The Way We Were - Short Story Excerpt Three

Everything around me feels fast and thoughtless. I'm thoughtless, too. I can’t feel my body anymore. I’m so grateful. When I can still feel my body I can still hear my keeper, and when I can still hear my keeper, I can't dance like this.

The Rolling Stones "Under My Thumb" is playing on the jukebox, and it's my favourite song forever from now on. My body that I can see beneath me, but that I can't feel, is moving with a harmonized surrender.    

My feet move in shuffles from side to side. My head goes up and down, back and forth. When I lift it up towards the ceiling, I can feel that my face doesn't look how it usually does. I'm not putting anything on. There is a rawness that surrounds me. I notice my hands floating all around. They surprise me every time because I'm not instructing them to go anywhere. They just move.

Everyone I know thinks I'm a good dancer, but I'm not. I'm just a good performer and I've always been very good at faking. Before this summer when I'd dance, I was moving how my keeper told me I should move, how she wanted other people to see me move. It wasn't fun at all, but I used to take comfort in following her orders.

That's my secret.

Well, that's our secret. Nobody knows she exists, except her and I. She's gone now. She’s far away. I told her and her liquid sounds to leave me alone this summer. At first I was worried that I wouldn't know what to do without her. That I'd keep talking to no one in particular, a parrot in sweat pants, asking "Will I be okay?"

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.

Swelter - Short Story Excerpt

He died in the most badass and tragic way. He did a lot of grafitti, you know what I mean? Huge, badass murals all over the place. Normally he’d do them really late at night and he’d come wake you up at six in the morning and you’d have to bike over to wherever he’d worked the whole night before. It was really annoying but you’d forgive him because he’d have this huge, happy smile on his face. And it was worth it. Beautiful colours, weird shapes, funny words all sewn together on some wall in the middle of town. For some reason art is always more beautiful amongst ugliness. Totally fucking wasted in museums.

It was dawn when it happened. It was his stupid fault. He had his earphones in. Fucking idiot. A train came and he never even heard it. If he didn’t have his ears in, he would have moved. Instead, it was done, just like that.




I feel spilt up. Half of me thinks if he had to go, at least he went doing what he loved best. But then one morning in the middle of work after I’d been up all night thinking, I thought about how much it would have hurt to go like that. Sure, it was short, but it must have really hurt. I lost my shit, snot everywhere, and my boss at the deli counter let me leave early even though I never told him what happened.

Maybe he knew. It’s funny how word spreads when a kid dies.

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.

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.