Crutches - Personal Essay Excerpt

After that night, I didn’t have a drink or a date for six months. My relationship with alcohol had died a hard death. Simultaneously, I finally realized that no man was going to make me happy, and any man worthwhile, I wasn’t ready for.

I don’t know if it’s that I’m stronger than some other people with addictions, than other people who can’t give up their crutches. I don’t know if I am just lucky, that I was born with the foresight to see all I was losing. I don’t know if I had finally become so ashamed of myself that I had no choice but to change.

I could have gone either way. I could have easily continued down a path where I let the fire inside go out. I could have been lost, as Ayn Rand says, “in hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all.” I know I was one kiss, one drink, one mistake away from losing everything, forever.

The strange thing is that I don’t wish that I had never fallen so deep into men or alcohol. Yes, I have been bent and broken, but into better shape. The irony of life is that your greatest pains become your strengths if you want them to.



In the dark parts of my memories, there’s artwork. If the heartbreak hadn’t been so heavy, I wouldn’t have written that short story the day he didn’t want to see me. That short story wouldn’t have turned into a book. That book wouldn’t have lead to this book. I didn’t know it, but opportunity had disguised itself as misfortune. My antagonists were my heroes, I just couldn’t recognize them in their costumes. I’ve manipulated to live and breath on these pages. They gave me gifts greater than I’d ever known.

Without the alcoholism, I would never know the clarity of sobriety. I needed that dark to appreciate the light, to see that darkness illuminated everywhere, to realize they didn’t exist without one another. That’s the symbiotic beauty of this charming world; I didn't know good until I'd lost myself in bad.

So when the darkness comes, let it inside you.

The Summer I Lost My Mind - Essay Excerpt Two

"He only wants one thing."

I knew he was right but I didn't care. I needed something, anything to put space between my past and the present. When you lose yourself, it's not that you forget who you used to be, it's that who you used to be is gone. All I wanted was to forget her; not to be constantly reminded of that girl walking around the corners of my mind.

Just before last call, Michael and I started dancing with a beautiful middle-aged woman at the bar. I recognized her. Like me, she spent every night there. She danced closer to Michael with an elegance I had never seen within those four walls before. 

"Hi," he said.
"Hi," she said back.

She put her hands against his chest, patted his broad shoulders.

"You look just like my son did."
"Oh, yeah?" Michael asked.
"Just like he did before he killed himself."



The sound was sucked out of the room.

"Oh my God, I'm so sorry," we both said immediately, not knowing quite what to do. The pain was etched deeply in her face now that she was letting us see it. Michael put his hand on her shoulder.

"I'm so sorry," he said again.

She kept her hands on Michael and tears grew in her eyes. She didn't want to let him go, somewhere believing that if she held tight onto my brother that her son wasn't fully gone.

"Just like my son. He had curly hair, too."

I remember feeling frightened, and sad, and a bunch of things I didn't know how to put into words. In that moment, I hated the world. I didn't understand how it could be so brutal.



I wouldn't come to regret it until two weeks later when he stopped returning my calls. But that was in keeping with that time in my life. I had never felt farther from myself. The sadness and loneliness I experienced then was unlike anything I had known before. I lived wholly in a surreal time, existing somewhere between now and then. Nothing I did really felt like something I would do. There was some other person controlling my body, my brain, my mouth. I was taking a vacation and I only dealt with how I was behaving in the brief periods where the real me floated back to the surface. And I tried, really hard, to keep that real me at bay.

I don't blame myself. I can be a real buzz kill.

Die Happy - Personal Essay Excerpt

You’re more comfortable that way, making longer stories short. You want to arrange things, draw conclusions, give them an introduction. You want to take pieces of your life and structure them on pages. You want to take people and make then permanent. You put them in black and white type. Once they’re concrete it’s easier for you to accept.

You don’t share, not easily. You’ll write your most intimate thoughts for a stranger to read, but those closest to you don’t know those that live inside you. You want to emancipate those inside, you want to let them live outside, for other people to see, to move them from your haunted house that no man has dared explore. The nakedness feels more comfortable when it’s one removed.

These words on this page are glowing because the truth in them resonates so deeply in you. You want to die happy. You think that’s the only way to live. That’s the only logic you can assign to life, the only goal you have.

How do you do it?

My Own Personal Jesus - Personal Essay Excerpt

I pray to him, bare knees on a wood floor, in my warm bed, sitting a restaurant; anywhere in the world. I pray to him after a difficult day or early in the morning. I pray to  him when I'm heartbroken, happy, lonely, confused. I look up at the ceiling, into a blur of anonymous people, or sometimes, in the mirror at my own reflection and I speak with him. I feel like I'm talking to an old friend, someone I love but never get around to seeing enough. I believe, somewhere, somehow, he can hear me. I often cry when I pray to him because I miss him. Since he died, I have never asked God for anything.

"Please, Patrick, help me," I say out-loud or in my head. It doesn't matter. We don't need sounds to hear each other.

The Long Goodbye - Essay Excerpt

The excerpts, divided by pictures, are from two separate parts of the essay and don't appear consecutively.



"Rejane's pregnant," I said as soon as I saw him. And as he stepped closer to me, gravity changed, and we were in orbit, encircling one another once again. We spent the night together. He told me that he'd missed me so much that summer that he'd woken up in the middle of the night and put his socks and shoes on was going to knock on my door and tell me that he still loved me, but by the time he was halfway to my house, he turned back. I wondered if in that moment, I was somewhere else, in the bed of another, wishing that it was him breathing next to him. So even if we were worlds apart, we had been connected without ever knowing it.

You'll think this is crazy, but I did then and for a long time after, believe that somewhere, in some alternate universe, that Kate, and the boy who loved her, the ones that don't live on earth anymore, not in the flesh anyway, just in their slowly fading memories, are together and will love each other, with a force and profundity most people never know for the rest of their days. But I was young then, so much younger than I am now, and I didn't know then that something could be untrue even if you really believed it. 




I started crying harder.

"Why aren't you sadder?" I asked him.

"I am sad, Kate. I just don't know how to show it."

"When you leave, this is really it. We are really over, and there is no going back."

I wouldn't have believed it then but I was right.  He left that night and the boy I loved never came back. I think in some ways, I am still making peace with it. And by writing this essay, I am still saying goodbye.

In Raymond Chandler’s novel, The Long Goodbye, his famed hardened detective Phillip Marlowe says when his lover leaves, “There was a lump of lead in the pit of my stomach. The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right.

To say goodbye is to die a little.”

That night, I died a little.

Forever - Personal Essay Excerpt

That summer my Mom looked at me in the middle of the day and said, “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I just couldn’t go back to things the way they were. I wish I could.”

The sadness in her was incredible. I knew it had been hard for her, that leaving my father took a giant amount of strength, but she’s done a lot and a lot that’s difficult. I should have realized this was the hardest, the worst of all. But I hadn’t.

Later that week, my father and I were sitting on the porch talking. He wanted to throw me a party to celebrate my wedding and give me a grand to put towards it.

“No, Dad, you don’t need to do that. I think Glenn and I will maybe, one day have a real wedding. I mean, I never saw myself getting married without my family there.”

“Yeah, neither did we,” he said.

I stayed quiet. I guess I had pictured my wedding, I just hadn’t realized until then.

“You were always so romantic,” he said. “I sang you a song about Hank Williams who had to leave an Indian woman, and you cried until I made up a new ending and told you he came back to get her. You would watch those Disney movies over and over again and you always cried when they married Prince Charming.”

I hadn’t remembered. Thinking about the little me, her romantic hopes, made me realize that I did believe in fairytales once. Sure, the marriage ceremony itself didn’t matter, maybe not even then, but I did believe, with some child-part of me, in love eternal. My Dad had always remembered. The way he dealt with it was wrong, but now it seemed he was only trying to do the right thing, trying to force me to live up to what he thought I wanted, thought I deserved.

My mom was only trying to do the same.

Once, they had loved each other, and they both had wanted so desperately for it to be eternal. Things just didn’t turn out that way. They, like everyone else, had spent their decades together trying to do the right thing. They tried to be good, they tried to be right, they tried, as best they knew how, to make it work. They tried.

And that’s the saddest thing of all.





I tell people that they’re happier now. But they’re not. This is just where the chips fell. Looking back and looking forward, there were one million reasons this all happened but one feels truest; these things just do.

That sort of sums up my feelings about life. Things, good and bad, happen randomly, for no real reason other than that they just do. And so things change. People get married and marriages break up because that’s the course your life feels like taking.

The room felt warm that Glenn and I were married in. My face hurt from smiling. My eyes were starry because Gina’s camera kept flashing. When he was saying his vows I thought of my parents. I wondered if they were spending this moment separated, but together, with thoughts of me, thoughts of them, thoughts of forever. If they’d spend the rest of their lives separated but together, if every moment would be split in two, coloured with remorse for what could have been, for what eventually was.

Then that feeling and the heaviness floats away. As I move towards the sweet, redeeming light, I think, I love him.

I love him.

Months later, when I go to visit him in Belfast, I forget my wedding rings.

Hero - Essay Excerpt

The excerpts, divided by pictures, are from two different parts of an essay and don't appear consecutively.



There has always been something otherworldly about him. And so, I believe from the moment he was conscious of other people he has felt like an outsider.  He could not speak until he was three - which worried my parents, but when he did start talking he spoke in paragraphs. From then on he has had a special closeness to words, often acting as his protector, his escape from other people.
 
As Michael grew older, he would need the escape and protection that words provided him, living in his imagination, crowded by beautiful words.




The focus, and the ability to know the truth of your talents, to determination to withstand the rejection without being defeated is something I envy. So many times, I have watched Michael, jealously wanting to be as confident as he is in his vision of himself. I admire him, not only for his talent, but for the clarity, so greatly. I curse myself, and tell myself that I should be more like he is. 

I don't know if I'll ever be like Michael is, though. I have not had to withstand the trials he did. I've never been pushed to the brink and come out the other end. I don't know if I'd have the super-human strength. But that's why he is my hero. We are so different, his bravery and courage is so unlike my own that I know I'll never possess it. A hero, in my opinion, is meant to have some parts of themselves that are unreachable to you. Michael, in my eyes, is only part mortal. He’s mythical.

So, I'll go to him for advice. I'll look up to him. He'll be my shoulder to cry on. He'll cheer me on. For the rest of our lives, he'll  be the dark horse that won the race, while I remain the mortal, always trying to catch up.

Twin Soul - Essay Excerpt

There were so many nights that summer when Caitlin and I would be in the same place, but not be together. She would be focused on him, I would be focused on some catch of the week. But we would both be perpetuating the madness further and further, and we knew that, so we didn't need to talk. If we stumbled across each other in the bathroom we'd just share a look and collapse laughing. Or we'd cast a look across a dark bar, distraught, and the other would nod her head, showing her wordless support. There was no need to ask how the other was, we always knew, instinctively. And we were always there for the other, not as a sound board, but as a mirror.

I've always found the concept of real twins being so connected that they could feel the other's physical pain fascinating. My twin is not similar in the physical so I didn't know until she told me that she broke her arm. But that summer, her feelings lay over my heart like a blanket, and I could feel what she felt with each and every rapid beat.

With my twin, only emotions are identical.

The Summer I Lost My Mind - Essay Excerpt

"You have a specific smell."

"What? A bad one?" I asked.

"No, it's not bad."

"What does it smell like?"

"Just you. Your smell. I could be anywhere in the world, anytime, and I would know it's your smell. I'll never forget it. It just smells like you."

And then it hit me. Maybe all the men were just temporary, acting as in-betweeners, filling space. But we would mean something to each other. Our encounters would not be wholly casual, devoid of human feeling. We would leave a lasting impression on each other, however tiny. For better or for worse, we would remain somehow embedded in each other's consciousness; in a smell, in a movement, in a look. Nothing ever meant nothing to anyone.

The next morning, we walked all around the city, and then after he bought me two McDonald's soft-serves, he left me on a street corner in the middle of Toronto. We kissed, and the finality of it all surprised me.

I walked back to my condo. It was far, it took me over two hours. I remember thinking the whole way home, but I wasn't sure about what. Random thoughts just floated in and out of my head, strange voices I owned argued about if I'd done the right or wrong thing. 

I was restless. I decided I couldn't just go home. I walked into my best male friend Ben's place of work, which was a cafe around the corner. 

"Guess who doesn't learn from their mistakes?" 

Ben looked up.  It was a question worth asking. I was still drunk and apparently, I looked like an insane homeless person.

"You, dummy."

And then we both keeled over, laughing like hyenas.

I haven't seen or spoke to Scott since.




Later that night was Alice's birthday. 

It was swelteringly hot. I spent the remainder of the day showering Scott off my skin, and trying to sleep my hangover away.  Neither worked.

As I got on the streetcar to Alice's I remember feeling different than I ever had before. I wondered if changes happened slowly but then one day stop, having become complete. I thought that maybe that day was the day where there was no going back. As I walked up her steps, I was pretty sure the change had been absolute; that I had lost my mind for good.

I remember the party being fun. But everything was fun all the time, so it felt uneventful. Fun had become the background for the anxious ticker-tape that was always going in my mind. I decided that routine, no matter how unusual it was, always felt routine. I couldn’t escape monotony.

When you kill time it dies hard.

The One You're With - Essay Excerpt

I still can’t figure out why I dreamt of her so vividly. Somewhere, some part of me wanted to say what I never did. For weeks after her messages I felt so angry, an anger I had never experienced before. I didn’t know who I was angry at. Her, me, or him. Maybe all of us, equally.

Moving on has always been difficult for me. I am, in fact, not able to move on. If I have ever been close with anyone, that closeness still remains in me, however small, even when it shouldn’t.

I haven’t dreamt of them recently.

When I walk past his street when I’m home, or when I drive by his house, a part of me always hopes that I’ll catch a glimpse of them. I want to see them briefly in a private moment, so I can have some image of them other than those I’ve created.