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.