“It’s hard to move forward when you don’t know what way you’re facing.” 

...

Writing came to me like a gift, like something I didn’t deserve. It was like shaking hands with the love of your life on a hot summer night, on a street corner in Montreal, the day after you were supposed to be gone already. He wore a blue shirt and I wore a pink dress.

Like him, writing hit me like a freight train. Like him, writing found me when I wasn’t looking for it but needed it most.

In the just over the year I had with the man I met on a street corner, the so far and maybe ultimate love of my life, there was a lot of rap music. There was dancing, talking, reading, watching, travelling, a voice I felt like I’d always known, his hand on the small of my back and sleeping well for the first time in my life. There was a lot of happy. 

There was not a lot of writing.

“Can you imagine if we’d never met?” I asked him.

“I don’t like to think about that,” he said.

We broke up a month ago. Things I didn’t like to think about are now the reality I live in. Here I am, waking up every night at 4 am, jolted by an alarm I didn’t want to set. I feel like everyone else lives on Planet Earth. I live Planet How The Fuck Did This Happen? Planet Make This Go Away.

But mostly, I live on Planet He’s Gone. 

Lying awake, I have come closest to the understanding that God, or whoever, doesn’t fuck around. He gives but He also takes and doesn’t need to give anything back. I have been forced to accept that time and loss are enemies and best friends. I need time to move past this, but the more time that passes the more what I’ve lost is really gone. 

Last night my friend Molly looked at me in Café Diplomatico, an Italian joint on College Street that’s very popular and not very good. “I wrote an article that comes out tonight,” she said. “It’s called Don’t Cheat On Your Loneliness. I saw that written in a bathroom stall. Isn’t that perfect?”

Last night, in a taxi I didn’t need to take, I thought, “Fuck. All I do lately is cheat on my loneliness.” And why shouldn’t I? How do I be true to something I hate so much?

“Write, I guess,” I heard a small voice say. But I don’t want to write. I want this to be over.

Last night, at 4 am, awake again, I listened to that small voice because it’s really hard to ignore when my house is so quiet.

“Write,” she said. 

She told me that through writing, one day, things will change. That one day, everything I write won’t be for or about him. With fingers pressed up against that keyboard, the lingering sense of him will have faded. That by writing; not by texting other men, not by seeing psychics, not by visiting rock stars in North Carolina, I will have not cheated on my loneliness.

I fell asleep.

I woke up again hours later. Today is the first day since we’ve broken up that I’ve sat back at this computer.

Of all the things that feel true lately, and there are many, the following remain the most shining and resolute. I need to be faithful to this heartbreak. Only by stretching myself in the direction of loneliness will I come back again.  By writing alone, listening to a rap song he would fucking love, I will see what happened between he and I not as a tragedy but as my becoming. One day, I won’t miss him like this. One day, I will hope everyone gets to fall in love like we did.  One day, I will understand why this happened.

Until then, I’ll write. 

That last time I visited him. The last time we made love. The last time I felt that the happiness we had was not destined to self-destruct.

Go over it, over, over. No, again. Again. Again.

One more time it's going to make sense. 

In that moment, I heard my heart break, like a flower stem snapping, a clean, small sound.

I wish I could go back to believing, knowing beyond any doubt, that this dangerous and fragile thing between us could have lasted forever. That it wasn't dangerous. That it wasn't fragile.

That it was good and mine forever.

"It produces feelings of increased energy, euphoria, emotional warmth and empathy toward others, and distortions in sensory and time perception."

Isn't that what falling in love feels like, too?

...

When I was with him I wrote all the time. Now, I stare at this screen and I don't know what to say.

...

I dreamt of my grandfather last night in his most lifeless state. We sat at a holiday table and his face was swollen. I met my mom in the kitchen. 

"We have to take him to the hospital. What's wrong with his face?"

Later, in waking life, I visited my grandmother with him.

"Larry, kiss me." Then, she said, "Come near to me, Larry." Finally, "Do you think I'm dying, Larry?"

That afternoon, in the cold wintry light I watched as he said, "You're doing fine, little girl."

Don't Think About It Too Much

Sex shapes the body, juice shapes the mind.

I curse myself because I can’t sleep, just when I’m with him. The temperature has changed, the cold snap moves between us, hanging gauzy in the air.

“I’m sorry, I’m nervous,” he said.

“Me, too.”

Rap music played.

He kisses me and I nod out and when I wake up all I want is more.

Take A Fall For Me

And the saddest part is that the overriding part of him will like being alone. While he's relieved, I'll spend months reminding myself it's over.

Black Sheep

It was the Halloween before I left home.

Matt and I were dressed up to go out to a party in the west end held by a couple of my cool friends in a cool band. I was dressed as Liza Minelli in Cabaret, too dressed up, more dressed up than anyone else was going to be. Cabaret was my favourite movie. When I was bored, I’d imagine myself as Sally, skinny eyebrows and bowler hats.  That night, I spent an hour pinning all my hair under a short black wig. I didn’t stop until all my blonde was hidden. At that point in my life, I took a special pride in doing what I’d set out to.

An hour after I arrived, five minutes before we left, Matt looked at me. 

“Oh, you cut your hair, eh?”

There was a drawn out pause.

“It looks good,” he said.

“This is a wig.”

“Is it?” His face didn’t move. There was no inflection in his voice. 

“Yes,” I said.

Do you really think I cut my hair? Why would I do that? I’ve always loved my hair, I wanted to say. 

Though, in retrospect, this was the indicator that something was really wrong, this moment didn’t scare me. There was only one thing that scared me about Matt. The one thing that made us truly different; he did not care if he lived or died. 

The speed doctors had prescribed him from when he was seven years old, for his ADHD, made him never hungry and never tired. He never seemed to need anything that kept normal people alive. Instead, his death instincts grew stronger. He never slept because his heartbeat kept him awake. He went a week without showering and brushing his hair or his teeth. Dirty laundry was always all over his room no matter how much I tried to do the wash. 

When the Adderol was good, when it was working for him, he’d write rap songs for seventeen hours a day, always pacing back and forth, his voice echoing through our house. 

A.D.H.D was a diagnosis my father never accepted, “Please. It’s more like I.D.G.A.F.”

At this point, I would laugh when my father said this and agree. “Yeah. Matt has I Don’t Give A Fuck.”

That Halloween, Matt was the highest I’d ever seen him. I had started reading about psychotic episodes. I was always a touch psychic with my brother. We were more twins than siblings; I felt what was happening to him as strongly as I felt what was happening to me. Had he broken his leg, my leg would’ve hurt, too.

“You know why I do drugs?” Matt asked that night.

“No. I don’t want to.” 

“It’s the only time the visions stop.” And then he laughed. “That’s the opposite of most people.”

By this point, I had tried multiple interventions with Matt. So had my mother, and in his own way, by screaming and hissing, so had my father. I knew Matt wasn’t going to stop doing drugs. 

“You can tell Mom I’m getting better if you want.” He and I were sitting in the bathroom of the house party. I was on the counter, my feet kicked up against the tub, counting the runs in my black tights.

Matt was hunched over that counter, procuring cocaine. 

“You are getting a little better,” I lied.

When you love a drug addict, you don’t enable them, but, when you really love a drug addict, you can't leave.

“Why did Dad talk to you about his visions and not me? They didn’t happen to you. They happened to me.”

Are you sure? I wondered.

“He’s fucked up,” I said.

“You’re his favourite.”

I wanted to take off my wig. It was starting to itch.

Three weeks later, we admitted Matt. He was diagnosed bipolar. My mother was left was three questions. Why was he a drug addict? Had he done the damage himself, with the drugs? Or was he born sick?

My father and I knew the answer to the first one. Only, we had one more. Had we driven him crazy by telling him what he saw wasn’t real? 

Black Sheep

I sat with my mom in the car on the way home from the mental hospital. It was Matt’s third admittance. It was four months before I left.

My mother had taken to holding herself, arms wrapped around her waist in inappropriate hug that did no one any good. When she was driving, I pried her hands away from her stomach at red lights.

“You need to focus.”

I turned on a rap cd. 

“Don’t,” she said. “I can’t listen to that music anymore. It ruined Matt. All those words, swirling around his head, made him crazy.”

I rolled my eyes when my mother said that but I wondered, later, if she was right. Maybe Jay-Z and Tu Pac Shakur and Kanye West and The Geto Boyz and Wu Tang Clan were the culprits.

The days got longer, my showers got hotter and my iPod was glued to my ears.

Three days later, Matt looked at me and said, “Biggie Smalls is like Hemingway, you know? So simple, such eloquent prose. Marla, Marla, I have to tell you something. Listen to me, okay? Listen! When you move, Marla, fall like a fucking thunderbolt.”

I nodded. He was crazy but he was poetic.

I have to be honest. It was around that time, that I too began to question if what I was seeing was real.

Strictly Reserved For You

 "All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it."

...

His family loved Christmas. His house seemed to contain no mysteries, to her jealousy and wonder. 

From this period, buried under crisis, she knew she was unreliable witness, that she could not be true to the events unfolding, only the impressions they left her with. 

Therein lay the problem.
...

It was the Christmas her brother's brain set fire. 

It was the Christmas her grandparents began to die. 

It was the Christmas mother lost twelve pounds overnight. 

It was the Christmas she had walking pneumonia for six weeks without knowing. 

It was the Christmas she had a cyst that could've been cancer, but was really a left-over from when she was a fish.

Branchial cleft cysts act like cancer but are remnants of embryonic development and result from a failure of obliteration of the branchial cleft, which in fish develop into gills.

 Although it was odd to picture herself as a fish, it felt biblical, fitting.

It was the Christmas she had learned to breathe under water.

...

"You're turning twenty five, Kate. Wow."

"I feel twenty five."

"Yeah? How's it going with that guy? Are you going to marry him?"

"I don't feel like we're going to move backwards."

Black Sheep - A Novel

My daughter, Marla, just turned twenty-three. I wonder if we would have been friends had we met when I was her age. I have never asked her.

The irony is that I don’t appear before myself at different ages. But I feel myself at different ages, shaped by what the people that visit tell me of my past.

Friends or not, I like my daughter and she likes me. We both consider privacy paramount.

“So, Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time again?” Marla’s fingers are yellow with nicotine. I miss smoking.

“Why are you quoting Vonnegut? What an awful book. I wish I had never wasted my time reading it.”

“Life is hard sometimes.”

“I didn’t tell you about this so that you could mock me.”

Last year, I told her that people come to visit me. I shouldn’t have. It was a moment of weakness, born of living in the past more often than before. I guess I thought that maybe people came to visit her, too.

They don’t.

She touches my arm. A blue surrounds her and has since the moment she was born. I love blue. When her blue is near me I feel safe. I don’t know why. It has always been difficult for me to trace the genealogy of feeling.

Where is anything born, if everything that’s happened exists before you at once?

“I love you, Marla.”

“Did you pay your rent on time this month?” she asks, starting to clean my dishes.

“Leave those alone. I worked at forty major newspapers across Canada. Why do you think I’ll always forget to pay my rent?”

“Well, did you?”

I shake my head.

My daughter stops with the dishes and she makes me a sandwich.

I don’t know why she is always worried that I won’t eat. My mother’s sandwiches were good. Marla’s aren’t, but I appreciate them anyway. She leaves quickly after I’m done eating. She always leaves quickly.

“Bye, Daddy. I love you.”

“Bye.”

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. I love you.”

I kiss her on the forehead. I am very tall, and I have to lean down to reach the soft skin under her dark fringe. For a moment, I see her mother in her eyes. She locks the door behind her.

When I head back to the kitchen, I see Marla as a four year old, hiding in the corner, laughing. I hope we will get to spend the day together. I love children. They are much easier than adults.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“What a wonderful surprise!”

“Sorry for hiding.”

Don’t envy me. Just because my memories are just three-dimensional doesn’t mean I get special treatment. I don’t get to choose the pace at which my life happens. Death comes fast or it comes slow. Time will one day end it.

Frank, by the way. My name is Frank.

He walked towards her. He’d dressed up. He held his motorcycle helmet in his hand.

“So, how are you?” she asked.

He shrugged, uncertain. She noticed her reflection in his eyes.

“How are you?” he asked.

The conversation hung on that.

“So do you want to go first?”

“No,” he said. “Why don’t you?” He looked away, wincing. “Let’s not do this here.” And so they walked, exactly two meters apart, along Toronto’s busiest street. Traffic sounds pitched and blurred. She pictured them walking naked, like mannequins, looking like people but really being plastic.

“I’m not happy,” she said.

He put his hand against the air, stopping something hurdling towards him.

“We don’t have to do this. We’ve talked so much, that’s all we’ve done. My failure has always been an inability to communicate with you.”

She nodded, and five minutes later, he left.

And that’s how two years disappears in the blink of an eye, the slight of a hand.  

She could only identify it in retrospect, but the man she hadn’t met was hovering around her.

She knew him; like magic, like weather, like dreams that came and took over unannounced.