Black Sheep - Toronto

My brother went crazy at nineteen. I guess, at the time, it felt fast but in retrospect, it was a slow process. People don’t just go crazy, do they? No. They become that way.

Sometimes I’d wake up before everyone else and find him sitting on the porch, lost, staring at dawn, bathed in the warm light. When I found him like that in the summer, it didn’t scare me quite so much. It was always better in the summer.

“Are you okay out here?”

He’d turn and look at me like he didn’t recognize me.

“It’s Marla.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, sis. I’m okay. Want to come sit with me?”

He’d hold my hand and I’d sit with him. Out of nowhere, he’d start to cry.

“What’s wrong?”

His face would fold up like a crumpled piece of paper and he’d move his hand over his eyes, trying to bat everything away.

“Nothing.”

“Why are you crying?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

“My skins too tight, sometimes.”

“You’re my best friend.”

“You’re mine.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I just had a lot of bad dreams.”

“Should I get Mom?”

“No.”

It was better in the summer; the outbursts were more frequent and sometimes he got violent but at least you felt like you could get through. In the winter he’d get so skinny it was like he disappeared.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to get Mom?”

“Yeah. I’m just being a pussy.” Then, he smiled. “I think I’m going to go back to bed, chickenhead." He clucked.

I should have gotten my Mom but he was so funny sometimes in the summer. His sense of humor gave you the impression that everything would be okay. Some nights we’d stay up so late laughing that my stomach hurt the whole next day.

He was around sixteen when he started spending whole nights away, and the laughter went with him. Eventually, it became days. Once, it was almost a week. I knew it was done when my father found him wandering around the neighbourhood shoeless before dawn in January. He had blisters on his feet that didn’t heal for months. The hospital said he was lucky he got to keep them. I used to find him watching t.v, scratching at the blisters until they bled.

The night everything changed, I remember sitting by the window with my mother, watching the snow fall, waiting for my father to return. He’d left three hours earlier. When you’re a little girl, you know your Daddy will return. I wish, more than anything, that I could know things like a kid again.

The snow fell so heavy that night.

“I’ve never heard such a beautiful silence in my whole life,” I told my mother. She sat, a part of the beautiful silence, not moved by any word I spoke.

When they walked through the door, my father was holding Matt up. He couldn’t walk alone.

I was young but I knew something was very wrong.

As soon as Matt saw my Mom he ran to her and attached himself to her hours, until finally, mid sob, he fell asleep and didn’t really wake up for three days.

Later, she and my father sat in the kitchen. I watched from the door frame. Her head was in her hands, her shoulders moved heavy with sobs. I remember thinking she looked like a tiny bird crushed under big rocks.

My father paced.

“He just doesn’t have the killer instinct I do. He’s weak.”

“Don’t talk like that Frank.”

“He’s weak, Laura. He’s weak.”

“Don’t--”

“He makes me sick.”

I knew it was over then.

Black Sheep

"I know on some level I am responsible for her visits, that this version is of my creation, but even when I don’t engage in conversation she won’t leave. I feel like a helpless woman. I don’t like it."

The fucked up thing about life is that there’s no common denominator, except your own self, and I’m not even sold on that. I guess I’ll always have me, but I feel so different in every situation, like water that moves in the wind. I wonder if there’s any continuity, really. I wonder if I’m one person. I get the sense I'm fragments of a bunch of other things, of everyone I’ve met along the way.

I could argue that the only common denominator in my life is my computer. It has all my photos, all my writing, all my auditions. All my old love letters, private messages, little things that I keep on my desktop for no reason, call sheets, school work; separate pieces of the past that I can’t delete forever. It comes with me everywhere I go. It's who I turn to when I'm happy, when I'm sad, when I want to share, when I want to be alone. This machine knows my truest self and I can't decide if that's sad.

What strikes me, sitting here, looking through everything, is that there is no continuity. No fluidity. No one person or place that is common.

But there are shared themes. I think every person is given a set of themes that they come in with and leave with. No matter what, every phase, every relationship, every part of your life is built with the same bricks, held together by the same glue, dancing with the same matter, just rearranged, tricking you until you've spent long enough with it, until you're wise enough to realize it's all the same.

And that’s how you never escape yourself, not even when you try.

The Other Side of Silence

"My version of falling in love is borderline psychotic. Should be avoided at all costs. Get obsessed. Can't fall in love and function at the same time. All-consuming. Tunnel vision. Euphoric."

And there's so much you feel and so much you want to say, but where do you begin?

It's all consuming. Tunnel vision. No hope. No help. No nothing. I'm drowning and flying, feet kicking, dirt in the air, trying to shovel through him, trying to move through me.

The difficulty is that he's with me all the time, even when I'm alone. The absence of him is heavier than the presence of most other people. It's never been like this before. It happened, ripping the skin off me, a splinter in my side, breath on my neck that wakes me in the night.

We're even together in my dreams.

And I can't write how I used to. My brain moves slowly, like a synchronised swimmer off-time. No, go left. No, dive deeper. Wait, what now? Turn, move, keep moving. Don't give in. Don't you dare give in.

But I already have. It makes me silent. There's something in this silence, the other side of it, something I don't like and want to go away.

"I like your vulnerability."

"I don't."

I know it's good to show it. I know it's good for him to see. Maybe that's what scares me, that he sees all of it, everything, all the things I don't like. He sees my make-up all over my face in the morning. He sees my hair, matted. He sees the jobs I don't get. He sees that auditions that go badly. He sees the book I'm struggling with, the stories I can't tell, the quiet I don't like.

Intimacy, by definition, is synonymous with familiarity. I don't want him to be familiar with things that I wish didn't exist.

"Do you ever think I'm ugly?"

"No."

"Never? Not even sometimes?"

"No. Never."

Maybe real beauty doesn't exist without real ugly.

Don't look back now.

Are you always looking at something through a lens?

Mirror images are never exact. We never see ourselves, not how we actually are. We'll never be able to. You can walk through films or stick in a photo, frozen, but you'll never have a the luxury of looking at yourself. Not like a third and separate party looks at you.

Are people just shadows of your own thoughts of them? Where does the truth lie when everything's passes through a filter? How does this look from the outside?

I don't know why I'm so interested in objectivity. The premium I place on how things look to other people is higher than anything else and I know that's stupid.

Because when does anyone see anything for what it really is?

What you see here, what you say here, let it stay here when you leave here.

He thought she was asking for herself.

In reality, she was asking for him. Old as she was, she still missed her Daddy sometimes. Letting him talk reminded her of a time when things were simpler, when life was easier, when hearts hadn’t been broken. He just didn’t understand, she told herself.

"Did you think it would happen like this?"

He brought his hand up, and almost put it on her shoulder. Frightened by her sudden display of emotion, scared it might inspire the same in himself, he made a fist. It hung in the air, like an ornament on a Christmas tree.

He never could swim the tide.

Playground Love

There is something strange and lonely about beautiful people. Beautiful people that are beautiful without work, without effort. It’s something given.

With him, she could tell it never really felt like his to begin with. In his mind, and in his body, he was still the little boy that talked too much, the little boy that was too smart, the little boy whose brother was his best friend.

She kept seeing him as a teenage boy, sitting in class. He looked the same but fundamentally different, the youngness seeped through every part of him. He'd hidden that youngness now. She saw a giant cloud of silence that he wore like a cape.

Sometimes, when they sat at breakfast, that tremendous silence fell over her like weather. It was a silence she'd never known before. She watched his lips move, his smile, his teeth, the conductor at a noiseless opera scored by the first real thing, ever.

"You're the smartest person I've ever met."

She wasn't stupid, either, just disconnected. The silence had meaning. It mattered. She knew it.

Her life was about to change.

Animal

I see myself in people so they see themselves in me. I get swept up. I am taken by their brooms, lost in their dust and pushed into their corners.

"Take me and push me around. It's okay. I want to. I like the floor."

Before, I never trusted happiness. I was always convinced it would go away, that I couldn't get too comfortable, that it wouldn't be there for me when I needed it. I never lay in what I loved because I wanted it too much. I didn't know that it wanted me, too.

“It's surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time”

In the darkness, there are pangs of nostalgia for things I thought I had. Once, it mattered, it happened, with great force. Now, it's gone. I can't remember any of it. I don't know where it went. Stuck in a vacuum of what I thought I knew once. Hidden is some place, worn like glasses, vision shifting.

"Dad, do you think the world is better now than before?"

He looked away.

"I think it's coalesced. There's more good and more bad. What's peculiar is that you can't separate the two. It's a gel."

I am surprised not that things changed, but that things became so different and so quickly. I look back at the girl I used to be and I don't know her. My friend Sarah is beautiful, especially lit by candlelight.

"Do you feel like it doesn't matter?" I asked her. "Things are so important in the present, the moment starts disappearing as soon as it ends. You remember less and less, and eventually you're left with nothing. So, nothing really matters, not so much. There's something beautiful and freeing in that."

Memory is deceptive because it's coloured by today's events, Einstein said that.

I guess we all have our time machines. Mine's defective. I can't travel backwards with any confidence. What I remember jumps in front of me, like a child crossing the street too quick, like a sword cutting air, like scissors through hair. It hurts and I don't know why because I don't want to go back.

"For time is the longest distance between two places."