picture by livejournal user seafoodmwg (more in her journal)
Someone plays two chords on a guitar as they pass my window then stop, their hands become busy elsewhere or maybe they are still. I don’t know, I can’t see them from here, my place on the floor, between my computer and the foot of my bed. It feels like a visit from my ex-husband, as if I could go to the window and see him there. Red pants, shirtless, a guitar on his back and his long brown hair getting in his eyes. My vision gives me the way he looked when we went to Vancouver Island and visited Robbie, the summer before Robbie purposefully walked under an ambulance on Boxing Day. My vision reminds me of when I had faith. The sun was perfect, blaring down, a rock concert of light, heavy-handed and meaningful. The neatly kept streets were full of tourists who tried to put coins in my coffee cup. We slipped into the change room of a store with a dress we couldn’t afford, just for a breath of air conditioning, just so he could take it off of me.
I suppose this means it’s summer. Spring has slowly crept away, a child uninterested in conversation going outside to climb the glorious trees waiting there. It makes me miss Toronto, this atmospheric humidity reminiscent of an afternoon I slowly poured a glass jug of icy water over my head outside the Black Bull on Queen street as if I were in an eroticized shampoo commercial, the way the water coldly pushed my clothing onto my skin like a textured tattoo, the way my hair dried into curls not five minutes later. I felt like the first pages of a book newly opened, a story about to be told by a fresh new author. Now I feel unwritten, like I had a story but it got lost along the way. Like words left unspoken that were meant to fall from some lips I missed meeting. I feel displaced, conditioned to not have a home. A modern gypsy denied the dignity of reason.
The masquerade has a Flickr Pool: Masquerade Ball.
Michel posted a new page of Jesus Monkey Pants in Space.
For my job interview with Telus, I had to go to an imposing building that looked like a secret government industrial facility. I was escorted through an impressively locked security door with shatter-proof wired glass and upstairs into a small, windowless, bile-green room that could have passed for a holding cell in a women’s prison, then interrogated by two older women who rarely frowned. They read the buzz-word questions directly from papers on the table, leaving me with the impression that the entire thing could almost be left to teenagers. Once, near the beginning, the power cut, leaving us in a confusing pitch blackness. “They’re working on the generator today.” After half an hour, they left me alone long enough with an examination sheet that by the time they returned, I had corrected the punctuation of the questions. Possibly an unwise thing to do under the circumstances, but I grow depressive in silences with nothing to do. A closer examination of the metal cabinets wouldn’t have been wise, though I considered it, and there are only so many times I can read the sides of cardboard computer boxes without beginning to feel claustrophobic. I think they liked my stories of working in theater, but were uncertain what to do with me. Either way, I get a phone-call by Friday. They can’t say yes or no until after a criminal record check.
