Snippets of My Day

I sit at my computer, which rests on a collapsing table. We used it for dinner when I was a child. It was folded up and pushed against a wall as we grew older, as my mom worked more and didn't need the money from renting out the downstairs, where the bigger, better dining table lived.

We use it since my parents separated, now that we live upstairs again.

The table is my father's family heirloom. I remember when he refinished it one summer, how he sweat under the sun, the stains on his peach t-shirt.

I stare at my reflection in the mirror across from the table and I decide what's wrong with my face. Mirror-gazing is my favourite pass time because time does not weigh upon me. I remember when my hair was longer, how I was prettier then, softer, younger.

Why do women always change their hair when things go to shit?

I decide I should shower before speaking to my editor. A piece of stray hair falls past my face, and I watch it from the corner of my eye, sure it's a bat.

The cyclical nature of life seems unfair.


...

I call a divorce lawyer with my mother's last name who has an office in the Scarborough Town Center. My father used her to divorce his third wife after my brother was born. They had been separated for ten years, but seeing my mother's last name on the lawyer's store front, he took it as a sign to severe ties.

This was, to him, a romantic gesture.

"Can I come in tomorrow?"

"10:30?" said the woman on the phone.

"Any later?"

I hang up and I have a craving to call my father, but I promised myself I wouldn't until all was said and done.

...

I am sitting in a park with two new friends. They are bohemian and beautiful and I feel strangely at ease in their company. They suggest we do a play reading and I oblige when normally, I hate doing things in front of people.

There is one speech that my friend reads about a exposing herself to a man she loves and I think about it all afternoon.

She talks about the philosophy that only we are real, that everything else is a dream. That the man she loved was a dream. That she made him up. That she fell in love with the wall. That he was the one person she exposed everything to. She trusted him with her deepest, darkest secrets, but that she could only do that because he wasn't really there. That she chose him for that reason. That she fell in love with him because he was fake.

But don't we all fall in love with dreams?

...

At a diner with my brother, I turn to him while eating poached eggs. "I'm just disappointed that he wasn't who I thought he was."

He drinks his coffee, thoughtfully. It's 4 pm and he's just woken up. He takes the DROPOUT cap that he had made off his head. My brother stands on shaky, hopeful ground so it's fitting that he would take what he hates most about himself and stitch it across his forehead.

His curls are so matted. How did they get so matted?

"The thing is, he was. Everyone always is who you thought they were while also being who they became to you. They're both. He is, and was, sometimes, who you thought he was."

"That's deep, Mike," I say.

He shrugs. "Yeah, I'm in an everything is true phase."

"Be careful."

"Why?"

"It's really confusing."

"No."

"Trust me. You're new to it."

If everything is true, who do you blame?
...

I do a photo shoot for my friend. She was my book buddy in grade one and it took me awhile to realize I knew her when we met again. She recently travelled the world and as I an putting on a ball gown, she tells me about Cambodia. She has heart problems and ever since her diagnosis, it is like seven hearts beat in her and she can't live enough.

"There was this little girl, she couldn't have been more than fourteen. She would follow you through the streets and could beg in every language. Fluently. She must have spoken eight different languages."

"No."

"Yes. English. Spanish. German. You name it, she spoke it. My friend from Ireland went to Cambodia shortly after me and I told him, 'Be careful, just speak to them in Gaelic and they'll leave you alone.' I swear to you, it was the same girl that he met. He started speaking to her in Gaelic and they had a full conversation."

"In Gaelic?"

"Yes."

"No one speaks Gaelic."

"I couldn't believe it. How did she learn those things?"

"It's so sad."

"I know. The resiliency of the human spirit is unbelievable."

Looking at her, feeling her seven heartbeats, I agree. I think of how smart that little girl must be, how I could never learn French even when I tried.

Maybe I just didn't have to. Maybe we can always do what we have to.

...

I lie with him in his bed. He just bought us new sheets from the dollar store. On my skin, they feel like silk.

He holds me from behind and with his arm near my breast, I have never felt more committed.