Author: foxtongue

nevermind that time I was kidnapped in L.A., just remember the time I was in a wedding dress instead

I dragged 40 pounds of books over to Pulp Fiction on Main St. yesterday, only to have them buy two titles, basically reducing my trip to $8 for an hour’s work. Boo. Then, on the long walk home, after a lovely streetside conversation with BJ, one of my cart wheels snapped off. Double boo. Luckily, after about half a mile of unsuccessfully attempting to drag a broken cart, some very nice guy on a bicycle pulled up and said, “Did you lose a wheel? Yeah, that’s ruined. Hold on, stay here, you going far? I’ll give you a ride home.”, spun away, then came back and picked me up in a big shiny jeep with a canadian flag on the back. (Turned out to be Oliver’s neighbor, because this city is small like that.)

So that was my tiny, merry adventure, and once again, like many of them, it involved hopping into a car with a total unknown. Thank you random man, for making my day so much better!

New score – Jhayne: 1. Stranger Danger: 0. Win.

The other exciting thing that happened yesterday was that I recieved my very first HST return. Not a huge chunk of money, not even remotely enough to get me in the clear, but enough that I’ve been able to kill some of my debts. I paid off the $70 I owed on taxes, set aside what I owe Karen, and half of what I owe Paula, put some cash towards my EI debt, and today I’m paying off the ICBC transit tickets someone put in my name while I was in Montreal, so I can continue working on getting a driver’s licence. Sounds mundane, perhaps, but it feels bloody brilliant all the same.

do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again.

‘You don’t seem to understand, sir,’ the worthy Lyon, my teacher, used to often say to me, ‘that certain words are made to go with others; between them there exist certain relationships that must not be changed.’

‘I can’t help it, dear teacher, but for words too I am a firm believer in the virtue of bad company.’

André Gide, 1911

Under the surface of the conversation lives another set of words, ur-homonyms, post post modern, the secret referential dialect of poetry birds, blue and gray, alike in species, but not in feather, the language an echo of captured ghosts. We are eye contact, insinuation, the rhythm and flow of a secret river covered over. He fiddles with his phone, pulls up a memory, a beautiful mention of jewelry and bones, and unobtrusively places it on my side of the table, the better to keep it between ourselves, the better not to interrupt. It is the best sort of message – silent, apt, instantly understood – spun from the fearless perfection of falling stars. It was confirmation of an unlikely truth, a gesture clear and unmistakable, almost but not quite an apology. We had thought ourselves as solid as stone, but then we crumbled like plaster under rain, our gestures blurred, our voices unheard and stolen by a sudden, dangerous misunderstanding. It was terrible, ragged and abrupt. We became a fire guttering, giving off no warmth and even less light, but this, I thought, looking up to meet his meaning, and its depths, it justifies what came before, this is why I thought it was safe, and why I will again.

confluence

Sweetness, sunlight, warm days and two wills held up like a slightly cracked mirror. I stayed up late, walked everywhere, and, for awhile there, I did not feel so fragile. On my second day, we went out on a lake in Central Park in a little rowboat like the owl and a pussycat singing handfuls of song, and posed for our very first photograph, magical, digital evidence of our parallel lives finally coming together. It had been shocking to see him at the airport, standing casually by the side of the baggage carousel as if he could have been just anyone, instead of my dearest friend. Two weeks later, drastic change, while on the surface, things are the same. I am back on the west coast, still reverberating from my trip.