When trying to imitate flying I might try one of the following.

The world flickers like animation cells as your body slices through it. Your location in Space both concrete and ephemeral as you locate yourself in your seat on the swing-set or your feet on the edge of the diving board or your hands over your head, body soaring skyward from the spring of the trampoline.

"From its frightfully steep 53-degree first drop to multiple slamming turns and other assorted dives and hops, the fast-paced Cyclone perfectly illustrates the twister, while nearby, the Thunderbolt sits in forgotten loneliness and all other Coney classics have faded into memory."


A sensation between dancing and dying.


"This is why people OD on pills and jump from the Golden Gate Bridge."

A hovering of terrific proportions if you imagine that gasp, held tightly in your belly ready for you to emit as you plunge off the top of the lift hill. A sensation that engages all of your organs, from skin to eyeball and leaves you suspended until your feet return to ground.

During my second year of high school I experienced my first roller coaster. I had fallen very seriously for a boy that'd been a friend for several years. It would indicate a pattern I would maintain steadily for the rest of my life. The thrill and terror of that crush, as you look into the eyes of your true love, every day over slushies, but he doesn't have any sense of your devotion.

The plunge, the repel, the propel.

"Remember the first time we slept together? You said it felt like when you learned to float."

For one pregnant moment, as I lean backwards in a game of trust, I hope that the arms meant to receive me, don't fail me when I fall.

"Anything to feel weightless again."

Undressed

Be sure to leave something behind - this is how you will be remembered. Or at least, you always have something to go back and get. The remains. As a friend said recently "like a girl on a one night stand who leaves something behind so she has a reason to see her lover again."

I have this curious relationship with a friend - the currency of our friendship is an exchange of favours. Favours that appear to be loose collaborations, but in many ways are a empty of any real effort. They get dressed up and pretend to be something that in many ways I see as being those remains. If we continue to create work for ourselves, situations, than there's always something remaining. Always an excuse or reason to continue the friendship. I can't quite surmise why we need a project in order to be friends until I think about other, older friends, and realize that in less obvious ways, this is how friendships had been formed in the past. In the absence of sexuality, we possess things by trapping them in other nets. Ultimately, however, I'm unsatisfied with that. I feel as though I've been given only one route to understand someone, a rigid framework in which to function that allows for little nuance to the routine. In the future I might take that back and say - no, it was these limitations that made certain relationships interesting, but for now, these restrictions seem to mold the knowing unnaturally. I feel 'used', although for what ends I don't know. Maybe I'm projecting since it turns out I have at least 4 other friends with whom our friendship is based on collaboration. I in fact, take distinct pleasure in team work.

How friendships, hobbies, passions of mine have taken shape I am concluding go something like this: I desire things in order to understand them. Most people desire to have and in the having are finally freed of their desire. Either they are bored by the having, or desire other, shinier and prettier things. My desire - be it lust for a man or a creative ambition - is for knowledge. There are things I see and I don't quite understand yet. If I already understand it, I don't want it. But I can also have things, I mean physically possess them, and not understand them - having and understanding are not the same thing. And just because something allows itself to be possessed does not mean you know it, real having is more than physical acquisition.

If I do a mental survey of my attractions, I am drawn repeatedly to people who remain foreign to me for as long as possible. This is a type. The type is not height, width, hair color - its a composite of mysteries or disguises. I want to solve puzzles. This might be why looking and thinking about art objects has more appeal than making them (now), because with each (foreign) object I have something new I have to understand. I can fall in love over and over: an endless supply of objects, and makers, to understand. Where as myself and the things I make - I think I understand thoroughly.

If I look at friends, the strongest I have are ones that were subjected to a certain effort on my part to understand what they are; friends I asked more questions of and did in the end, maybe have a better understanding of, but still found them foreign to me. I can mark that transitional point from feeling nervous around them, slightly uncomfortable but in some masochistic way, finding the discomfort tantalizing, to feeling at ease and familiar. That discomfort was what drew me in - that intimidation you feel around new people who on some intuitive level you immediately desire. Not unlike lust, which is always for an 'other' - the mirror arc that will complete.

I bristle when a friend reminds me that I had described myself as having a type. I bristle because I don't want conversations said in flirtation to be remembered past their sell date. Things said 4 months ago no longer have face value. I also bristle because I'm sorry to have simplified my desire into 'taste'. As if to say you could parade any number of things before me that were similar and I'd be satisfied, that as if the gentle nuance of a moment didn't count for anything. What kept my ex-husband and I together for 6 years is not repeatable in a similar model, a fact I think that has made similar models so dissimilar. My attraction to him was constant because the understanding could never be resolved. We appeared to know so much about one another on the surface, our analytical skill for each other's every action and word part of a rapid fire game we played called "I'm going to find you out yet." This is exhausting. We never found each other out, we gave up. I mean, I was tired out for good.
But isn't this a version of everyone's failed affairs - you keep at the destructive ones because you want to solve them. The easy ones fizzle out. In both cases you have, you possess, but without challenge you can no longer lust. The same desire that drives travel and exploration, creativity and knowledge. I am ready anytime to pick up and move, expose myself to that discomfort of discovery just to avoid complacency.

But back to the remains. What if you are never quite sure that its been solved. If everytime you walk away thinking you've figured it out, something shorts out. Everytime you're sure you've put that last piece away, you find another missing. That's when you leave something behind to go back for. Just to check, just in case. Its one's intuition doing battle with one's logic. I have often rushed through things in order to make the most of it before it fizzled. Thrown all my best material away too soon. What about those that unfolded slowly over years? Those were the most beautiful and ultimately the most heartbreaking. After 12 years I wonder why we waited so long to turn on one another so cruelly. After 3 years I wonder why we have to go the long way round to being friends. Were the friendships fraught with tension that end poorly when the pressure is released - are they more momentous and more delicious that those that have formulaically disposed of desire on the early end in order to function? I think they are more memorable. I will remember the narrative better with that crescendo than without. I will remember that desire longer with so many years given to undress it. I left more there to go back for, more of myself than one can leave at a one night stand.

To Zion.

"I believe that love cannot be bought, except with love" Steinbeck

This quiet drive with dialogue, a 7 hour play. These things that are apart of the cinema: trees that hang over the road, the bend, I have no map, you don't like chocolate and sand, the two rocks you divide from the rest and give me, now in my pocket (the one with the red stripe), you buy me food as though we are on a date, your hand on my waist in the deli as though I was your girlfriend, I tell you you remind me of my brother, although I don't know why, you don't ask, trails of dead lady bugs and finches in the sand, my skirt blows between my legs, you spot the batting cage and know I'd love it, and we tell those kinds of stories about traveling people tell one another when they just meet. I sing softly on the way home, you asleep and twitch only slightly, beautiful when you grasp my skirt and won't let go. I don't know what to do as we coast into the city and I stall, but don't stop the car, I propel forward and say stupid things, as always, including :do your other girls like having sex with you as much as I do. You say: some more, some less. And then pause. I hate myself for making such a joke, for insisting that all I care for is fucking you, but I cannot bear to care anymore than that since I am not going to be perfectly formulaic for you to love. I will not get outraged, I am passive aggressive; I will allow you everything and nothing; I won't make you out to be exotic, you are like family to me - that's why there is everything and nothing. I am fine being used, I am fine if you can only imagine me beneath you, I am fine with that, but I don't think its true. I think you will be lonely. You will always be in love with could bes and therefore, will never know love in the now.

I had convulsed before leaving the house, certain that it would hurt. But it didn't. I just didn't want you to get out. Not because I had anything to tell you or anything to do, I just don't know, and I need knowing. I wanted to find out about feelings that seem serene madness.

We are, it is now silenced. And was not very loud to begin with. A quiet thank-you and a you are welcome.

Your window down the street, still.

Comfortable Silence

I rewound the same song three times to hear the story. You sang along - a feat, you usually don't know the words. We talked for hours both directions about love and marriage, children and depression. We talked and then in our speech there was comfortable silence. We bickered in Nashville like sisters bicker, the lines kind of like pantomine. You act like my mother, I'm the bratty sister, petulant and rude. There's strange comfort in that. Even when I'm behaving impatiently I realize that its a comfort I share with no one else. A comfort that makes it acceptable and funny when I throw my leg over your sleeping body when we share the same bed; I'm so fast asleep and you so familiar, just like when we were teenaged girls and I snuggled under the covers.

Willpower

Just a little bit slow to react these days. Those electrified moments are not as obvious or the dial has been turned way down low. Take it slow. I'm sort of enjoying the directions, although I don't know why I'm being given them (yet), but I'll follow the rules of engagement and slow everything down despite desire and despite time. This being quite the opposite of the American mania that I should be particiapting in: join all the clubs, get all the awards, make all the money. Instead I'm dreaming of some sort of fictional past that we all conjure up, the moral of every story when the everyman is the hero and the ones with the hustle and bustle are the losers. Culturally we certainly get a kick out of Hollywood, but we aren't going to make any examples of its narratives: the movie stars, after all, didn't slow down and take it easy until they were rich, rich, rich! How can we reward the everyman who works a normal day to pay the bills he has to pay, who doesn't over consume, so he hasn't any debt, doesn't 'want', which seems to be how we're being brought up. Want more and you can have more. Manifest.

Should I want to manifest freedom, freedom from want, where would I start? I should probably throw out the last three pairs of sinful high heels and stop lusting after that boy, I should probably stop competing and just ease myself in. But what would happen if you stopped in the midst of that manic flow? Common sense tells me I might be trampled.

A few weeks ago I listened to a girl from graduate school talk about her plan in action for art-world domination - at least, to put it fairly, the success of her practice, which rightfully she should want to manifest. In her voice however was that mania - a certain desperation to guarantee that this longing was useful, that this plan was going to lead to something satisfactory. I wondered how love worked in her life. Was it useful or wasteful - it eats up precious time after all. Was it natural and organic or an act? I had never seen her let her guard down even a bit, I describe it as 'being on message', so I have never been able to tell the depth of her soul underneath her mania. Everyone wants to see a crack, not in order to see weakness, but humanity. I see quite the opposite in people who are manically bent on success - their weakness if clearly on their sleeve. On the other hand the most intimidating people were those that never intimated any 'plan', but stepped comfortably through their life with their head up and a certain stillness. Not silence - just without the mania. I think its old fashioned confidence, but without the trappings of American mania or coastal neuroses, we can't recognize it anymore. Instead we call it aloof. Or other nasty things.

Take it slow. That's what I was told. I have the same tendancy for speed as anyone else here, and when faced with desire I want the shiney new object now, not later (I'll show you my credit card bills). And so I'm a little bit frightened of people who have that desire under such perfect control that other things bend to their will, or their confidence. I want that same stillness. Lately I've found myself slower to react - that part of me that is emotionally a day late and a dollar short has started to sync up with my willpower. But that sync hasn't kept me from confusing a good head of confidence with sheer stubborness. Sometimes my willpower, although less needy than when I was younger, just has more confidence in desire than in patience.

1984

There's a smack-smack on pavement that bounces between the houses. I slide my window open as wide as I can and sniff the crisp evening air.

Smack-smack.

I can see the long, narrow backyard and the chain of identical yards as they curl down Ranchero Road. Cats parole the fence tops and lawn sprinklers fan back and forth over grass. I can see in to the neighbour's house across the alley - husband and wife at the kitchen table - the room simple and bare, their clothes the colour of nothing. It's not quite dusk.

Smack-smack.

I sit at the window and tell myself stories. I tell myself stories in the bathroom before the large mirror. I tell myself stories on the front deck, lying out on the wide wood rail tanning, precariously taunting a fall to the driveway and feeling a little bit dangerous, but I know I'm not.

Smack-smack.

My sister is out tonight. Her room is quiet and the door is closed. I sneak in there sometimes and breathe in the smell of Tracy. She's musky like a teenage girl is: part cheap perfume, part hairspray, part feet and part cigarette smoke.
Her bedroom has dark brown carpet for some reason, while the rest of the house has rust. My bedroom has white carpet because we moved in here when I was a baby. She has a red bedspread mom made printed with abstracted summer hats, a red phone shaped like a sports car and a red tape player. Her table under the window has a make-up mirror on it that has double doors covering the glass. It is covered in stickers and lipstick, as is the surface it sits on.

She has a jewellery box shaped like a dresser that places "Laura's Theme" from Doctor Zhivago. I always come in and wind it up, pull out the bottom drawer and let it play. It makes me feel sad, although I don't know why. I'm only 9 and I doubt I've seen Dr. Zhivago yet, but my parents have the record so I know the song.
I'd hung everything I knew about sadness on that clanky music box.

I creep around quietly in her space even though I know she won't be home. I had heard her on the phone after school talking with her friend, she's gone to a party down the street. She's mad at our mom.
She wore a leather jacket and a pair of black boots. She does her bleached hair like Madonna.

Smack-smack.

We'd gone away a couple weeks ago on holiday and Tracy had stayed home. I was depressed that she'd stayed, I wanted so badly for us to be friends.
When we were gone she threw a party at the townhouse, we could tell because everything had been moved around. It was clear that they'd tried to put things back as they should, but things were backwards and just a bit off. I could tell right away, it was like we had been burglarized.

Smack-smack

The little clay family that our Aunt had given us at Christmas had been on the bookshelf. There was a dad and a mom and two sisters: one big and one small. When we got home the big one had been broken. I'll never forget.

Smack-smack.

Tracy had played kick the can on the front street when she was younger with the kids from the houses across from our's. Their's was public housing. I couldn't figure out how that meant anything, because their town houses were the same as our's, only with bigger front yards. There were more kids on that side though. On our side there were a lot of single women or childless couples. The neighbours on our left changed constantly and on the right was a quiet immigrant couple who worked nights as janitors. They had had a baby girl the year before.

Across the street there was always something going on. Bobby was a football star but one night they came and took him to jail. The folks next door to Bobby fought pit-bull dogs in their basement and some mornings there would be bloody carpets hosed down on the front yard.

Smack-smack.

I never played out front or knew any of the kids.

Smack-smack.

I'm back in my window and I'm waiting.

Smack-smack.

The sun went down a half-hour ago.

( )-( )

I can hear the TV downstairs.

( )-( )

It's 11:30 p.m.. MST. Longest day of the year.

( )-( )

It's quiet and still. He's gone inside. He's no longer playing basketball on his driveway.

( )-( )

It's not that late but my parent's are looking for Tracy. I'm worried about my sister. I don't really get it yet that teenagers stay out as late as they can.
She's told them she was sleeping at a friend's. She'd let me in on the lie and I had warned her against it. I lied all the time too but I didn't want to be held responsible for her.

( )-( )

There's an argument rising from downstairs. I haven't really heard a noise like this come from my family before. I stare hard at the clock in my room and it's 1 am. Their voices undulate up the stairs from the narrow hall leading to the front door. I can't make out anything but crying and agony.
My sister is yelling at dad: "fucker, fucker, fuck you", she's slurring. There's a tension that makes it under the crack of my door and into my bed; it invades my sleep and grasps my lungs. I'm scared. I can't make out the situation until mom starts to read the room back to dad: "She has puke in hair Bill...she's missing her boots.....her ear is bleeding and the lobe's split open..."

I hear the kind of thumping that people never make on purpose and I get to my feet. I don't know who I'm trying to save, dad or mom or my big sister or all of them, as I race down stairs to find my dog at the top of the stairs, petrified despite his size.

Thmp-thmp.

They don't see me as I see them.

Thmp-thmp.

Three people equally terrified.

Thmp-thmp.

I knew where Tracy had been. She said she was staying at a friend's. Mom had asked me if I knew anything when they were calling around. I had slunk away to my room for bed: "I don't know anything!"

Thmp-thmp.

I see her little white socks crusty with dirt. She has the tiniest feet I've ever seen.

Thmp-thmp.

I'm frozen where I stand and the sound is pinched off. I don't know how long the struggle carries on.

Thmp-thmp.

Dad took her to the hospital that night.

Thmp-thmp.

I get up in the morning for a softball game. I dread going (I'm the worst player on the team) but I dread staying at home.
No-one says a thing out of the ordinary.
I trudge down Ranchero Road in grey polyester uniform. It's to hot for ball.

Smack-smack.

No-one ever says a thing out of the ordinary.

Smack-smack.

Tracy left home at 17.

Bicycles: A Personal Account

I have a bicycle. An orange one that I had to have a garage sale in order to buy. I also sold a few of my CDs and took clothes into consignment. I was like an 8 year old, except that when I was 8, I probably couldn’t yet ride a bike. Such a late bloomer in certain ways, was I. Am I.

In the story I’m riding through downtown Calgary with my husband. It was the day of the Stampede Parade and so the streets were shut off and crowds were gathering early with their children, cups of Tim Horton’s coffee in hand and lawn chairs in position.
We rode in the crisp morning air - still cool, because mornings will never be hot in Alberta - planning to plant ourselves on the roof of the museum and watch the parade below us. Watch the floats float.

This is where I should begin:
"Hey howdy, hey cowboy," before we left our home, we were sitting on the fire escape talking, you smoking cigarettes and me hanging from the stairs above. (Why didn’t I smoke with you? I do with everyone else.)
We’d sit outside and talk sometimes. We’d go over to the convenience store and buy snacks and pig out with a movie and ding-dongs. Or no ding-dongs, but I’d eat Hotrods anyway, and you’d have peanut M&Ms and Coca-cola. A steady diet of those.

In the story schoolz out for the summer and we are riding our bicycles through Calgary like a couple of teenagers. We plan to plant ourselves on the roof of the museum and watch the parade below us.
Instead I find the letters.
We went to the fucking bookstore, how civilized. I came outside and couldn’t find you and thought you’d left us for good.

Last night I rode out to the shore and found all the houses under water - or flooded I guess. They looked like they were bobbing in the sea, the waves lapping around the front steps and covering the lawn. It was a pretty foggy night and the water was awful black. I may have been riding in it or may have stayed on shore, I don’t know. I just know that I turned around eventually to head home and I felt like I was being followed. I stopped and called Dad to pick me up - I was at the cross-roads - but of what and where I don’t know.
I didn’t see Robert Johnson there.
But I got home and found the bike seat missing the next day.

So you’ve been out boozin’ and whorin’ eh? Just like you’d always wanted in your poems. I don’t know anyone who’s more of a romantic than you, young man. Maybe me. I have that paper bag still, that you gave me the Oreos in.
Man, we built 6 yrs around junk food and couldn’t gain a pound.

"So I’m at the doctor see, and he says he has to check for a brain tumour and I says, what would I want with a tumour?"

(They took a flashlight and looked into your ear for that tumour, the light came shining out your eyes.)

And so I say: "fuck - give me a break, you’ll call when you find out right? Were you going to call or what?"

And I imagine you in your new bar - some strip mall pub in Winterpeg - telling them you talked to your wife on the phone for the first time. Maybe you don’t tell them a thing, being the romantic that you are, you probably want to remain a mystery. Good for you, I wish I could maintain the same composure.

But in the story I’m walking down 14th street in a flowered dress. I think it’s hot outside, I may have brought my cardigan. Karen is somewhere on the other end and we’ll have fish with her. For some reason I hate you only in moments on that walk because I still know we’re on the brink of love.
We were awful young baby. Way too young for how intense and hard we were on one another. Lying in bed in the dark and falling so hard and fast inside - to places I know I’ll never go again.

What did we do again? Go to Superdrug and buy snacks and then that video store in Chinatown and rent Japanese anime porn and lay out blankets and pillows and turn off the lights. It was like building a fortress with you every night. Until something snapped.
Was her name Joanne?
And snapped again.
I sat down on the street and wept.
I lay down on 8th ave and yelled.
I lost myself inside my head - I’m allergic to wine by the way -
We snapped.
I can’t imagine a depth of pain that is any farther down. That’s the truth. You.

So I was on my bicycle you see, coming back from Evanston at around 8pm and it’s misty out. Just spitting rain. It takes about 30 mins and I’m riding through Roger’s Park and it may or may not be a good part of town - I don’t know - but I feel alive. I feel like I just want to stay on my bike in the dusk in the rain forever in a neighbourhood I don’t really know in a city I’ve barely seen. I want to be suspended.

And then the doctor says: you have scar tissue on your heart, you’ve been having a series of small heart attacks.
And I wonder: is that real? Or is it just us and is it just us? Will we die of that exploded heart, when that one last small heart-attack becomes too large?
And we’re in British Columbia in the motel and lying in the bed watching marathon TV and making plans for mini-golf or go-carts. Its deserted. I want to cry to think about it, you and I building forts like that.
You know, we stopped making love. We even stopped fucking - until of course you were leaving.

So I’m on my bicycle and I’m thinking only of that day like I’m watching us from above the roof of the museum, and I see us on our bikes riding into our fate. My hand on that locker door and on the sheets of paper I find there. Something else guided my hand I swear - it was all so fucking karmic. Who could’ve said then, that this is where we’d be now? You in Winnipeg and me in Chicago? Me the drunk, and you? The smart ass I guess. I’m sure you haven't straightened out that piss-poor attitude yet.

Sonorous, rich, cut to ribbons. When we danced around the family room and you sang me songs. I swear to God there’s not a person in the world who knew our love. Not that feeling.

Once Removed

There is a cliche - you can never go home; which I think means you can never return to that complete utter innocence of home and childhood folded together. Now physically removed from home, having set myself facing another direction I wonder which thing about home is more resonant with me. Was home my mom and dad's house? Was it my ex-boyfriend? My old job? Sunny afternoons on the porch with beer and Jason? I have long felt that the uncomfortable and feeble severing of my friendship with Jason was the last snip of the apron string. Now home is a place again, just a city, but one that no longer has an emotional pull. My friends have scattered and my loves have all died away.
Why is puppy love and friendship so bound up in comfort? I think of the anger and fear that welled up inside of me between leaving Rich and Jason and I severing contact, and I realize that was the pivotal moment of growth. I was actually becoming - nothing Deleuzian here, more Oprah - (an adult). I was responsible for me and was painfully certain I wouldn't return to the bosom of home, where I knew as well as anyone, there was no one waiting. And even if there was, it would be bookended with misery, not a fete for the returning heroine.
There's that song - Prodigal Daughter - "look here comes the prodigal son, fetch him a tall drink of water, but there's none in the cup, cause he drank it all up, left for the prodigal daughter". I think both my sister and I have ejected ourselves - we know there is nothing waiting for us when we return, so we keep going. She astounds me with her steam, her perseverance. I feel on the other hand that mine has only picked up since that fateful winter. Now I have that perseverance, I have abandoned fear, but also feel a bit of an urge to taunt fate. Isn't it time to go again? If you can never go home, why turn a temporary sojourn into one?
What puzzles me now is the emotional, physical feeling of home. A peace that envelopes a person when in the presence of another. Is this a deja vu or just pattern behavior? You are like my sister, so I feel 'home' when I sit beside you. But at my age, how many personalities must feel familiar now? Are they still only ones reminiscent of mom and dad? I'm certain when I sat a few weeks ago on C's back patio drinking beer in the evening sun and talking nonsense with his landlord that it didn't feel like home because he or his friends bare any resemblance to my family. Instead it is frame. I have somewhere remembered an experience that was pleasurable - was it my age? my company? the air that night? - that has been encoded as 'perfection'. Perfection = peace = 'home'. So you can 'go home again', when you find those isolated moments of perfection: the perfect light, air, conversation.
My sense is that I could reexperience this emotion over and over, if everyone in the picture was unknowingly complicit. I remember very clearly what was pleasurable as a child: sitting on the back balcony on late summer nights with my parents. I had been allowed to stay up late, it was 11 o'clock. The patio lanterns are lit and I'm playing with some toys on the green plastic carpet and my parents are drinking beer. The air is warm and mosquitoes buzz around and I feel complete. This is conditioning: now whenever I sit at dusk or in darkness on a deck and drink a beer in the warm summer air I feel the same pleasure. An inner satisfaction that is essential: to relive the sensation of staying up late for the first time again and again. The sensation of seeing the part of the world that had so long been off limits. This is going home.

The object that waits.

Shouldering. The mutual moment of supporting another with a balance of pressure. The impossible structure that has moved away from the scaffolding, the armature and the framework and assembled itself in the middle with balletic grace. This composite moment is magical, delicate, simple.

Last night I dreamt that you took me out to the middle of an endless, flat field and held me, enveloped me in your arms and your body, covering me in a woolen coat. The sky was dark and moody and I complained that we were in the open, that people could see us out here, but you kissed me and told me that the crowd couldn't see. They were moving the other direction.

It was true. When I looked their way, they were dissipating and I would soon be alone out here with you in a cold and vast flat tundra seated on the ground. I woke up. I couldn't tell if there was dread or complacency in my heart when I discovered that the one that was going hold me was also the one who could hurt me; that far from any enclosure there is a precarious feeling of freedom and fear.

We are here in the middle now. We've toed the marker and are waiting for the cue. But the cue never comes, and the action remains poised. You remain with your hand on my face - unclear whether you will slap or caress my cheek. The choreography goes unwitnessed without a dance, the stage directions are frozen and poise is intention. This assemblage of parts could spring to life or fall to pieces; spraying the air or the ground with its life. But there is none, just a taxidermied gesture that waits and balances, as the crowd backs away and the moment persists.
Peek over your shoulder: it is still there.

Perfect Lies

The story-shaped self - at least this decade's or this generation's version of authenticity, has required us to define ourselves by the words we use to frame our lives. The words we use over dinner, over beers, on a date, in school, on our blogs. We want to tell our lives, and have it unfold as we've seen lives unfold on television. My mind plays a few tricks as I imagine - prior to TV and movies, how did people conceive of their lives unfolding? Stories were anecdotal and meant to teach lessons, or just so morals, and not intended so much, as they were passed down, to illustrate a perfect start and finish. It was under these morals we fashioned selves that met socialized, religiously sanctioned lives, authentic or not - they were the lives lived. This isn't to say that books and their fiction didn't have an effect on one's determination of their being - influence their 'authenticity' somewhat, but a book unfolds slowly, where as the passive act of watching feeds you. You are taught by what entertains you, especially as communication methods become more savvy and fold in the psychology of Gestalt, and what we passively watch trains us.

Last week I heard film-maker Guy Maddin talk about his work. He told long, beautifully funny stories about being a child and falling in love with sights and sounds of film and radio. He spoke of the media as wrapping him, folding him in, covering him like a blanket. He eroticized his influences, the women of these films out his grasp but tantalizing and desirous, and out of this desire, an adult Maddin emerges - his adult self shaped by these moving memories - at once time based, and then contained. The narrative framework contains, the movie loop contains, and experience contained - a time capsule of desire that can be revisited and refelt again and again within hour allotments, re-experienced and relieved in every film Maddin makes for himself in order to satisfy this desire.
Maddin's stories sped onward - they were rapid and peppery - and filled with, lies. I think they were lies - the kind that leaves the audience whispering afterward - "was that part about the chimp, true??" But they were true lies - to coin a movie - because they were his. His embellishments and his narrative. These were the lies that Maddin shaped his self with, and his art, and because they were his - his creation - they were true. Who cares if the chimp really pistol whipped him (literally), the carnival ride we take hearing it, is worth the same suspension of disbelief. (You likely won't die on the rollercoaster, but you feel like you might be in danger). Thrills are great lies, but when you experience them, they are still true. The thrill is perhaps the perfect definition of the true-lie.
Is it the millenial moment to have to lie to tell the truth? Is this result of the society of the spectacle, that in our speech and in our framing out authentic selves that we lie, but these lies become and are more true than what other plain words might say? The truth of a story is useless, it is illegitimacy which has value. These little lies acting as manifest destiny, that with their retooling and retelling the narrator will get closer to the truth of themselves each time, until their story has completed the full circle. At full circle it might be bare, stripped, naked, without disguise. It may be uncomfortable or may be charming. But the truth must now be very charismatic to compete with the great lies we have been telling all along. These charismatic truths have begun to shape shift and appear like spectacle, confusing and maybe even conspiratorial.

Never kiss a fool and never be fooled by a kiss.

With every lover I reach a stand off where I decide - its me or him, and I delete their numbers, lose their gifts, throw away their letters. I erase them from my mind. Always the girl with a dozen ex-lovers, half who will never speak to me because I threw such caustic words their way.

We've gone in strange semi-circles never crossing paths, to seeing each other everywhere, or if not one another, some reminder of. I can't resist seeing in that some intention by the cosmos that our world's collide - and right now, it feels as though our bumpers grind uncomfortably against one another's. I want you out. I don't want you where I go, which is why, I drunkenly say: asshole. You fucking asshole. Because I don't want to find you in my house, where it suddenly seems that you've stepped, and at the same time, I can't tell why I'm so adament.

It is for one, that I want so much for us to be friends. I want to will you to know me for more than my body, my sex, my silence. I want you to hear me and watch me the way friends see one another. This is my greatest, aching desire that I carry from man to man, for one to love me like a brother would. I want all of our desire to be poured into our conversations, or chance similaritities, our passions. I want our minds to be all that is tantilized, and our hands to only care for the other. I'm jealous that I'm not that girl, because then we'd actually know one another - instead I am the skirt you chase. And chase for years on end. And I put up such a weak fight, as the first flutter of your hand melts my resolve and I must admit.

The first few encounters, I was on autopilot. I wanted something, I wanted you, but kept a thin sheet between us as protection, allowing for total detachment within a matter of hours. The next time I saw you I was able to slip easily into amusing banter, a stand-up act where I entertained you and your friends. I was able to play me, and I think, make myself likeable. Desireable again. Because it seemed, I think to you, that I didn't care. This one last time, this one last time I insisted that I wanted you and boldly placed myself in your way, steadying myself to allow my chest to be unzipped, my soul to pour out, and something to be given away that I couldn't recover. I don't know if you even noticed - as we rolled to face each other and our lips met, hungrier than ever before - I thought I felt our hearts leap in a kind of union that seemed out of place here. Here which is nowhere. Unlocatable. Dislocated. Empty.

I have noticabley become detached from your friends, who thought I was so likable before, they must wonder (or do they know?) why I don't love you like they do. They must think I used you cruelly. But in my ears her sing-song voice says your name "isn't it sexy?" and asks me who my lovers are. I think sometimes she was hunting me there and then for you, when she brought us glasses of gin, grinning. I think she was trying to make me love you, and I wanted to say: I do. You don't understand, I do.

Useless Desire

This hand that covers the distance between my neck and my waist, down my spine, gently, and around my waist. A more gentle touch than this moment deserves, since we are not in love, and have no intention of being so.
My posture twitches between tension and relaxation. This hand that covers my body, reaching my belly, my breast, my insides as it builds the momentum. A conductor of my nerves. My desire an orchestra that is poised for crescendo.

I'm in a car, driving (winding) with him. The land rolls out before us and sky is clear and clean. This is home, I know it. My lips are sealed.

This hand that travels over my skin, it pulls me toward him and I keep my soul out of it. This is about my body only. I will feed myself this once, a guilty pleasure wrapped in guilty pleasure, without ever soiling my hands. This hand that lifts me like a feather to his groin, that searches through the folds of my body, that positions my neck, my back, my legs around him. This hand that seems to hover just inches away from my skin, we never touch, just vibrate like wings. This is a dance and we are performing. Or maybe only rehearse.

In dusty towns there are ice cream stands and junk shops. We don't say much, he and I. We don't know each other, after all these years, we are merely acquaintances that want. We keep the doors shut. Heavy and ornate they are twice my size, guarding against some dark secret that would explain the inexplicable hunger. He cannot want me, he wants everyone.

Spinning in place, we move from ledge to ledge. Gingerly than forcefully, there is a music in my ears that is summer camp, swampy days, sneaking away. All this in a vacuum. We break and reform, me in your lap, sliding down your legs, against the table, your hands firm and larger than life. And as I turn to face you my lips flutter at your ears and eyelids, forehead and neck; your smell burns my nostrils and I miss your lips, place one finger at the tip. I cannot close that arc, I cannot make us lovers.

Before Boys

At a party in 1984 the kids are watching Ghostbusters. I think that’s right. The little birthday girl isn’t too happy about it. She’s invited all these girls to her house, but as usual for 4th graders, there are sides being taken, alliances being formed. Politics at its youngest. They have chosen sides against her (or so she interprets) and its probably because she was caught crying. Well, she didn’t control her public display of emotion. A tactic that she had seen work for other girls, but had worked less often for her.

There is a game of memory where Mom brings out a tray of objects covered in a cloth napkin. Napkin is removed; girls memorize what they see. Thirty seconds pass; tray is removed; girls write down what they remember.
The birthday girl loses.
She loses the next game, and the next; and is then quite fixated on the fact that there must be a conspiracy. How can she not win at her own party? She’s had too much candy, she’s tired and spoiled by the attention and blubbers to one side.

All the parties came to this sooner or later. Blubbering. The bowling party, the ice cream parlor party, the Ghostbusters party. Beyond these three, I have no recollection of any other parties, so I must have been cut off
But regardless, at an early age I couldn’t feel much compassion between us girls. I could feel a lot of competition. I was at once alienated and angry, and at another desperate to make more friends, collect them like porcelain dolls and hope that one day someone would ‘want’ to be my friend, not just have accidently acquired me. I wanted to be desirable. And a winner.

A Dowry

What framed my life as a girl was the lingering impression that my mother was very unhappy. She dropped a lot of hints, so I didn't need much help formulating this theory. Around 9-14 years old I heard a lot about how she should never have married my father, or should have left him years ago (how can she put up with all this traveling? she'd ask); stories of longing about how she'd been a smart girl (skipped a grade even) and was now doing what? Raising two ungrateful daughters. And I was an accident. She'd temper these intimacies, that I'd have been more than happy not to share, with "but I'm so glad I have you, what would I do without you?" which, in light of the older sister's antics, gave me the oppressive feeling that it was now, all down to me. I would be held responsible for saving my mother.
As I grew into my teens she'd often discourage me from boys, I didn't need 'em she'd tell me, I should go to school and get a good job; which, thinking back was excellent advice. She warned me about depending on a husband, told me to take care of myself. Talked about how miserable it is be given an allowance and have no assets of your own. I should've focused on this self-improvement more, but like all young adults I focused on the thing I was warned to stay away from. I turned all my attention towards boys. I became a serial monogamist, a serious offence when your thirties roll around and you've actually lived with 3 different men, been married and divorced once, and in your heart still see yourself as a commitment phobe.

I moved away from my family as a strategy for avoiding my Mom's neediness. It's a complicated kind of neediness that I have given up on describing, because I ultimately come out looking insensitive. Maybe I am, I consider, when other folks tell me that family is very important to them, and they could never leave where they grew up and leave that very family behind. I made some tracks. I wanted the dust cloud to cover up what had turned into a massive failure. My siblings on the westcoast, rarely paying a visit, and me in the home town, expected for dinner only on special holidays. Mom only content communicating with me by phone and email as though I lived on another continent, rather than in another neighbourhood.
But the day I moved away for school was the day Mom wanted grandkids. The day I moved away was the day she thought I should be married and living in the suburbs. She started clipping eligible bachelors from the local paper and sending them to me in the mail. She'd keep an eye on the boys I'd grown up with and give me the running update should I maybe reconsider one of them. Then she'd pull back, angry, and threaten me with: "Well who would want you anyway, no man's going to want to take on your debt". And later, "I think that's why he broke up with you, he didn't want to be responsible for your student loans."
Mom had trotted out the latter statement as an explanation for a break-up I had initiated. Not content, she used it again as an explanation for a painfully failed affair with a best-friend. An affair, which she had hoped, was going to bring me back home.

Introduction: When Cabbages Were Kings

First things first: when you're trying to get away from your family and your lack of school chums and trying to get your big sister to notice you again, what do you do? Some kids might have been hanging out under the slide smoking cigarettes or drinking a can a Pilsner stolen from the basement fridge - but I was burying myself inside a make-shift tent.
At first I thought I was quite the architect, and that that alone would draw my sister's attention. I had rigged up a nifty pup-tent from bright orange blankets and plant stakes. The stakes were wedged in the dresser pulls and the rest of the blanket was draped over the far edge of the bed and tucked securely into the wall. This made a covered cubby-hole of the space between twin-bed and desk, about 3 feet wide and 6 feet long. I'd crawl in there with Archie comics and cookies, actively imagining myself into a scenario involving Antarctica and emergency amputations or Saskatchewan sod-huts in the dead of winter. For some reason I devised that she would be curious about me as she shuffled, sulking into her adjacent bedroom. Or better yet, that her friends might be equally curious and demand that the little sister get to hang out too.
Who was I kidding? A fourteen year-old girl with skateboarders hanging around the driveway, Le Chateau bat-wing sweaters and paint thick eyeshadow is not interested in my passive-aggressive antics. I buried in a little deeper, only to provoke the attention of mom, poking her head in at the entrance with unrequired sweets and beverages.