Tag: alberta

my heart will do the rest, tasting a name as something sacred, it all comes out in the wash


The storm’s knocked out lights in the city tonight, so many it’s possible to see stars. I felt a flutter of silent excitement when I found out, but I live too far away from the dark zones to prowl through like I want to.

Late, drizzling black, cold through the curtains, the cats have gone to bed without me. I’m resolved to get through at least ten more photos from my trip to Alberta, sort through, pick out the clear ones, fix the colour, try to resist the urge to pick up the phone and call long-distance. He’s got time off, the most since I’ve met him, and somehow this makes the silence unbearable in a way that it wasn’t before. Thoughts unworthy of living inside of my skull, walking down back alleys, scrawling poetry on the walls. Conversations flit through, scattering sentences, accuracy slithering away like a harshly edited student film. Jumpy, erratic, stretches of time where I can’t make out the words for the mumbling colours that are freezing the frame. Last week I had it, the week before that it was verbatim.

The pictures help, they soothe the feeling of thinning memory, of intimacy and time stretched too dim. As always, I wish I had taken more, captured us at the Greek restaurant, how he made me laugh so hard I thought I might die, or during the ride from Calgary to Edmonton, his brown eyes lightening with confessions, delicious history spun into a rope to tie us together, handcuffs made of the darkness of the classroom where he put his head on the desk and passed out as a child. I smile just to think of it, grin madly when no one is looking. Stories, the oldest magic, scratched out of experience, perfect, solid, swallowed and digested whole. The terrible things offered for sale in a truck stop bath-room as we travelled North, anticipating how we might be late. On the phone with the manager, writing directions down on the inside flap of a travel book map. Why we didn’t order chicken feet, the immortality of sharks, wondering if the police should be called if I went missing. How he laughs. The bare outlines of history filling in with names, anecdotes, similar feelings from disparate narratives. What it felt like to be one day closer or to kiss him.

It makes me wish I were a visual artist, so I could draw the moments I missed with my camera, illustrate the wonder of my heart as it sang with the vibration of his blinding, sweet consideration. I am starved for these images, worried I will not write them down in time, will not examine them with a heavy enough contemplation to lock them into place for later, to turn in my head like a crystal splashing pure white light into colour.

I had him stop the van in the middle of a street next to the river in Edmonton, just to look at the moon.

all I wanted was to paint us in mythology

wednesday's child
365: day 2

I wrote the rough of this while sitting on a table in the back of the club Mike played in Edmonton, waiting for his fans to disperse after the gig. I want to polish it properly, but feel stuck, so I’m posting it anyway:

Driving West along either street, you will come across too many one way streets. Your head will turn, searching for the butterscotch of centre lines, hoping to find some rhyme to the maze. Instead, the streets will seem to coruscate, shine, and blind you, balefully offering oblivious wrong turns. Undaunted, you will keep driving. The asphalt will become brick, cobbles, cut stone. Red and granite and gray. You will look to the moon to guide you, a sideways glance, as she sits in the passenger seat beside you, as tall as winter, nestled in black fur, laughing, offering perfect directions. You do not doubt her. Her gray eyes are sharper, can survive the tangled city traffic, though in the daylight she is almost blind. Her egg-shell maps are drawn directly on her empty hands, woven from experience and time. In a year, you might find out why, but for now, you do not need to care. You are glad for her company. She likes your scarlet heart, even stained fog thin as it is from travel. She likes your polished voice, how it brings colour to her airless skin. When she shyly kisses you, as loud as paper, she is exactly what you need. From her place in the sky, shaking the tops of trees, sweet as candy, her smile looks like your teeth.

a verb’s action noun

Trucks like monoliths, grumbling gods to some sort of travel plan, the kind of yellow covered maps you only buy in gas stations. Row upon row, headlights as big as our heads, snow gritty with gravel, running to skid on the ice, arms silently flung out for balance like sweatershirt wings. We walked through them transformed from adults into children by sheer scale. Machines built by hands like ours, but unimaginable as only a collection of parts, a warehouse of nuts, bolts, and aluminium siding. Machines that growled, spit smoke, carried worlds in their bellies and dwarfed us, our chilled faces, our frozen laughter. The way I wanted to kiss him there, between the vehicles, between history, but didn’t.

Crunching white footprints leading back to the hotel and I still wouldn’t do up my coat.

My trip to Alberta was like a trip to Canada, too. It felt like time travel. Vancouver is warm winters, high heels in December, ocean sunsets, miniature dogs, Kitsilano graphic designer vegetarians with tans, fake nails, and eight word coffee orders. Twenty four hour internet cafes lined with serious young men with short hair, Mac laptops, and Clark Kent glasses, planning on working in video games, dreaming of going to Japan.

I’ve been anti-social since returning, picking my company with exquisite care, unwilling to give up my time away. My trip spoiled me with inspiration, with company, with care. The people I went to see put me back on my feet, lifted me from myself and gave me new direction. As we drove to the airport, he held my hand, and I gave him directions that included I was pretty. I worry that if I give myself back to Vancouver, I will lose the complex taste of these memories, that they will flatten and take with them that precious ice edge of rediscovery that we so sweetly forged together. The cloud machines, the black sticks of prairie fire licking the sky. How terrible to fade, to disintegrate like a chalk-drawing photograph left out in the rain.