sandpaper skin

this is about a friend. the older i get the more i understand that friendship is hard. being a good friend, saying the right thing. you have to learn how to be yourself, define yourself by other people. standing in front of the chalkboard in elementary school, your shoulders pushed back and tracing collections of chalk dust on your scapulas, your hips pushed back into the ledge and your palms sweaty. not everyone can be a good friend all the time.
monica, she stands up at the chalkboard and she can’t get over it. she can’t see past the smoke and ash. my friend, she’s tiny bird bones and sugar cubes, she’s breakable. but she’s a liar, and she’s destructive. the words that come out of her mouth, i take them with salt and pretend that I’m okay even if I’m not.
but i did it. i pushed through walls that were bricked up and violent. waded through thick, dark mud that clung to my legs and threatened to pull me down, pull me down through a curtain of golden wool strung between dark green trees in a wood that is blackened and smoky, into a place of permanent night where tea cups fall like precipitation, smashing their tiny china bones in crusty bird's nests and the hollow places in trees and lay scattered jagged and delicate through the dewy grass.
why can't she, why can't she stop walk walk walking through that dirty sticky mud, leave a trail of selfish though our lives, glass and pure white sand, sickening pink champagne spilling over the walls and trickling in puddles and pools on the ground. you can't do that, you can't do that to people you like, you need to get a grip, grope, grasp on consequences, push all of those heavy laden cartons and boxes tied with string into an old baby carriage, and push push that baby carriage down a hill. let it go, let go and lick honeyed waxy candies from your pockets and stop taking out your tragedy on your friends.
i wish she would be a graceful loser. I wish she hadn’t gotten caught up in some sort of cycle of personal tragedy. I think that I don’t know how to be a good friend to her.
monica, she’s beautiful. and when she wants something she gets it. monica digs herself into everyone’s arms, leaving lasting indentations in the skin. people don’t forget monica, she doesn’t let them. she presses herself against them, asks questions and gets involved. she is everyone’s friend, she works so hard, she works herself so hard..
when i look at her i see her sandpaper skin: thin and vulnerable, her brittle bones but also her bold questions and focused eyes – she doesn’t look away, she never looks away. but she doesn’t look brave, she looks lost.
monica and i, we have had our battles. i don’t know how to feel, i don’t want to feel sorry for her anymore. her desperate eyes and her pretty china doll mouth. i don’t know if i want the responsibility of being close to her. her fragileness, her uncertainty, they hurt me too because I say things, my wavering voice and my own uncertainty and they smash into her and I don’t even know.

she knows what she doesn’t want to keep, but past that – after leaping from the third cement step all the way down to the sidewalk, ankles curving to steady the foot, she had landed, brittle bones intact – she doesn’t know what to do.

visible blue veins

her house is quiet. quiet with a chance of stepping on eggshells, tiny shards of white shell ground into the plushy suburb carpet. I can feel the tension coursing through her veins, as she pads up the stairs to discuss tonight’s plans with her mother. the first time I saw her mother I was surprised. the way hannah talks about her I expected a bossy woman with big shoulders and arms, ruddy skin. she hasn’t talked to her own mother in two years, she hasn’t talked to her sister in three. but hannah's mother is small, with a wilted kind of posture, smudged blue eyeliner and wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, a crinkly smile. she is soft with visible blue veins running up and down her neck and wrists.
when we sit in class I can feel the row of lecture seats pulse with the nervous bounce of hannah's leg. she constantly shakes her right leg. I’ve taken to pushing my hand into the top of her knee when I see her doing this. her face flushes and she takes a pause in what she’s saying, and stops.

paperback.

when his hands fumbled, i asked him if it was his first time. he said it was. somewhere in there i became the expert. after i watched each of the stripes on my flannel sheets peel off and squiggle along the hardwood floor, i thought about her decision. i was never one for waiting. i was never one for waiting for someone else to decide. somewhere in there i became the passive. i never would have thought. i watched the leaves on my curtains flutter in the wind, tear themselves from textiles and fall into piles against the woodwork. i type out these assignments with my mind on automatic, i try to eat a few meals everyday at the appropriate intervals but it's so hard to stomach anything these days. i watch the yellow light bulbs unscrew themselves and shatter in lemony glass shards, sending sparks through the clothes on my floor. somewhere in there i became that girl, laughing and twisting and shrugging it off. i never would have thought.

northshore.

maybe my heart beat's connected to this thing, no i'm not ready for a downtown trash collection. somewhere inbetween my mouth talk talking, flexible jawlines and dry throats, i stopped telling the truth over there. i'm not used to that, compulsive lies, i used to be impressive, he used to be impressed by me but that doesn't work anymore, i need to be more, i know you feel it too. sliding into a desk where my palms can sweat on the tabletop, leave liquid handprints before i need to leave, swift down a hallway, there's no air down there, no air down there in the basement. i've created a monster (eyes focused like a microscope) cause now i've got these shadows following me, i'm all too accountable. you know me, fifty shades of grey and i'll pull you under, every facet of my life, glass jars on every surface. did you really think it wouldn't be that bad? turn me into some kind of angry nomad again, you're all too accountable. i don't want to think like this, in lies and exaggerations, but he said, he said think of the moment when you are most serene. i laughed because i don't think i've ever been serene. jittery on three cups of chai tea, sweat on the backs of my thighs, spontaneous tears that freeze on face, no, i've never been serene. and i'll probably keep on lying, i'm sorry, i'll probably keep on lying until i feel like i impress him again.

mason jars of sea salt.

i did it. i pushed through walls that were bricked up and violent. waded through thick, dark mud that clung to my legs and threatened to pull me down, pull me down through a curtain of woven gold wool strung between dark green trees in a wood that is blackened and smoky, into a place of permanent night and where tea cups fall as precipitation, smashing their tiny china bones in crusty bird's nests and the hollow places in trees and scattered jagged and delicate through the dewy grass.
why can't you, why can't you stop walk walk walking through that dirty sticky mud, leave a trail of selfish though our lives and loves of lapis lazuli, glass and pure white sand, sickening pink champagne spilling over the walls and trickling in puddles and pools on the ground. you can't do that, you can't do that to people you like, you need to get a grip, grope, grasp on consequences, push all of those heavy laden cartons and boxes tied with string into an old baby carriage, pull on some skeleton keys for clothing, and push push that baby carriage down a hill. let it go, let go and licked honeyed waxy candies from your pockets and stop stop sending envelopes of serpentine sentiments to your friends. ride your bicycle and tie your hair into knots and take a step back, take a kilometre back, take a couple of steps back before you've discovered that hole in the wool of your grey pockets.

cloves and cypress

she thinks about hips
the hips of women
she arches her back
pushes against the sheets
flexed feet, sweat-covered breasts.
there's something about waiting
maybe, that can change your mind
when you don't mean to.
she thinks about hips,
the hips of women.

that body of yours, that i leave all alone (ex 4)

two people come out of a building. she's upset, her posture curled. she's trying to protect herself. the fingers on her right hand are circled around her left wrist. her eyebrows are pointing down, her mouth is set in a straight line and she's looking at the ground. he's talking, moving his eyebrows too much, shrugging shoulders. they are in the middle of something. as they walk down the street you can tell that he's saying something important. she holds her left wrist, her elbows jutting against her waist, her messenger bag hitting her hip. his hands are in the air, the steps he is taking are far apart. a man with a stroller comes down the street and she moves to right and he follows behind her single file. when the stroller is past them she keeps the same pace, walking with her shoulders hunched, and he has to quicken his pace for two steps to catch up. but his rhythm hasn't actually changed, he is still talking and moving his hands.
this is the problem with young people. they fall in love and make plans with each other but they are supposed to be selfish. she is supposed to go to graduate school for biochemics, he is supposed to move across the country for an architecture internship. but still his hands are moving and her mouth is closed in a thin straight line and their hearts are both beating a little quicker. they walk down the street trying to find a place in the sidewalk where they can both have what they want. the sun catches on her hair, the wind presses his t-shirt to the muscles in his chest.

young lovers with their legs tied up in knots

there's not a lot i wouldn't do. watch her tiptoe through the hallways, rustling fabrics and knocking against woodwork while hiding candy-coloured easter eggs. rest my elbows on the counter while i lean against the bar and watch her move and twirl with her friends, faces dewy and hair stuck with sweat. i know there was this one time she told jella that she didn't want to go to prince edward island with me. said if she wanted to sit in a wood-paneled shit hole she could visit her parents. there's not a lot i wouldn't have done with her. prince edward island was supposed to be a place for us transplant our roots, to push into the red soil and be those functional young adults we always knew we had to turn into. it was my plan, it was mine. she didn't have to agree, she didn't have to echo my soft ambition. lying between cool sheets in the dark, planning out our lives in whispers. now my mental road map, a highlighted migration east, seems too spacious for one. visions of myself, conversation-starved and manic, falling out the window of my pick-up truck, or driving in a sleep-deprived trance and slamming into the fiery eyes of deer. she didn't have to agree to me. i think i'll move north instead.

summer book list

- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
- The Adventures of Tintin Volumes 1-8 by Herge
- When You Are Engulfed by Flames by David Sedaris
- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabreil Marquez
- apparently 10 plays for night class by William Shakespeare
- Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
- The Handmaiden's Tale by Margaret Atwood
- Payback: debt and the shadow side of wealth by Margaret Atwood\
- The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
- I'm down: a memoir by Mishna Wolff
- Skim by Jillian Tamaki

I have already read:
- Paul Goes Fishing by Michel Rabagliati
- Dar by Erika Moen
- French Milk by Lucy Knisley
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- 1/2 Richard III by William Shakespeare
- various zines

I was a little ambitious last summer so we'll see how this goes. If you want, book club with me!

may 1

We’re still trying to escape the lion’s breath. Hot air on the back of our necks, damp and clouded. Getting away was the hard part. Coming through cold, harsh waters to emerge into the cool air, the sun rising behind silhouetted buildings and trees. It’s a solitary journey, it’s different on the inside. Building a new life, moving into a clapboard house on the escarpment. The house needed a new life too. Fresh paint, ripping up carpet to reveal dusty curving hardwood floors, scraping the dirt off of grey windowsills. My mother standing over the sink, eating a tuna fish sandwich, paint flecked sweatpants. The marks of progress. Pictures of our faces put in glass frames on the wall, our old furniture settling into new corners. Fog clinging around the house, I always think of that time in terms of mornings. Walking hunched and lonely to school, cars growling by while I walked steadily through dark grey mist, footsteps on wet pavement, hands in my pockets. I always forgot gloves. That was when dinnertime forgot it’s name, eating meals after ten o’clock, eating frozen food. Nothing like in my childhood of homemade, wholesome family time. Mashed potatoes, pork tenderloin, corn on the cob. My mother moved up steadily, from minimum waged part-time jobs with managers ten years younger than she was, to better work environments and staggered hours, to better bosses and steady hours. The work clothes she hated, pin-striped pants and turtle necks, cardigans and trousers. I would make dinner so that it was ready the moment she walked in the door. But the hot wind lingers and blows through cracks and crevices in the wall. Overturned lamps, broken-down stovetops and leaky eaves troughs.

lessons in productivity no. 1

this is a writing blog. but i feel the need to post anything that i've done lately in order to feel productive. here is something i made for my friend medina for her birthday:
the original picture: post-absinthe one night, june 2008



the card: medina's twenty-first birthday, may 2009

slice is my vice

you should not seek solace in craisins. while it might be the sweetest way to eat a cranberry, craisins are not comfort food. when someone asks you how your day was, replying that you drowned your sorrows with a bag full of craisins does not conjure up the same sympathy that admitting that you lost yourself in a tub of ben and jerry’s does. it only makes you seem like you have a problem.

character sketch.

Audrey is this cool punk rocker self righteous feminist woman, who has tattoos all over her biceps and is an active activist, she sits at bake sale tables and sells her free trade brownies just after her advocacy meeting. At least she used to, at twenty-nine it’s a little hard to be the disenfranchised youth. She stands and sways to heavy grungy angry girl music, female Kurt Cobains, male Ani Difrancos, gender-fucking performance artists, she stands on the hardwood and sways and moves and bucks her hips and wants to fight the power, shove fists in the air. but she’s twenty-nine now and they expect her to dress professionally at the work place, but her tattoos peek out and give away her true identity. She is a children’s librarian. She reads these books to little kids and she can see traditional gender roles in these harmless little story books, she sees sexism and racism and heteronormativity but she can’t fight the power here, surrounded by runny noses and grubby hands and protective parents. Why don’t parents want to protect against the most harmful of lies? Women can drive tractors, that’s a given now in any case. Why can’t a man wear a purse or knit or make babies? Opening the minds of seven year olds. She goes home buys concert tickets online and buys some kitchen appliance off of her friends wedding registry because she’s getting married and moving on and Audrey isn’t. Audrey wants to go back to school so she can be one of the thinkers and doers, the movers and shakers.

fragment 2.

Will didn’t know what he was going to do for money this year, of course he wanted a job in an art store but all art students want that, instead he’d just avoid the cliché and disappointment and find a simpler job. He got a job in a photocopy place on campus, assisting people with their copy needs. He did alright, he photocopied until his fingertips were black and left fingerprints all over his drawings when he went home that night. He worked with some awesome people, these masculine fresh-faced bearded guys, Josh and Luke who both wore flannel shirts and dark brown leather boots and knew how to survive in a forest. Sweat and facial hair, tough denim and pencil scrawled notebooks. Thinkers and doers, active and controlled. Will slung his messenger bag over his shoulders and wanted to be more like them. They’d never try to be like anyone else. He’d shrug his way home into his dark apartment, listen to Dale’s thumping heartbeat music and sit, his abdomen pressed to the edge of the table and his forearms putting pressure down. Why didn’t he have more to say? Preoccupation and slight of hand, ADHD and silver fish, flitting through the legs of his chair and the legs of the drafting table and through his legs, swim over to the girl in the apartment across from his, through her legs and the iron bars of her bed.

unpacked

They had just moved into together. It was so quick, a lightning speed shuffle from one part of town to another. It wasn’t him that felt too quick, it was these walls and door frames and electrical outlets. She had just pulled the plug of her alarm clock from her sea-glass blue walls and she was pulling it into this new pale wall and setting it on a jade coloured bedside table. It was the speed, the dangerous acceleration of movement of cardboard boxes and Rubbermaid containers full of winter coats. Nick had asked her when she wanted to move and she had said “Saturday, I think I can be ready for Saturday.” She had tucked her clothes into suitcases, her books into boxes, stuffed blankets into her old duffel bag. Pulled the sticky-tac from the backs of posters and pictures, laying them flat in an oversized art store bag. She had neatly and casually pushed her life into boxes and helped Nick make the trips back and forth to the new apartment. At first her stuff had sat in a stack in the middle of the living room floor. She had burst through one cardboard box to retrieve dishes so they could have glasses of water with their pizza on Saturday night. She was letting it sink in, the beige walls, the hardwood floors, the pale blue cupboards with peeling paint in the kitchen. The scuzzy bathroom floor that she’d have to avoid for a while, until there was time to fix it. It was exciting and stressful simultaneously, anticipation over their first apartment and picturing her and Nick installing shelves together or cooking dinner or lying on the couch. Also picturing all the work it takes to settle, to feel like the walls and floors are yours and not some strange piece of public property to lean against. To feel a degree of ownership and belonging, these are my plates in the cupboards, my toothbrush on the sink. The slow process of gradual work: hanging up picture frames, needing a can opener, the way boxes tend to slowly disintegrate as you find you need certain things until you’ve slowly unloaded the box and can crush the cardboard.
It didn’t happen this way. Instead she had left to run errands Sunday morning, to get her library books, some milk, a new laundry bin. And when she had returned Nick was installing picture frames and hooks, had already put all of her books on her bookshelf, had set up the television and stereo system. All of her unopened boxes were stacked neatly against the wall to conserve space, except for her boxes of books which he had opened. He smiled at her, pressing into the plaster with the drill. She shed her shoes and set her bags down and stepped over to the bookshelf. He had put her books on it for her. Her books from school were mixed with her old favourites, her cookbooks integrated with The Making of a Poem and Cultural Studies 2B03.
Throughout the day she had studied, cooked a dinner of macaroni and cheese and put the sheets on their bed, fit her clothes into the closet and dresser. Nick had transformed the apartment. He was out for a beer now with his friend and she wandered around the rooms. Every picture he had wanted to hang was securely hung from various walls, the furniture was arranged, the various shelves filled with her books or his, his graphing equipment, his drafting table pushed against the wall. The only evidence that they had just moved in was in the stacked boxes of hers that he had neglected to open. The kitchen cupboards were full, food tucked away into the pantry, the salt and pepper shakers filled and huddling on the table. In the bathroom his toothbrush lay on the sink. It was so quick, so light and easy for him to aggressively settle into this new space. It looked like he had already lived here and she was just moving in with a few things. She had wanted to take a little time, enjoy the claustrophobic clutter of unpacked suitcases and boxes, furniture without cushions.