last night:
Sitting in Kino Cafe on Cambie Street, a place I am far too familiar with from when I was a teenager, out to support an old friend in the latest band she’s in with her brother. I am uncomfortable here, isolated, oddly part and yet not of the lives of the people involved with this evening. We used to come here all the time. The bartender would flirt and pour us drinks, even though we were underage. Fifteen years later, the bartender is gone, off to open his own place on Main St, but the place is little changed. As, too, are the people I am here with again.
Oddly, like the venue space, she looks almost exactly the same. The clothing has changed, but excepting that, the only thing missing are her braces.
Her brother, by contrast, I cannot see him as the person he is past the ruin of who he used to be. It’s as if someone has clumsily globbed handfuls of plasticine over the familiar corners of his body, rounding him out into the oddly bulky costume of a stranger. Underneath his new shape, however, it’s likely he is still a liar.
She is my conduit to these people, to this place. Her I named far more, in certain ways, than her parents ever did, a solid fingerprint the world does not know to see. “I don’t like my name,” she said when we met, and so by the time she was eleven, I had changed it, twisting the syllables until it described her face, until it fit her as well as her own skin. Little Mouse, she is, and for so long now that people commonly ask if she’s Russian. If it weren’t for her, I never would have come. Out of the twenty socially incestuous names I know in this crowd, she is the only one I would call my friend. For the rest of them, it was more that I was sometimes around, though we were all almost constant companions, present for almost every adventure, for years.
It makes me wonder if I should feel sorry, if there is something I missed, though I would not change our distance. Even through my disasters, I prefer who I am to who they would have me be.