Character is spontaneous, rather than coherent.

I've always believed we're a lot less definite than we think. We're like mercury; well never be held, we'll never take shape.

I sit down to write and I see nothing. No words, no ideas, no feelings, no nothing. The quiet is new and it scares me. Or maybe its old and that's why it scares me. Lately, I spend my days dissecting someone else's text, frustrated and tired. I come home and look at everything I've written and I hate it.

The stage manager is the only other girl. She has pretty brown eyes and moves like a bird.

"My friend who's a sculptor, a new artist, called me and said 'I'm looking at this piece I did and I hate it. I can't stop looking at it and I can't stop hating it. I need to go get drunk,' and I took him aside and I told him, 'Listen to me. Self-loathing is a huge part of being an artist. Every artist hates most of what they do. It's part of the whole thing. That's why so many of them drink too much, or abuse things, to escape the self-loathing.' He didn't listen to me."

She laughed. I nodded.

"You make art one time out of ten. Take a hard look back at all that you invent. My brother told me that."

Character is not what a man says, but the sum of his actions. If those actions come quick, without warning, surprising even ourselves, where does that leave us? How do we know anything?

I'm just trying to figure out what changed.

Maybe everything has its moment.

Sister Winter

"At Christmas, all roads lead home."

"There is, in lovers, a certain infatuation of egotism; they will have a witness of their happiness, cost that witness what it may."

The dreams started after everything fell apart. Not before. I know that’s true, because they didn’t feel like dreams. They felt real. Too real to just wake up and forget about, unfolding in what looked like little pictures. Little pictures that I had painted. Pictures of things I had seen before.

The time when I was awake began to feel less and less real. The days passed too slowly. I would lay in my bed while it was bright out and wait for sleep to come, so we could be together again. In my vintage dreams, she was more alive than people who stood in front of me. I was only happy in sleep. That haunted me. Maybe they were more like nightmares.

Silent nightmares.

Home is where the hot wind blows, where most girls are married by twenty-two, and where one person in thirty-eight lives in a trailer. Most people don’t have high school diplomas. There has been no rain since April.

Sometimes, when I've dried out, she does get back in. She likes to remind me that I didn't see myself ending up back here.

"I tried to run away" I tell her.

I did. I tried hard to drift far away from this heat and the past. I swear, I would have made it if it wasn't for those dreams. I would have made it, if I just didn't look back. I would have made it, if it wasn't for her.

...

I wasn't drunk the night I ended things, but I can't remember how I did it.

I know I said stupid things like I hoped that we could be friends. She said he didn’t think that would happen, that she couldn’t just be my friend. I know she asked me to reconsider, and I said I’d done a lot of considering. She said that she knew things were bad and that I wasn’t happy with her like I used to be, but that she wanted to try harder.

I said I didn’t think it was a problem that trying could fix.

I think eventually I said that we were just too different and that we had to go be different, apart.

She thought our differences were what made us special.

We talked late into the darkness. Eventually there wasn’t anything more to say. We both lay in the bed, not touching, not sleeping, not speaking. I heard my heart beating. I could hear her heart beating. We didn’t move from the bed until long after the sun rose.

I don’t remember saying goodbye.

I haven’t seen her since.

The rain always reminds me of that night.

Like Father Part Five

I have a fever. He's sitting with me in my bedroom. I try to remember the last time we were both in here together.

"What's wrong with you, kid?"

"I can't decide."

"Women are always like that."

I turn towards him.

"What do you think the main differences are between men and women?"

"A poet put it best. For women love is everything, for men, it's a thing apart."

I nod.

"What does that mean?"

"That men are cold. Women are tender."

That makes me sad.

"Do you think that's true?"

"Just look at the beast in the field. Lions, once the woman has her cubs, she stops paying attention to the man all together, and only fends for her babies. Male lions will eat their cubs, if they have to. They'll do whatever it takes to survive. Then, if the male lions eat the cubs, within three days the female lion will be getting it on with them again. What does that tell you?"

"I hope that's not true."

"It is. For centuries, men have had an advantage. They've had brute force on their side. So women have had to develop other skills to get along. Do you know what that is?"

He points to his head.

"My mother was quicker witted than any woman I've ever met. I learnt what women are like at her knee. Women will say things to you that you would deck a man in the street for. And they know it, that's why they say it. All women, your mother, every woman I've ever met, has tried to cut me in two with her words. I learned to be sharper than them with my tongue."

I think of myself. "Do you really believe all women are like that?"

He looks like he wishes he hadn't said that.

"Most. It's always a power struggle," he shrugs.

"That's true. There is always a push-pull."

"Exactly right. Why do people say it should be fifty-fifty, when everyone is just trying to win in the end?"

My Own Personal Jesus - Personal Essay Excerpt Two

I remember him how everyone is remembered once they’re dead; in stories you tell at a dinner party.

When Michael was seven, Patrick set up his first email address. It was used for their correspondance alone.

"Hey Mikey,
I say we get a six-pack of beer from the liquor store and then plunk ourselves down on the beach and whistle at pretty girls. What do you think, buddy?
Patrick"

Michael and I idolized him. He was the only grown-up we knew that was good at playing. Looking back, I realize he always did better with kids. Some part of him was unfinished, filled with boundless energy, restrained around people his own age.

As a child, there is no one that makes you feel so special as an adult who treats you like a friend.

Black Sheep - Belfast

Frank sat in the kitchen. His stomach was filled with lead.

She should have been back hours ago.

He turned the radio on, as quietly as he could. Every time the man’s voice grew louder, hiding up in his nose, Frank heard a bomb go off.

Every time he blinked, Frank saw a bomb go off. Every time his heart beat, he knew a bomb went off.

He saw her arms strewn blocks apart. He saw her chest, cracked wide open. He saw her leg, split in two.

He couldn’t stand the common, nasal, mean accent anymore. He clicked the radio off.

He thought of turning a light on, of finding some comfort in bright, but knew he couldn’t. Any change in light, in the sound of footsteps, in voices that carried, was asking to die. He slowly moved downward, and lay on the floor. He imagined a man six miles away, hearing a wrinkle in time and coming to kill him. He shivered.

The last time he was warm was in Canada.

He thought of his mother’s dining room table.

Then the lock moved.

His heart beat so loudly that he was sure he was dead.

It was Mariah.

He watched her take off her coat, not talking.

Underneath, she wore nothing but a tight dress that hung close to her body. Her eyelashes looked like spider’s wings and her eyes were wet. She reached her arms, sinewy bone, above her head. They moved like two ballerinas.

“I thought you were dead,” he spat.

“Things took longer than expected.”

“Did it work?”

She nodded, vacant. The violence surrounded her like nuclear waste, incandesant and powerful, seeping into the sky.

“I thought you were dead.”

She moved towards the mirror above the sink and lit a match. She was wearing a blonde wig, and her face was powdered impossibly white. The wig curled around her face. In the hazy dark, she became Jean Harlow. Kim Novak. Grace Kelly.

She pulled the wig off like Indians scalped intruders; vicious, furious.

Her red hair fell down her back like blood.

He watched her in the mirror. She brought a cloth to her face and moved it across her cheek bones in small circles.

“But can you think of a better way to die?” she asked.

“Run,” whispered the voice in his head, “Run as fast and far as your feet can take you.”

He moved towards her. Tears ran down her face.

“I want to drag my teeth across your chest to taste your beating heart."

He let her.

That night, she made love to him with a gun to his head.

On Youth & Young Manhood

“Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you - gently, with love, and hand your life back to you.”

Their closeness was born from a mutual misunderstanding.

He'd spent his life feeling misunderstood. She didn't realize until later, until she recognized it in him, but she had, too.

It was like he pushed something, gently, inside her. That push moved something else. Then an avalanche of new fell atop her. She'd travelled farther in her mind to see him than she had in her life's entirety.

Their closeness was born from a difference, a silent likeness.

They didn't need to talk. They saw what they shared; the misunderstood, the lonely, hovering around them, like steam in the air.

One says to another:

"Brother, are you headed home?"

He replies:

"Well, brother, aren't we always headed home?"

...

For a long, long time I've been trying to memorize your face.

I talked to a funeral director once. She was my age, beautiful, blonde and drunk at a party.

"You know, people think a crisis brings them to some belief system. Not true. Most people come to me believing nothing. And then they're fucked. You have to have a belief system in place. It doesn't just come when you need it. Have you heard of the whale? Yeah? Most people are too fucking scared to live in the belly."

She kept drinking her beer.

"What's your belief system?" she asked.

"Mine?"

"Yeah."

"That you never know what anything is until after."

Welcome to the road of trials.

Like Father Part Four

"I wasn't gifted, but blessed."

We're sitting in a sports bar. There's orange light spilling everywhere. Televisions are broadcasting sports games I don't care about. I feel relaxed and quiet inside for the first time in awhile.

Tonight, my Dad's face looks like a tragedy back lit by beauty.

"Do you think you worked hard, or do you think you were talented and that's why you were successful?"

"Something drives you. You understand that."

Do I?

"I was guided towards where I ended up. As sure as God makes little apples, if you work hard, you will make it. But you have to be talented. Some people work hard and just aren't talented. As my Dad would say, some people will never be talented as long as their asshole's point to the ground. Trust me though, you keep working hard, you'll make it."

There is no one in the world as comforting as my father.

...

We walk home.

"Who puts a clap board on the sidewalk? Real estate agents are the worst kind of whores. They might as well stand on the street with their dresses at their ears."

My heart's beating in my jaw. Just tell him.

"So, I'm writing a book about you."

There's a silence.

Fuck, I didn't say it right.

Then he does a pirouette in the street. He takes my hand, leading me in a poor man's waltz, scored by rumbling cars in the vague distance.

"Let me know if you need any information."

He rode in on a day too dark to see.

So what happens now?

I think we're all looking. Not for company, but completed solitude.

...

I wanted what he had. I wanted to know what it was like to believe you could save someone's life. He'd been saved and he knew it. Who was I to say it wasn't true?

Maybe that's why things don't work. I'm a skeptic.

This writing acts like a garbage dump or holy cemetery of my past. I organize everything abandoned. I take all that's wrecked and build something new.

I can make things stay together. I can make them work again.

...

"It's okay to sit and think awhile," she told me.

I nod. I can sit. I can watch the sky light up with near-misses.

All I want to do is be amongst the rubble, cleaning old parts. I collect the broken things like treasure. I want to hold them. I want them to forgive me for being thrown out in the first place.

I'm a woman made of stone. I escape more than before and I don't invite anyone with me. When things happen, I just watch, passive.

"I'll use this later."

I'm somewhere else, reassembling, in solitude.

Nine Months - Black Sheep

When I get home, Laura is in my apartment. She’s pregnant again.

She and her crazy pregnant stomach will not leave me alone.

“Frank! I was waiting for you. We don’t have any milk. Can you get some? I want some tea.”

She’s rubbing her back.

“Oh, this baby is heavy. My back hurts.”

My father told me once that when you spend your time seeking, all you see is the great absence of what you're looking for. Still, I can’t stop searching for the faces of my past. I know I shouldn’t, but I decide that just for today, I’ll play along. I can’t explain the reality of the situation to her, anyway. It's not fair to try.

Like me, she can't move past the moment she’s stuck in.

She is so beautiful.

"I missed you.”

“Can you get me milk?”

“Yes. What’d you do today?”

“Cleaned. I called my mother.”

“How is she?”

“Crazy.”

“She loves you, though.”

“Do you think I’ll be a crazy mother, like her?”

“No. Everyone is always a little better than their parents.”

“That’s true. When we’re old we’ll watch this one with her kids and see how she’s better than we are.”

“Of course we will.”

She walks towards me. I see her folded into me, pressed against my chest, her body resting on mine, but all I feel is the surrounding air. I look up.

Focus on anything other than the space, I tell myself.

When I look down again, she’s gone.

Quantum - Black Sheep

Belief divides people; doubt unites them.

It was a night defined by nothing other than quiet and space. Alone, and unable to escape the biting Montreal cold, Frank could think of little other than his wife. She was in London, he thought. Or was she in Scotland now? A part of him was motivated to write her a letter.

“Come home.”

But when he put pen to paper, he knew he couldn’t start there.

“So. Are you in love with her?”

He couldn’t start there either.

He preferred to not think of his wife, halfway across the world, wearing a backpack, spending all her time with a short-haired woman.

Sometimes, he heard her voice whispering in his ear.

“The people we were together don’t belong to us anymore.”

But it wasn’t really her voice, it was his, and in vain, he put it there, to connect them once again. He watched the birds outside dive through the air. There was just enough dark to see.

He called Marguerite.

“Hi, baby.”

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Nothing. Led Zeppelin are playing tonight.”

“Yeah?”

“Wish I was there.”

“Over rated.”

“Come over. Come over and we can listen to their record.”

And then, he started crying. He hadn’t cried in fifteen years.

“Baby, what’s wrong?” she asked. Her voice squeaked.

“Nothing. Goodbye.”

The phone slammed down. It rang again, and again, and again but he ignored it each time.

Patty was in Belfast, he decided. She had seen Sean. Lead by nothing other than a powerful feeling, they recognized each other in a sea of strangers, as friends. They were drinking together now. Sean had never really died. Patty wasn’t leaving him. Together, in a dimly lit pub, they were toasting to Frank.

They missed him.

Moved by visions of the only two people he’d loved in recent memory, he fell into a sleep where he spoke to his father.

“Another one bites the dust?”

“Aw, Dad. Why’s it gotta be like this?”

“Someone’s going to need you tonight.”

“What?”

“Just pay attention.”

As soon as his father condensed, floating in some sphere of darkness that Frank could feel but not touch, he woke to his phone ringing. Thinking it was Marguerite and wishing his bed was warm with a woman, he answered.

“Frank, it’s Dave.”

Dave was the copy-editor at the Gazette. He had a measly amount of hair on his head and he and Frank spent their nights taking shots of tequila, talking about Hemingway.

“Look, I’ve heard about you. My brother’s in a real bad way. You need to come here now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Can you come here now? Please.”

…

Twenty minutes later he walked into a small apartment in Montreal’s N.D.G. He was greeted by Dave who was wearing three sweaters, sweating profusely, combing his few hairs off his forehead with a shaking hand.

“Thank you for coming.”

Frank took off his shoes. He saw grey everywhere, followed by a painful flash of white that hit him like lightening to a tree.

There was sickness in this house, he could taste it.

Frank looked around and saw shadows whispering things to each other. Dave didn’t speak.

“Is it cancer?” Frank asked.

Dave nodded.

“He’s in a real bad way. He’s got two kids. I thought everything people said about you was bullshit, but… who’s laughing now, right?”

Frank nodded.

“I love those kids.”

Frank's breath slowed. He felt his skin swimming around him. Dave lead him to a back bedroom.

“His name’s Tony.”

The brother lay in a bed, shivering. Frank saw spikes of blinding light escaping him, replaced by a black snaking into his eyes. His breathing was labored. The light was painful to look at.

He moved closer to him, and with each step, Frank felt no separation between himself and the sick man. He could not see anything anymore, held by the darkness of the man’s body. He jumped into his stomach and swam around his lungs. He traveled deeper, hugging the man’s liver, and then disappearing into some place of just black.

Then he saw the blinding light, only upon this closer inspection, it looked like ocean pearls, knitted together. Frank had suddenly become tiny, so tiny he couldn’t see him legs beneath him. He ran through hell and towards the pearls of light, like a child in the sea. He grabbed them and smashed them and battled with them until he was sure he was drowning.

The last thing he saw was a little girl with brown hair eating the pearls. She noticed him and spit the pearls out of her mouth.

“Don’t be scared of me,” Frank pleaded. “Please, don’t be scared of me.”

“I’m not.”

She smiled and gave him her hand.

Together, they danced through the forest of illness, and he swore the rain in Tony’s stomach sounded like Robert Plant.

Ten minutes later, Frank regained consciousness. He jumped out of the Tony’s body, and found himself standing at his bedside, hands raised. His hands hurt something powerful but he couldn’t stop moving them along his withered chest.

“You didn’t do anything,” said Dave.

“Tell me how he’s doing tomorrow.”

On the way out, he saw the little girl with brown hair in a picture.

“Who’s that?” he asked Dave.

“Tony’s youngest.”

As Frank walked home in the cold, he heard Led Zeppelin bouncing off of every closed window, spilling into the icy streets. He heard people laughing, singing along, the songs butchered by tired Quebecois accents.

He lived ten more years, and at his funeral, Tony’s daughter found Frank. Now a beautiful young woman, she took his hand.

“Thank you.”

Her touch was so warm that Frank left, dressed in black, sure he had a second-degree burn.

Chosen One - Black Sheep

One broken window later, they were in the house.

“Are you happy now?” Paul hissed. “Look at this mess we’ve made.”

But Anne didn’t hear him. She heard her footsteps against the wooden stairs. She heard her breath escaping her. She heard the child sleeping in her stomach, the baby she knew was a son, and his heartbeat against her ribcage. She listened for any sound that Helen was okay, for any sound that her fear was unjust, for any sound at all.

There was none.

She first laid eyes on Helen from the sliver her bedroom door had been left open. She was lying too peacefully in her bed with her hands crossed on her chest. There was vomit everywhere.

Her glasses were on her bedside table. Her hair was curled. She was wearing the pink dress she wore to church every Sunday and her patent leather shoes. She was wearing gloves. Her face was caked with make up. Red lipstick, garish rouge and blue shadow smeared all around her eyes. It had been applied with little girl hands.

She looked so young.

For the rest of her life, Anne would remember that face.

She’d wanted to leave beautiful.

“You’re a stupid girl. You’re a stupid, stupid girl,” whispered Anne, running towards her on the bed. She lay her head against her chest and heard a faint heartbeat. She tried to lift her.

Paul stood, frozen, in the door frame.

“Help me!”

He didn’t move. She’d married a coward and, as time passed, that remained the most terrifying discovery of the day.

There was a hospital visit. There were doctors and nurses, and blurred images on ceilings that would haunt Helen for years as she tried to sleep.

All that Helen concretely remembers is Anne, whispering in her ear. “Listen to me. I’ll keep this between us. Just you, me and your brother. I’m not worrying your mother with this. This is between us.” She pretended to sleep in the assigned bed.

When Anne woke up the next morning, she was still crying.

Helen spent the next two weeks, on her knees, praying. He’d sent someone to save her. That was all she needed. He’d loved her enough to let her stick around.

Through death, she found God.

“I owe Anne my life,” Helen would tell her friends in another language, with one too many drinks of wine as decades past.

“What do you mean?” they’d ask.

“I owe them my life,” was all she’d say.

Then she’d find her way home, lost on the cobblestone streets, speaking to some angel high above her that kept her company, alone, in the most beautiful city in the world.

And Seek.

Miss lonely, but you know you only used to get juiced in it.

How much good are we doing?

How much fun are you having? How many people are you kind to? Or more, how many people, that you let in, are kind to you? Can you count on one hand the people that understand you? Is it hard to be alone?

Is it hard to be together?

Well, then, you're just a fugitive in his arms.

...

I mark years by snow. How much has changed since last Christmas? How much has changed since the Christmas before that? What were my resolutions last year? Did I live up to them?

How much have I done, that I can measure?

I know that time is not so linear. Things invite themselves in overnight only to disappear without a trace.

Where'd I go?

In Love, Not Limbo

“A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”



It all started with a wrong number, a phone call ringing three times in the dead of night, a voice on the other end of the phone asking for someone she was not.

Well, more or less.

So far as she could remember things had always started and ended over the phone. Things are too black and white without sight. It was so easy to lie when you didn't have to look at the person. All she had ever trusted, her entire life, were the nuances of someone's face.

...

"The weird thing is, the last night I slept with him, I slept so soundly. I can never sleep in a bed with anyone else. But that night, I slept without moving. I wasn't...I wondered if that meant something."

"I can't remember sleeping soundly with someone."

She knew then that neither of them thought they would ever fall in love. The danger was, what they couldn't see, is that they would fall in love again, then again, and probably, again.

"Remember that night in Montreal? We danced on the bar? You broke Ben's toe? We requested 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight'? Remember those things?"

"Remember when things didn't matter?"

Elvis - Black Sheep

The garage was cold.

Frank took the spray paint out of his jacket. He held his loafers in front of him.

This was worth the four bucks, he told himself.

The silver paint exploded in the air, moving all around him. He watched the tiny particles of paint mist, enveloping the cold. He smelt the sour smell. He danced with the paint to avoid getting it all over his uniform. He saw the silver sparkle, and he heard it whisper to him. As it grew, he felt like a King wearing jewels, with a crown, with a throne. He shrunk down, closer to the ground, the paint spoke to him and told him that life was for the getting, while the getting was good. It told him that one day, he'd own this town. He'd have ballplayers as friends.

It didn't matter that he was lonely now.

He took a shot of the whiskey in his other jacket pocket.

He hung the shoes to dry.

The next day at school, he was the only boy with shoes like the King.

Three weeks later, he lost his virginity to a girl at a party that was offering herself to anyone who was interested. There were rumours that she'd been with twenty men, but Frank didn't see how that was possible. The party only lasted two hours.

"Thanks," he said, still inside her, lying in bed.

"I did it because you have shoes like Elvis."

Walking the neighbourhood, how he did every night, unable to sleep and as dawn broke, he thought that was as good a reason as any. As the sun rose, he danced in the street like Elvis, moving his body parts every which way, sure that now, he was a man. That now, he was different.

He was fifteen.

It's cool when you realize that you're becoming the person you want to be.