Revelry

He turned upside me down. He kissed me and my head hung off his bed. His touch was soft, softer than it had been, because we were going somewhere new. He always took time kissing me, touching me, being close. I got the sense he liked beginnings.

“Tell me nice things.”

He moved slower and I felt him. He kissed me again and the air was gentle, like warm water. The night exists in memories that don’t make a story. Flashes of dreams and moments of hope, obscured by the alcohol that I could taste on our skin. I didn’t want to dawn to come. I wanted to stay, to be against him, in that moment, frozen.

“Like what?”

“Nice things.”

Reality lived like shadows.

We woke up laughing. He pushed the hair off my face, his hand against my forehead. Later, he took my hand and we crossed the street.

“Look both ways.”

Sympathy for the Devil - Personal Essay Excerpt Two

He broke my heart on a warm and sunny day. I broke his heart on a cold and rainy day. With long distance marriages, you are never experiencing the same thing at the same time. Not even the weather.

That summer, I would sit on the streetcar, going nowhere at all, just wanting to be in motion and never still, listening to the same fifteen songs on repeat. It was there, amongst the anonymous population of Toronto and with the city gliding past me, that I felt calm. There was a space that enveloped me. In that space, I could finally think clearly.

I don’t figure things out through talking. If anything, the talk pushes me against a wall with a knife against my neck. I feel suffocated in words, in ideas, in hypothesis’ of why we didn’t work. Sweating, with the music, my legs crossed on a metal seat and looking out a dirty window, I could make my sense of what had gone wrong.

For three weeks, I only cried on the 501 streetcar, headed west.

Forever Ago - Short Story

To Marianne, forever ago.

There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t, at some point, think of you.

They aren’t long thoughts.

I just saw a woman pass me on the street and she had hair like yours. An acquaintance talks the way you do. Or did. Maybe you don’t talk like that anymore.

When my girlfriend smiles at me, with the morning light hitting her face having left some shadow, I see you, not her, lying in bed next to me. There is something about the expression, the sadness under her skin. You both share a vulnerability brought on by sleep.

I see you even when I’m not looking, when I don’t expect to see you at all. Is it wrong to see someone everyday that I might never see ever again? Please know that I don’t see you in a way that is tangible, in a way that feels close enough to touch. I see you like a photograph and with all the time, you’ve become two-dimensional and out of focus.

Forever ago. That’s how long it’s been. Does it feel that way to you?

Do you remember us sitting, on your wood floor, with no furniture, no bed, no money, nothing at all, laughing until daylight? Do you remember that summer two years after we got together? When we made dinner in the dark every night? You had taken to wearing jean shorts and combat boots, flowered dresses and ripped tights. You lined your eyes, thick, like permanent marker. You’re hair hung so long down your breast.

Do you remember how happy we were?

Or did I make that up? Were we sad? Were there flowered dresses? We were happy, weren’t we? Was it my fault that it changed? Do remember that night it rained and the apartment flooded? Do you remember how Seinfeld was always on?

I forget how your voice sounds. Isn’t that weird? The hours we spent talking and I can’t remember your voice. It feels unfair. There must be so much else that I don't even know I've forgotten. Small moments that we shared together just up and left, forever. Is it like they never happened?

Do you sometimes think that if we’d taken a left down that road instead of a right, if we’d stayed home instead of going to the bar, if we’d seen that movie we were considering going to, if one small insignificant thing was different, we’d still be together? If we’d met later, if we’d met earlier, if we’d never met at all?

Why am I thinking like this, when it all happened forever ago?

I'm sure you're very different now. I'm different. I know the people we were together don’t exist any longer. You always told me that when two people are in love they create a world together that didn’t exist before. That’s true. My world is different now that you aren’t in it. The women I've loved are not all like you. Some, yes, some, no. But it’s in a touch, a gesture, a sound, and you’re right here, all over me again. I wonder if it’s in the way they make me feel. If all those feelings are somewhere rooted in you, in what we felt together.

I wonder if the man you’re with is like me. I hope you find ways to stay warm when it’s cold. Did you end up moving to California? Why don’t you have Facebook? How’s your Mom? Is your British accent still funny? Do you still cry when you don’t want to, but never when you do want to? Do you still stumble over words when you’re nervous? I bet you still smell pretty. I also bet you still wrinkle you’re eyebrows when you’re annoyed. You probably still hang up on people too.

I'll always know you in a way that time can't erase. Do you think its fair I get to know you like that? Am I being foolish in thinking that I do know you? Because I don’t, do I? I don’t know who you’ve become. I just know who you were.

Is that more valuable?

I thought I saw you about a year ago. It was Christmastime, and you’re hair was shorter, as I assume it now is. The woman I thought was you was carrying a brief case. But you got lost in the rush hour crowd of the New York City subway. Since then, I wonder if I’ll see you again. If cosmos will throw us together. Sometimes I get off at that stop for no reason other than that you might be there. If you were there, would we have this conversation? Would I know what to say?

"Do you really carry a brief case?"

Do you remember when we went to Europe? Do you still have the pictures? Do you remember how I would make you tea anytime you asked me? Do you remember the way you would fall asleep on my chest? Your hair felt so soft against my skin. Do you remember how I would blow air into your mouth, filling your lungs? It was like an exhale for me, an inhale for you? Then you’d force that air back into me? And together we’d be like one person, depending on the other to finish a breath?

These things all happened forever ago. That’s how long its been. So why do I still remember them?

For some reason, I want you to know, that I do love the woman I’m with. I don’t love her how I loved you. I can’t decide if that means I love her less. Maybe I’ve loved them all less. Do you ever love people more or less, or is it just different? Or maybe it's that I don’t love her enough. She’s not the one that disproves everything I thought I knew. I’m still waiting for that one. Stupid, right?

Do you remember the day things ended? Just one more cup of coffee before I go, that’s what you said before you left. Did you end up drinking the coffee I poured you, black with sugar, full to the brim? Or did you leave it on my table, like you left strands of your hair, that tiny bracelet, that black t-shirt?

I can’t remember. I want to believe that you drank the coffee, slammed it down on the table, and then stormed out. But I know that’s not how it happened. Our goodbye was slow. I don’t think either of us knew when it really began, how it became complete.

I got that letter you sent me a year later. I should have replied. I didn't because I was young and stupid and mean. I didn't understand that things aren't people's faults until you get a little older.

But its my fault that so much time has fallen between us. I didn't intend it this way. It was like I woke up one morning and suddenly, I didn’t have your phone number, I’d lost touch with everyone you knew, you’d moved with no forwarding address. Why did it feel overnight? Is time passing this fucking fast for you, too?

Forgive all the stupid questions. I have no business asking them, no business thinking of you every day, no business contacting you at all, when all of this was forever ago.

There’s just one thing I want to know.

Do you, at any point in the day, think of me?

Forever - Personal Essay Excerpt Two

Then I realized that there are few universal milestones in life; graduating high school, going to university, having a kid. Getting married is one of them. And so, most people, who aren’t looking deeply, do look at you differently as a married woman because you’ve crossed another hurdle. You’ve given up a little of who you were to become who you’ll be. You’ve taken the step towards what’s next. In most people’s opinions, getting married is remarkable and life-changing.

The irony being that my milestones, the moment’s that have changed my life, don’t happen in big, sweeping events. Change in me happens slowly. At a diner at 4 a.m. I’ll realize that something has taken place, that it’s over now, and that for better or for worse, I’m finally not who I was before.

Sternum - Short Story Excerpt

God created sex, exercise and cleaning for girls like me mourning the loss of men like you. When my limbs are moving, when I’m full on someone else, you don’t live inside me, banging on my ribcage. Without them, your fists hit my solar-plexus echoing like drums. Your fingertips slide down my sternum ringing like bells.

I move with music and men and moments, all strung together by your not being there. In motion, time rides a continuum. No one second feels so different from the next. No one second is so different from the next.

I tap dance, hard metal on soft floors, left then right, back then forth, up, higher than humans should jump propelled by change and lonesomeness. I kiss, hard and stupid and mean, arms over my head, legs wrapped tight, squeezing the breath out of someone else. I scrub and sweep, hoping the bleach and its pretty lemon smells will seep into my veins, hoping the cleanliness will permeate me.

I move angry, fast, without thinking. I don’t stay still. Not even when I’m sleeping.


When I stop moving, there's a stabbing pain, a violent silence. With the quiet, I feel glued to the concrete of some new place I’ve never been. Its some city I don’t recognize, somewhere I can’t stay, not for a moment. It is so sparse and I don’t see anything but grey. When I breathe my body is filled with cold, hard air. The coldness freezes so deep that it stops my heart, it puts my lungs in an ice suitcase, it buries my legs in a heavy snowdrift. When I feel the coldness coming, I move again, kicking and screaming my way home. I hurt myself, manic and unhinged, to be warm again.

Can you feel my heart beating from a million miles away?

On Being A Writer

I’m sparked, waiting for the light to hit.

I feel you, a hot whisper on my neck all the live-long day, only hearing you when the moon rides high, when most people won’t speak, except in guttural, human noises; a nightmare’s cry, a lover's call.

But you, you scream my name in the nighttime. Your noise is deafening. I don’t want to listen, but what I mute becomes so loud that I can’t keep my eyes closed. I toss and turn in my bed, strangled in sheets. When you won’t stop, I get up, bare feet on a wooden floor, sliding towards the sound like new shoes on shiny, untouched ice.

I can’t turn you away; scared that if I don’t listen to the words, if I don’t strain to hear the voice that’s not mine, I’ll blink and miss the moment, blink and miss what will finally show me to myself. You are like a cicadas; buzzing and incessant. You are like a piano, dusty and haunted, played by old hands. You are like a lady-singer, sweetly pretty, hurt and poetic, with a voice so sad that she could never have loved herself.

You are something bigger than me. I don’t know where you come from. When you’re gone, I don’t know where you go. When you come back, you tell me of your travels, whispering stories to me, letting me keep them as my own. I am a woman possessed, spending my life waiting to hear what you have to say next.




When you speak to me, we live somewhere else. Where the world echoes like harps and violins, where the wind moves, choreographed, like a prima ballerinas, where strangers look like black and white photographs. Here, with you, there are beginnings. There are ends.

We are selfish with each other. You don’t speak to me when other people are around. When you leave me lonely, I study them, wondering how to describe their voice, how to write their face, how to tell them to you later. You set me on fire. You drown me with rocks. You drive me miles from home, spin me like a top, and leave me to crawl. Together, we jump from buildings. We fly like sad sparrows. We dance like Fred Astaire. We kiss, chests cracked wide open; lungs touching hearts, organs touching bones.

I can never get it all out, I have never said it right. The words have never sounded as truthful as they feel. And so, I keep digging, piling thick mud into a hole with no bottom, waiting for you to speak again. I will wait, forever, listening for the petals to unfurl, waiting to hear the sound that’s made when hope blooms.

And I sit; like the man counting the seconds until the guillotine falls, like the woman, stranded and miles from her umbrella who just heard thunder, like the teenager, drunk for the first time, struck by nausea that starts in his toes, waiting for this to hit me.

Like a soldier with amnesia, I can’t remember the good times even when I try. But one night soon, I will dream reminders. I won’t be able to hide anymore, cowering in the corners of my skull that weren’t yours yet.

Swelter - Short Story Excerpt

This is an excerpt from a short story I just completed, called "Swelter." It is written in the voice of Louise, a seventeen year old girl who's friend Colin has just died. The excerpts are not consecutive.




The funeral felt really long, like it stretched out for hours, days, weeks, months, years, miles, kilometers, continents, oceans and equators. The heaviness that sits on a bunch of people that are mourning the death of a young person weighs trillions of pounds and it crushes your bones. There’s this quote I just got tattooed on my ankle and it says, “Inside each man there is a poet who died young.” Colin died when he was still the poet, but after he died, that poet died in me, that poet died in us all. We felt the poems dying that day. Growing up is realizing that everything about life is unfair, and the most unfair part is that it ends. Life kicked the childhood out of me that day. Once you’re gone you really can’t go back.




We ended up in his bedroom. He pushed me up against his wall and he kissed me. He’d kissed me before, always at parties when he was drunk or high, but this time, it felt different. He meant it this time. He tasted like those white tic-tac’s, kind of vanilla and kind of mint. Pure delicious. I knew then he’d planned it.

“Let me move in you,” he whispered in my ear.

And before I knew it we were having sex, real sex, for my first time ever.

When he finished, I’ll be honest, not that long after we started, he kissed me, really tender, like boys always kiss girls in movies and rarely in real life.

“I love you, Louise” he said before we had to put our clothes on because his parents were home. I felt so pretty when he said that that I started crying and then I couldn’t stop.

He let me sit on the handlebars of his bike and he drove me home the long way. It would have been awkward sticking around his house when his parents were home. I could hear his Mom crying too when we snuck out the back window. So instead, we drove through town dressed all in black, like morbid Amish people during a parade. All I needed was a bonnet.

Later that night, I wondered if all that happened because he wanted to feel closer to Colin. Then I thought, maybe we’ll get married because we have this in common. No one else is going to know Colin, not how we did, and by pledging ourselves to each other for eternity, we would, in some ways, be staying close to Colin forever.

Funny how history works.




I had my headphones on. I listened to the C.D Francais as I had taken to calling it. The music pushed the leaves from the trees, the clouds from the sky, the blue from Heaven, and I could see all the planets. I could see silvery Pluto, the beautiful red Jupiter, and then yellow Venus. I could see the infinite blackness and all the beautiful orbs of colours that populated it. I reached out and touched Neptune. It felt like cold water.

I think I even saw Colin waving at me.

“This town is so severe and silent. I wonder if a person can die from it, choking to death on things they always wanted to but were never able to say,” he told me the week before he died. We’d just gone out for breakfast, the two of us, because everyone else slept through it.

It was a pretty insignificant thing, coming from him. He always said shit about life and death, waxing poetic about unanswerable bullshit. The boys called him Socracock.

It’s only because he’s gone that all those trivial little things from the past echo on and on and on, but I wonder if maybe it was the silence that killed him. Maybe he had died, choking on the silence, seconds before the train hit him. So on his death certificate it should say that the cause of death was “peace and quiet,” not railroad misadventure.

Or maybe the silence killed him metaphorically. Maybe he saw the train coming and decided not to move.

When I went inside, still shivering, I put the kettle on.

The water boiled while the day was on fire, and I watched it, patiently waiting like a bird on a wire.

An Open Letter To Men Inspired By All The Other (Hateful) Open Letters To Men I’ve Read On Blogs Lately.

Dear Men,

Thank you.

Thank you for being my brother, my father, my ex-boyfriend(s), my ex-husband, my boyfriend, my nephew, my cousins, my uncles, my grandfather, my best friend(s) and my future son.

Thanks for being different. Thanks for the late night talks where you provide a clarity I can’t find in myself. Thanks for trying to understand what you most likely can’t, what can’t really be understood to begin with. Thanks for being a shoulder, and thanks for the rare times you want to cry on mine. It doesn't make me think you're a pussy.

Thanks for being the same. Thanks for the look in your eyes when we both realize that’s the truth. Why do we pretend we’re so different? We aren’t, are we? Our society is sick with the insanity of believing we aren't alike, that you are impossible to understand. You men feel the same things, right? Lonesome and united, happy then sad. So anything we think was all your fault, wasn’t. Women need to look in the mirror a lot more often, and that starts with me.

On that personal note, thanks to the dudes I’ve dated. You were, and I’m sure remain, a good kisser. Maybe we didn’t make each other happy, but thanks on behalf of the girl you will. I’m not mad at you. People fuck up and we hurt each other. If you’re mad at me, I understand and I probably deserve it. Thanks for the heartbreak, the rejection, the euphoria. One of the few truths in this world is that we make what we want of what happens to us. I hope you’ve made something good of me because I’ve made something good of you. I realize now that if you didn’t like me its probably because I didn’t like myself.

Besides, its easier to make art from you, from us, from what we became, if we aren't together anymore.

Thanks for calling when you say you will. And thanks for not calling when you say you will, because let’s be real - women do that, too. What we teach each other by being dishonest is, usually, a lot more valuable than what we could have learned together. If I’m obsessively checking my phone in hopes you’ve texted me back what I need to be checking is my self-worth.

Ultimately, thanks for the experiences we’ve shared, good or bad. The love and loss, tangled together, are the most defining moments my life. Thanks for defining all the other ladies, too, and thanks for letting us define you.

Thanks for being so fucking funny and smart. Thanks for telling me about cool music I didn’t know about before. Thanks for walking me to a cab or the streetcar late at night. Thanks for making the house feel safer when you’re in it. Thanks for loving my Mom, my sister, my friends - even if things didn’t work out. Thanks for the challenges. Thank you to gay dudes...well, to gay people in general. Your contributions to society make life more worth living for me, for my children, for my children’s children.

To the men who create, thanks for the songs you write about us. They're my favourites. Thanks for Daisy in The Great Gatsby, thanks for Annie Hall, thanks for (the t.v. version of) Carrie Bradshaw, and thanks for Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Men created all those women and in them I've seen the truest reflections of myself.

To the dudes who are having a hard time with us right now - I don’t know why we like the assholes. We should like you. Take solace in knowing that you are someone’s asshole, that someone who you can’t love could’ve loved you, if only you’d been willing. We all play foolish games and we’re all reckless with each other’s hearts. For better or for worse, know nothing is permanent.

To men in general, thanks for letting me think about you so much. Thanks for collared shirts. Thanks for how boss you look in a suit. Thanks for your blue jeans and Converse shoes. Thanks for the way you look at us. Thanks for nice things you say about our bodies, and thanks for how those nice things make us feel. Thanks for hollering at me on the street. The psychology of that is a little fucked up, but from here on out, I’m assuming that you are doing it with the most human intentions, that you just want to tell me the world is a little better with me in it. Thanks. The world is better when people are kind enough to remind me.

To the brave men that ask us out on dates, thank you. I can’t even imagine how terrifying that must be. It shouldn’t be all on you but it is. I’m really sorry. Thank you for the leap of faith. Trust me when I say that you’re doing good.

To all these notes to you on blogs - give me a fucking break. Like women have any idea what works and what doesn’t, like we all aren’t just running in circles. These women who are writing to you are missing the point. You aren’t doing anything wrong. The thing is, we’re all doing shit wrong, all the time, but that’s not what really matters. The right one for you, like the right one for us, isn’t going to care, not about anything at all, other than seeing in you what isn’t visible to most people. Writing judgmental open letters to you comes from feeling bad about ourselves. I'm guilty of all this blame but that was about my shit. Never yours.

Thanks for putting up with all those commercials on T.V. where you look retarded, and where the wife/Mom looks hugely superior to you. Thanks for putting up with it when women say “Eugh, men!” or talk other shit about you.

You aren’t all defined by you’re gender. You’re like us. We aren’t all any one thing. You aren’t all stupid, or frustrating, or mean. It’s lame when we pretend you are. Being a dick has nothing to do with having a dick. And, ps. thanks for dicks. And sorry for books like, “He’s Just Not That Into You.” The world, and peoples actions in it, are infinitely more complicated than we want to think and cannot be explained in a six-word catch phrase.

Thanks for living in a fucked up time in society for men. It was probably a lot easier when there were rules for being a man, when everyone’s parent’s didn’t split up, when cowboys were little boy’s sole role-models. I’m sorry. But I think we’re moving in the right direction, that everyday we’re a little closer to understanding each other.

Thanks to old men. There is nothing funnier than your jokes.

Thanks for marrying us. Thanks for fathering our children. Thanks for staying the night even when it doesn't work out. Thanks to those men I don’t know yet because I’m really looking forward to the time we'll spend together.

Men, you don’t know how lovely you are because we don’t tell you enough.

Katie

Sympathy for the Devil - Personal Essay Excerpt

It was a hot summer. The humidity was suffocating; it made your hair curl, your nerves itch, and your every thought pressed up against you like a nervous lover. Sleep was fleeting. Woken several times by nothing in particular, always wondering why the sun took so long to rise. On nights like that men who have been friends for years leave parties dukes up, fighting for blood. Anything can happen.

Everything did.

In the days leading up the end, I could feel the hysteria, impatient and merciless, like a wasp trapped under my blanket. It was like a spell had been cast on us all and suddenly, we were no longer our own. I could feel gravity bending in the air. I knew not exhale too quickly. One wrong move and nothing is how it used to be.

She'd never known him, not at all.