinned, sincerely happy with my answer, and said: “That’s easy.”  I thought your response strange then, but knew better than to question it – and now I now fully understand your reaction.  The near boundless depth of your thoughtfulness should never be underestimated.

I pick up the package, the dog’s approving eyes watching my every move, and raise it to my nose to sniff.  Inhaling slowly, deeply, my brain picks its way through various scents.  Past the smell of grime and paper.  Past the smell of tape glue and stamp gum.  Past the smell of ink and cardboard.  And there it is, buried beneath all of those other olfactory delights, the fresh smell of roasted coffee beans.

The large dog looks on, curious, as I begin carefully unwrapping the package.  She tilts her head to one side and then the other.  The small dog at my feet whimpers in her sleep and kicks her legs.  She dreams, digging through her subconscious the way she might dig a hole in the backyard.  Only here, there is no human to stop her.  Here, there is no need for her to stop digging.  Holding a corner of the creased, brown paper, I mutter under my breath: “Dig deeper, my friend.”

Peeling away the last bit of wrap, the powerful aroma of coffee suddenly hits me like the warmest, most welcome of waves.  Picking up a magnifying glass, I turn the paper in my hands and examine the smudged postmark and stamps.  They’re from somewhere in Indonesia.  Me, I’ve been teleported back to that café in Dar es Salaam.  You, you’re already gone.

the package part 1/2

I rummage around in my brain as an old man might dig through his sock drawer looking for a matching pair.  Trying to remember the last time we spoke is like that.  I take a snippet of memory from over here, sew it to a strand over there, and paste these pieces together over a larger scrap to make a whole.  Everyone does it this way, I’m sure.  Remembering is less recollecting and more reconstructing.  It’s not perfect.

My dogs are going berserk while the deliveryman stands on the other side of the screen door.  He looks at me as if I should let him in, and mouths something through the glass.  I open the sliding window a crack so I can hear him.  “It’s okay,” he says, “I’m good with dogs.”

I don’t know what that means, and I stare at him for moment.  He doesn’t even know my dogs.  They’re nice animals, would never hurt anyone, but he has never met them.  I look down at my dogs, barking, pawing at the door, trying to push through with their big heads.  I question the deliveryman’s judgement.

The package he’s holding, I can see your name scrawled across a corner in red ink.  You’ve always preferred red ink.  There’s no return address because you are forever of no fixed one.  Worn fuzzy in spots, there are stains here and there on the brown packaging paper.  Damp has blurred the postmarks.  Myriad stamps clutter up a corner.  There are no rips or tears because every edge has been meticulously taped down.  You know what it’s like to travel; you know what is needed to keep safe.  The deliveryman insists on getting my signature.  “I’m serious,” he says, “dogs don’t bother me at all.”

At once, I open the door and my dogs pile out onto the porch nearly knocking the deliveryman over.  The large dog stuffs her snout right into his crotch, hard, really going for it.  The smaller one, she starts running laps around him.  A look of panic flashes across his face as he teeters there, holding out the package.  I take it, surprised by how light it is for its size.   A car passing on the street slows down, the driver gawking, trying to see what the commotion is about, and the deliveryman laughs nervously as my dogs accost him.  “See,” he says.  I don’t know what he means, but I smile anyway.

With the tip of my index finger, I sign my name on the screen of the deliveryman’s cell phone while he pets my dogs.  Having collected all the data on him they could, the dogs are calm now, enjoying the attention of their new friend.  He tells them they’re good dogs.  My heavily pixelated signature is severe black against the bright white of the cell phone screen.  It’s barely my name anymore, but the deliveryman seems pleased when I hand him his phone.  “I’ve always been good with dogs,” he says.  Maybe he has.  I have no idea.  He walks purposefully back to his van, and I take the dogs inside.

the runner

A guy sitting two tables over hasn’t stopped talking for the entire time I’ve been here.  He’s talking into his cell phone about running, saying stuff about flat tracks, certified courses, and LSDs.  I have no idea what any of this means, but I can tell he knows what he’s talking about because of his shiny shorts, sinewy leg muscles, and impeccable posture.  He alternates sips from a travel coffee mug and a plastic bottle of water.  He has a system.

Me, I’m working my way through a book of crossword puzzles and sipping coffee from a paper cup, the plastic lid sharp on my bottom lip.  I bite the lid with my front teeth when I’m trying to think of an answer, causing the plastic to become thinner and slightly jagged.  It helps, I think, this gnawing.  I used to do the same thing in school, but with my pens and pencils.  More than once, I had to sneak away to the washroom with ink in my mouth.  I can still remember the taste.

The runner two tables over, he mentions something about black toenails.  I’m almost sure of it.  He takes a quick sip of his water before continuing, at length, about overuse injuries and orthotics.  I see him check a second cell phone while he’s talking on the first.  He’s amused; I can see it in the slight crinkling at the corner of his eye.  He systematically takes two more sips from both the coffee and the water.

I’m trying to think of an eight-letter word for ‘lacuna.’  ‘Omission’ doesn’t work.  Not at all.  I chew on the plastic lid of my cup a little more.  At the table to my other side, a girl sits reading a book.  Everything about her seems sad: her weeping willow hair, her charcoal skirt, the shooting star tattoo above her ankle.  Occasionally, I catch a glimpse of her book’s cover; it’s about travelling alone.  It says something about breaks.  The girl at the table, she catches me looking over at her and meets me with a look that makes me feel like a creature existing somewhere between a sexual predator and an orphan.  I count the letters in ‘break’ but there aren’t enough for the answer I need.

Jiggling one leg up and down the way ectomorphs do, the runner’s table vibrates, creating a storm in his clear plastic water bottle.  He talks excitedly about carb-loading, and as he does, his eyes drift over to a glass display case filled with donuts, Danishes, and chocolate-covered croissants.  The word ‘glycogen’ drips from his lips as though he might be saying something erotic.  The phrase ‘side stitches’ is spit out of his mouth as though he can’t stand the taste.

Where we live, winter seems to have forgotten us.  It does a half-assed job, only snowing occasionally, with the temperatures rarely dropping too far below freezing.  I suppose, if one should want to badly enough, running outdoors could still happen.  Past the window, the December sky is grey, and the ground is an ocean of dry, dormant grass with dirty snow islands.  Winter is on hiatus.  I count the numbers in ‘hiatus.’  There are not enough to fill the spaces in 14-across.

The runner, he’s on a tangent about training, leaning forward now, jiggling both legs furiously under the table.  Overtraining, this he rushes past as you might rush past a beckoning stranger on the street when you’re late for an appointment with your bank.  The volume of his voice drops a little when he begins talking about altitude training.  I can tell he’s proud of himself to know the word ‘hypoxia.’  Then he says it, just like that.  This runner, this guy two tables over says exactly what my ears need to hear.  He starts talking about interval training, and my eyes get wide as I look down at my puzzle.

I look down at 14-across, and see that I already have the ‘t’ and the ‘a.’  I air-write the word ‘interval’ across the remaining spaces.  It fits perfectly.  I can’t contain my glee.

stamp it off

“I can’t tell if you’re back,” she says to me.  And I don’t know what to say.  What does one say?

There’s mud in the snow or under the snow or both.  Our boots make a sort of squelching noise, and gunk accumulates on the rubber soles in layers.  The ground is wet from melting snow, and the temperatures aren’t quite cold enough to do a good job freezing anything.  Everything smells kind of rotten.  The earth knows damned well it’s not spring.  It protests.  And I can’t tell if I’m back.

“I decided not to stay there,” I tell her, trailing off.  It’s not really a sufficient response to her statement, and we both know it.  “It didn’t really feel like home,” I add.  “I was never really comfortable.”  Feeling like I already said more than I wanted, I stop talking.

The air is warm, but not so warm that you could go without a coat.  I wear my winter coat that I’ve owned for far too long, but don’t really want to replace.  It was never fashionable, so will never be out of fashion.  Anyway, I don’t want my life to be measured in how many winter coats I went through, and this one is good enough.

“So, you’re back for now,” she says, sounding almost accusatory.  She’s trying to pin me down, to get me to commit.

“That place wasn’t meant to be my home,” I explain.  “It was a place to be for a time.  When that time was up, I arrived at something of a crossroad: stay or leave.  I left.  That I came back here is something I wasn’t really planning.”  I try to catch her eye, but she’s watching her boots squish through the muddy snow.  “But here I am.”

“What do you plan to build here?” she asks.  And I don’t know what to say.  What does one say?

We stand at an intersection waiting for the light to change, listening to automobile tires hiss past us on the slushy asphalt.  Everything is so dirty when winter doesn’t do its job right.  Red and green lights trade places, and we walk, muddy, wet boots clomping over the crosswalk.  We’re in the middle of the suburbs with downtown, the heart of the city, kilometres away.  I don’t know what I plan to build here.  What did I build before?  So much of what I knew is gone.

“I don’t know,” I say, “that depends.  Is here the same place I left?”

She’s silent now, while the warm chinook wind playfully picks up her hair.  I think I catch the hint of a smile, but I’m not sure.  And it doesn’t really matter.  There’s mud in the snow or under the snow or both.  Our boots make a sort of squelching noise.  Gunk accumulates on our soles in layers, causing us to walk a little off balance.  We try to stamp it off.  We try in vain to stamp it off.