Small bathroom, tiled all in blue. Watercolour lit in diluted sun through dense cloud then dense glass. The mirror looks on. It’s the morning before the walk before work, resting in one of the last acts of a waning routine that fights me each day while I’m still at my most doughy and malleable. The last of the branches I must plummet through and smack against in sequence, as I fall from dreams down through responsibilities until finally, I buckle against the hard surface of my front door. This final branch is a twig with bright bristles that I ritually smush over and around my cave mouth’s entrance. To dull the colour, and the worry of a breath smell I can’t perceive myself. I press too hard in my insecurity and I chew the stick as I free my hands to tie shoes and zip jackets. I know I shouldn’t, but I struggle in the blur to catch myself.
Those Kids
He didn’t like the look of them. They crossed the road right into his path and spat globs of fluid flat into the street. Swaggering slow and clustered, they flicked chins over shoulders to grab sturdy glances back at him. They were very obviously together, uniformed in unfit sport suits and the first three numbers from the barber’s catalogue, and yet they are climbing the pavement spaced and separate. Shaved sides duck as one stops to examine an artefact on the ground, left a few steps behind in the wake of rustling polyester. A coin, or maybe a wasteful butt still tall enough to re-light? Worry strikes and he slows to a shuffle, not wanting to catch up with this kid and become surrounded as he passes. He doesn’t think they will try anything, but if they were to, this is the empty section of the street they’d do it. This is a channel through the centre of advanced civilisation, and yet his thoughts become primitive ones. They all look to be occupying that age that unnerves him, that age where alone there is little danger, but in numbers their threat accumulates and their intelligence does not. The age where they would probably try to kick rather than punch, an age where if he grabbed a leg as it flew at him, he could use it to throw a vicious kid across the pavement. Or more usefully, he could use the kick’s opening to smash his own shoe into the vulnerable crotch of someone only just old enough to understand what it means to hurt the way it would. The tracksuit bottoms would offer no protection and the first maggot would crumple and stay down.
His blood pumps and his fists tighten as he feels a surge swallow him. He is a pulsing organ of animal, bracing to squish and be squished. A pummelling circuit that fires without asking as his eyes dilate. But as the moments start to drag on his oversized shape, it doesn’t happen. He remains in the air un-squished. It still isn’t out of the question, but the breath comes back and his hyperfocus begins to erode and cave in on itself. The awkward muscle falls away leaving only the skeletal silhouette of his humanity, and he thinks for an exhaling second that maybe his assumptions were too harsh. They hold themselves intimidatingly and arrogantly, purposefully stripping away anything goofy and naive from their image. But perhaps, behind that facade there could be an insecure kid, trying to fit in by dragging themselves up out of their own childhood. Maybe whatever was on the ground momentarily cracked their expression and a sense of wonder breathed for just a second. Maybe it wasn’t money or trash, maybe it was a cool insect? Or a weird-shaped stick? Or a single unguarded frame of childlike curiosity from a kid forgetting not to be?
Everyone Is Headed Somewhere
I ride a chugging bus as it sails towards the city centre, double-checking the directions on my phone. I don’t enjoy connections, hoping that today perhaps the digital display overhead will match the delicate timings I planned from my bedroom. Pedestrians are beginning to bloom, more than I expected so early in the morning. And then stretching suburban streets with no one at all. It’s comforting to take such a familiar artery in, even when it is transporting you straight into the unknown. Helping a little to balance out the woozy nerves. The consuming dread. The mundane shrug. I lean against the smudged safety window as they arc past rows of empty student houses. Passengers gamble on their centres of gravity as we climb a long chain of roundabouts and parkways. I struggle but try to enjoy a morning view of the empty, rolling version of a city park that will flood and saturate by the time I come back past in the relieving afternoon. My mind drifts to hypothetical adventures I could be getting up to across these fields, dreaming of times I had nowhere to be.
- Journey To Job Interview (23)
- Journey To Job Interview (18)
- Bus Ride To Call Centre
- Van Ride To Warehouse
Map Dots
I’m new here in town. In fact, I’m so new that I haven’t set foot here and never plan to. This is my first visit, sort of. I come to just before the highway exit, missing the sign but feeling the way. Sometimes it’s the Interstate or the Trans-Canada Highway, other times it’s just a single-lane back road, or a lonely truck route through less well-connected scenes. You’ll see the farms first on the way in, trim houses dropped neatly against the vast blank plains and the deep dish sky. Silos and industrial stations tower looming and exposed above a sheer flat expanse. Maybe a painted sign with a unique motto, marking what honestly looks to be the only place on this side of the planet. The horizon circles way out wide, just visible across almost every distant degree. Here in a snow globe at the middle of dry summer. These small towns sediment and settle where the long roads find each other and cross like ribbons tied sparsely across the gigantic corn fields.
The Living Room Has Changed
The living room has changed. It’s nice, I admit, though I’m not great with change. I find some pain in it. I find some pain in what is lost to it. The rooms of this house are always in motion. One guest room still holds the air from my old bedroom, with flecks of the old purple paint still visible from strange angles only I would ever see.
I came back after a difficult first few months in my new flat, an odd number of years old. A brief stay home from an unfriendly city, with an unlucky crew of strangers, in a wipe-down boarding hall. I sat in an armchair in this warm living room and had conversations with people that knew me well. I ate their food and slept in the bed my parents bought me urgently from the charity shop after I came home from the hospital with a broken leg. This bed that I’d hated as a snapped teenager was now so nourishing. Just as breaking my leg was awful as it healed, but would go on to teach me a lot, I knew leaving home was necessary. But I hadn’t realised how much I had missed this dose of comfort. If I hadn’t jumped off of that roof I may have never stopped sleeping on a mattress on the floor. If I’d never moved out of my parent’s house I may have never learnt to accept the pain of life-changing and its components becoming lost.
There was a dog and a cat I knew. We had seen each other after school, on evenings and weekends, as I laid on the living room carpet in the middle of the week, filling out applications and order forms for my dismal catalogue sales job. My darker days of deep unemployment, where they would silently watch me, puzzled as I scrambled to get dressed just before my parents returned home from work. The dog was big and black with glassy eyes to his gentle soul, calm and observant. As I stroked him he tilted his head up at me and I was reminded of how he would stare up at us when we spoke to him, turning his head to one side when we did something he didn’t understand. I wondered if he understood why on one normal day I left the house and just didn’t come home again. I wondered if he knew why I was now back. He was getting older now, his energy growing softer, no longer in his bouncing youth. When I was younger my dad would occasionally try to wrestle me on this blue carpet, and our dog would not be able to contain himself. He would be straight at the edge of the ring, licking us to try and tag himself in. I have not seen this kind of openly vulnerable friendliness while I have been away, everything has been much more complicated than this. The cat was small and uninterested, as always. After she sleeps she wants to play, and when she decides we’re done she wants to groom herself before purring into a croissant shape on top of someone. She is still young and leaps around casually, shuffling her legs as she sleeps under a stool, in chasing dreams of long grass and hiding places. Her dynamic with the dog is one of parallel running tolerance and acceptance. There is no real bond, but no conflict either, only some intrigue.
The dog arrived here when he was four, raised by and alongside cats in a household that couldn’t give him what he needed as he grew into himself. He was the most polite dog I had ever met, and over the years of knowing him, he healed my deep distrust of dogs, leftover in me from accompanying my dad as a young child while we walked our previous dog through our intimidating neighbourhood parks. When we brought home our cat she was still a very young kitten, adopted by us from a kitchen floor crawling with multiple litters of fuzzy little futures. She had barely been handled and was very shy at first, spending a good amount of her life getting adjusted to being comfortable with people, often being known to bolt at any disturbance. Growing up, she learnt the ropes from careful and distant observation of the dog, whose cool attitude would rub off on her gradually. So we had a cat who acted kind of like a dog who acted kind of like a cat. I missed them both when I headed back after the Christmas break, to a place that didn’t uphold a trace of their non-judgemental ease and acceptance. The pain helps you grow, but it still hurts.
The halls I lived away in were a kind of home to me, in a warped way and an austere sense. I felt this only as my things sat piled and packed to depart, in the corner of the bare room as the sun cast shapes in through the twin windows. Although it meant that I would get to return to my parent’s house for the summer, I felt the hit of loss at the idea of leaving this room behind. This was my only safe sanctuary in the pioneering days of a new phase of life. This was the first place in my life that I lived away from where I was raised, out on my own. As my parents waited in the car downstairs for me, their second and only visit here since dropping me off on my first day, I felt deeply sad at the idea of locking up this room that I’d had such a hard time in. I turned and hugged the wall with tears in my eyes at the thought of never seeing this place again. I desperately hung in the silent air, taking in as much as I could of this place that only suddenly felt so sacred to me in the last hours before it was time for me to close it off. I took too long in there, unable to pull myself away, not knowing how to break the gaze of a final look at something that felt so important. I abandoned that room only when the pain forced me to. I tried to gather myself in the hallway, through the staircase and the courtyard, but each hurt me more as I saw them for the last time. As I climbed into the back of the car, my parents asked me what I’d been doing up there. I tried to hide my wet eyes and told them I’d just been saying goodbye to my old room. I did the same thing as I departed the low house against the park a year later. I’ve done it everywhere I’ve lived since.
Suffer
I wouldn’t have thought that it would be her who would be the first to suffer. Of everyone whose name and face I had in my brain, I would have been less surprised at anyone. We all felt the illness, its imprint against our movements, its pressure resting on the threads of our lives stretched taught. We can feel its intangible eerie presence, hanging just where we can’t quite see it. We understand that it’s serious. There’s no longer a shrug in a casual meeting, since deemed illegal. There’s no more bluntly decapitating shock in the office kitchen as civilian employees tell of hushed word from friends in medicine. It’s a shame the swimming pools will have to close, but at least we’ll have somewhere large and tiled to store the surging, system-crippling influx of dead bodies. There’s no one left in the office kitchen to realise just how real this is.
But largely, the majority of us are not suffering. It is inconvenience and it is detriment, but not loss. Not beyond a plane ticket or a birthday party. You retain your shelter, your breath, your loved, and your life. The radiation level misfortune most of us are handed is either a product of the faceless population’s suffering, or its attempted prevention. We know it sucks, but it also frequently sucks to be alive, and yet most of us want to continue living. No one wants to die from a news story. Your life is the last thing that the world can rip from you, and yes, if perhaps not the absolute worst then it’s definitely the loss that harbors the most raw terror. There are other things here to lose at the feet of this new chaos. If your adult life is a long game of chess, then right now you’re playing on a fold-up table in the back of a fishing boat. Not realising quite how far out you’re drifting, or just how dark the swelling water has grown. As the wind squares up to spit and pummel, most of us will be lucky to keep all the pieces in the boat, let alone on the board. A few will have enough spared to maintain their strategy, a few will have so little material left unspilled that they’ll be forced to dive overboard after their pawns. Like any distribution, this storm will leave most of us somewhere in between. But even that can mean a person losing all of their defenses.
Flawed Shape
How old were you the first time you realised that you were ugly? Not debilitatingly so, obviously, or else the answer would be pretty much immediately, but at what age did you accept that you weren’t on the right side of what you thought?
I can’t remember exactly when, but in a teenage minute one day it just fell into place. My awareness of myself shifted like a shadow walking towards a streetlight, drifting long behind me until I passed under the bulb’s honest light, and my outline sways sharply forward to confront me. Growing into a looming extension forewarning of my shape. I had, for a long time, looked at my reflection with such familiarity that it just felt right. Nice enough. The face that had informed my standard of what normal faces look like. The blueprint and the mould of my understanding. The bar by which I couldn’t help but judge. The nose and cheeks, caught in a darkened window, were always the old ones I knew. The eyes and lips glimpsed in a smudgy mirror were in exactly the right places, the places they’d been since I was old enough to understand that the person in the reflection was me. When I ask a shiny surface for a face, this one is its default. I guess it’s easy to go a good number of years, even while seeing plenty of separate faces in all different settings and manipulations, without stopping to consider that this core assumption left over from chubbier times, one that your world experience has long since outgrown the reasoning of, might not be as reliable as you left it alone to be. A lifelong theme; the way our own singular perspective can trip up our judgement. The subtle judgements that our flawed human minds make without us even realising. Unseen foundations of our thinking conjured from a unique gallery of experiences, through the emotionally rusted plumbing of our logic.
It’s a long journey to this realisation. The survival selfishness of early childhood gets rounded off and gradually shrinks as the first dozen laps of life are stumbled. We figure out that shockingly, others can see us back with their eyes, just like we see them with ours. We realise that, woah, the wants in our fingers are not the only ones in existence, just the only ones we can feel. You grow to understand that all the other humans around you also feel hungry at lunch, have a favourite colour, wake up shaken from scary dreams, wonder curiously about the unknown, and enjoy feeling happy in simple ways. It becomes easier to learn how to share, and later even drastically to put others’ needs ahead of our own. This all happened across my starter years, like everyone else. But where is the part where I find a second to realise that I only liked my face because it was mine? A terrifying discovery, the unearthing of a granite-hard truth alongside a distant, mortifying ignorance. A hard slam.
And we’ll never stop taking those slams. We only find them new as our fabric unfurls, untangling the threads and laughing off naiveties. I just hadn’t learnt to laugh at them yet. In many ways I still am. I continue to re-realise how dumb even the things that truly matter the most often turn out to be. It’s deceptively difficult to be feeling out in the dark for so much about the way life is, so dizzy you don’t even understand that’s what you’re doing. And it’s even harder to appreciate how truly funny the situation is while it’s happening. That remains a truth to continue wrestling with even in the adult times of the front. When you’re peering down the biting edge of a today, wrenching and flailing, it stares back an answerless and immovable silence that wails into your cavities. And yet, it’s almost impossible not to crack a smirk at the dissipating chunks of those today’s already overcome, with their bitter teeth filed down in the disarming lenience of memory.
So I look into the glass pane of the door as it drags itself shut, slowly sealing off a depth of hallway from the hanging sail of shade that skims this edge of the courtyard between lessons. I watch myself pivot into its frame and the usual circuitry doesn’t seem to fire up. As automatic as the pangs of self-consciousness, the instant evaluation runs without asking and comes back warped. The slight twist in the gut that follows is not unknown. Without yet understanding that unrecognised self-standard, informed by an unfelt bedrock-level bias that I’m unknowingly on the verge of blowing to pieces, I still know that some days I look strange, I look bad, I look upsetting. And then all at once, I look so much like myself that I cease to recognize the reflection at all. We change by the minute.
Questions For The Wall
What will others think? How is their thing so good? How can my things compare? Are my things as good as I need them to be? How can I compete? Why do I want to make things a competition? Why do I need approval? Why do I want to be recognised? Why is that a dream even though a lot of what it entails is off-putting? When will I be satisfied? Will I ever be satisfied? Why do I want attention when I find the deeper happiness when no one is watching? Is it only a short overwhelming rush? Who do I really want to impress? Whose opinions truly matter to me? How can I overcome the context? Why do I want to play for people? What’s changed since the days I was happy playing just for myself? How far away is the place where I just simply enjoy playing with the other musicians? Why do I let the world make me feel so small? Why can’t I be happy being simple and small? Why can’t I enjoy the fact that no one cares? Why is that not so sweet in itself? Is the only version of this life that can matter to me mine? Can I only ever live through my own eyes? Is my small patch of people and places big enough for me to be content? Could I expand it for myself without worrying about who else will see? Why do I want to be seen through eyes I can’t see through myself? How can I let go of wanting to do things for the attention of others? How can I be content doing my things for my own enjoyment? Running my own agenda and doing things for the people I know, not the faceless mass that I don’t? Why do I compare myself to people I don’t know? Why do I let comparisons strangle? Why can’t I take joy and not intimidation from the things that move me? How can I fuel myself on the things I love and not be held back by them? How can I forget the things that I don’t love and not feel that I have spent my time cursing? Why do I feel that I don’t shape up? Why do I feel it’s unfair when I don’t feel that others shape up to me? Why do I want the things other people have and feel slighted that I don’t have them? Isn’t the entire reason I love this that it isn’t any kind of competition?
At The Edge Of The Orchard
So we’re under the apple tree, the three of us. Among the curling trunks of the orchard’s shallow end. Behind them, the dark submerging density. And behind me, a sparse peppering, quickly breathing out into open field. Light drips through the leaf lattice above. Faces I knew from different sides of the same place, gathered mysteriously without much of a thought behind why. Unplanned, this is a real talk. Why are we so different? It seems that we’re all feeling that we aren’t. J was part of a friend group that accepted me when I showed up here, not knowing anyone after moving out to the edges of this new tree line. I consider him, after much deliberation, my best friend. He stands across from me but doesn’t keep still, moving his whole body around in expression as he talks, the way someone older speaks with their hands. F is someone I met threading early mornings in the sleepy square waiting rooms with thin attendance. Both unsure if we wanted to be there, we became unlabelled friends making the best of it. She sits on the bark where the tree bows and forks out shallowly, forming curving bridges, or in this case benches, of sturdy branch. We talk in the shade as a warm afternoon is passing.
Without us noticing, our nervous conversation gradually lifts out from the static it had been swimming in. The other sounds carried themselves back inside. We stay caught up enough to miss how far our honesty now sings. Shielded by the leaves and nothing else. Things I have wanted to say in all the little times, only just finding the words to translate the dumb language of glows and winds you feel under your skin. Their cathartic rush clutches me and it all dilates. Our disengaged peripherals fail to warn us of how bare we have become, how openly we are now exposing and mixing our vulnerabilities.
A cloud catches the sun and the light softens for a minute, before silently moving on. As it drifts away the shards of sun kaleidoscope through the tree’s canopy, searching for their resting glow.
Each of us has said some things we can’t take back, in this rare honesty we have coaxed from each other. We would deny it all in any other moment, but in this one we have each relinquished ourselves. It was real and it was dangerous and it was electric. Under the gentle dancing branches on a low warm wind, the only sound among soft green serenity was the urgent rumble of our pounding hearts. My blood is filled with beautiful panic at what I’m saying. I fizz and swim in what I hear back. And now I think I’ve told them every truth I had buried in me. Breathe. I had truly believed that some of these secret wonders I would hold onto forever. That at eleven years old I already had things I would take to my grave. And now I had none. Another deep breath. And then F spoke, and I sharply discovered I had more.
This wasn’t anything I’d sworn to keep to myself, this was something I had never even known. Her words cut into me and I began to sink and deflate. F had something she’d left until the end, and in the mist of all we’d said, she felt our galvanized trust anchored enough to support it. She wants to know what it’s like to be kissed. A new secret echoes in me. Something incredibly deep gets caught on these words and is yanked up from the depths of my subconscious. This thing that sat blurry and mushy underneath me is violently pulled into unflattering focus. I suck in a shallow breath. Her eyes nervously flick in every direction. Except for J’s, or mine.
Today I’m Made Of Clay
Today I’m made of clay. I look just like myself in the office bathroom mirror, or the reflection of a bus stop pane as I pedal and gasp through the street. I am a very convincing clay model of me. You can only tell when I catch the right light. Sloppy eyelids and a posture that doesn’t quite hold its shape. As I start to sink in the heat, the carefully sculpted ridges across my brain sweat and slide into each other. Synapses recline into easier shapes, coming wetly unstuck from the slouching muddy mass of melting grey matter. To make the thoughts work I have to reach in and mush the neural pathways back together with dripping hands. The excess squelches through, between my clammy fingers and under earthy nails. I can’t stop adjusting my nose. It will soon fall off of my face with a messy slap, simultaneously puncturing its shape and ruining the functional office carpet. It’s been fed too much liquid from the seeping murk drip behind my caked eyeballs, and now the base is flooded. It will droop and then the bonds will go stringy and break. The snap will recoil through my malleable putty skull, and both molded eyes will likely slip from their sagging, lubricated sockets to embed their dull grey stain forcefully into the carpet’s fiber. I am now so workable that my attempts to repair my progressing deformities just meld into the goop. I must be sent to the kiln. A deteriorating sculpture should not have an office job. But even if I were to be fired immediately, what monstrous form would I take? A deflated moaning tar man. A viscous soft-serve toothpaste body. A freeze frame of a spilling shape. A statue of something unrecognisable.
I must not be sent to the oven, but back into the ground.
Quit Vision 