Oh, here where cold meets hot, wet meets dry, stillness of the sand by the drumming of the surf
To throw yourself into the wave and unknown and return again and again to the ever-shiftingsame secure shore.
Color still vivid as Eden’s first hues riot against white sand blue sky and reddened skin.
Helios’ last true follower, peaceful in still worship amongst raucous beach revelry offering body as sacrifice to the sun god.
Stress burns away, purifying: a chaotic soul at peace.
I recently found back something I thought lost for ten years – a collection of poems from my youth, paper copies of my earliest work, when ideas and imagination went merrily unchecked, until at some point they were fewer and fewer between. My brother had scrapped my ancient computer for me, and drilled holes through all the floppy discs to ensure that nothing could be found.
When my love died and I moved, this had been carelessly thrown into the bottom of a box of assorted old but necessary papers, taxes and the like. I was devastated thinking this had been lost.
Sharing it, as a way of rekindling creativity.
My dearest Squish;
Eight fucking years. Hell, baby, I thought I wasn’t going to get to 8 hours, 8 days, 8 weeks without you. I know you come around sometimes. Thanks. It does keep me going at times, when I need that little reminder that it wasn’t all in my head, and what we had was real.
There are days when people tell me stories that I have to shake myself and go “damn, I was there”. There are other days where every little detail comes flooding in, and if I’m not in a situation that calls for calm (and sometimes when I am) will burst into delighted laughter of a remembrance, or tears that you are not there to share things with.
There are the purely wild “Jaymerizms”:
There are lessons that you taught me that I do my best to have learned, some days better than others:
There are moments in these past 8 years I wished I could’ve shared with you; there are people I would have loved you to meet; there was music to play (even new Stevie and Fleetwood!) and times that I could’ve have used that ultra-confident FUUUCK that to cheer me up and boost my confidence.
See, the biggest thing that you taught me was that life can be enjoyed on your own terms quite happily. That’s the trick of not being a “sheeple”… march to your own drum, off-beat, singing quietly and off-tune or loudly and on; listen to people who need listening to; give love to people who need a little love, but if they don’t give it back, don’t let them suck you dry; go outside with flare, because in a world of caterpillars it takes balls to be a butterfly; if people think you’re just a moth and not a butterfly, fuck it, you still have wings.
And those of us in the know, well, we all have a little piece of you inside of us. When we are together, we laugh a little harder and love a little fiercer, because we know that every moment we have with each other could be the last, so at least for that moment we live out loud.
I miss you, babe. You had the stinkiest earlobes…
Love,
Your Smoochie
I hear you there in the dark spaces, screaming of what you would do if let out of the carefully compartmentalized corners I have placed you in. You raged loose at the world threatening that if you could not have all things beautiful than no one could, oh the hateful things I have heard you whisper for hours upon days as l forced you away from those that you might hurt with your bile and fury and self-immolation the anti-phoenix consuming yourself in a thing of horror; perpetual death.
Every year, the hate/grief surges forward. Logic and culture dictate that you should be resolved, completed, distastefully acknowledged and then swept away. “Move on, just move on”, is the well-intentioned mantra. “Forgive and Forget.”
Forget? If I could but disentangle all the living horror wrapped around the pure memories of love/grief I would. I would swallow bottles of pills and undergo surgery if I could forget.
Forgive? FORGIVE? Forgive the self-centric and narcissistic? Forgive the incompetent and idiots? The blind-siding hatemongers?
And cancer. I fucking hate cancer. I hate that I did my best and it simply wasn’t good enough; I hate there was no miracle drug or standard treatment worth taking; I hated that it took my love away quicker than I had found him.
Stretching along the back boundary of the family farm was the bush, a woodlot of mixed trees and wildlife. Widthwise, it wasn’t a long distance until you hit the highway, but lengthwise, one could imagine being in a forest.
It had been an unseasonably mild winter with more rain than snow, though still enough to make getting around difficult on foot. Saturday, my father mentioned over dinner that when he had gone back there, things were frozen flatly, the trees keeping the worst of the snow out.
The next afternoon I slipped out of the house after lunch with my brother’s old hockey skates. While I did love to skate, it only happened perhaps once a year with school, and my hand-me-down leather skates were not much in the way of support, either for my ankles or self-esteem.
I followed the path of the tractor tires through the field, alert for fence posts jutting out. The sun shone brightly blinding off ice crusted snowy fields. At last I arrived to the spot where my father had been.
I had hoped for a small area that I could just skate around a bit. What I had not imagined that within the cool silence of boughs heavy with snow that the entire bush was frozen over, it’s surface as pristine as any zamboni cleaned rink. Some areas closer to the trees were white and brittle, a thin veneer hiding hollows beneath, but the other parts were dark and solid. Even should I break through, the deepest would be to my knee (the logic of youth not accounting for the need to slog back to the house in the cold).
The only sounds in the bush that day were the echo of my skates, and the occasional chirping of disturbed sparrows and squawking jays. Staying to the centre of the lengthwise path, I could imagine countless stories of Snow Witch queens, and fairy tale forests. I glided from spot to spot, the occasional push of a skate enough to carry me slowly through the trees, where only a few sparkling flakes floated freely around me, like being in a snow globe.
I carried a stick, to wield against imaginary foes (as well as to test any suspicious spots that might break beneath me), and my skates and imagination carried me through the afternoon down and up the length of the land until at last I had to leave my icy kingdom and return home.
It never froze over quite like that again. Even by the next weekend the forest floor was drifted over, impassable by skates. Sometimes in winter my warmest memory is that cold day, silence sliced by booted blade against ice, a moment of joy gliding over the past.
I could hear the pain in my father’s quiet “oh” as I truthfully explained to him that I did not have any happy memories of growing up on the farm. I do have one or two fuzzy memories that are happy, but they all involve being away from the farm: a sleep over at a cousin’s; going for a haircut; the one time I rode my bike to a friend’s house.
These fuzzy memories usually involve a much sharper memory: going to my cousin’s, since my mother is in the nuthouse; being screamed at by mother for ‘saying things’ to the hairdresser…like I hoped to go to university one day, and get out of town; being forbidden from ever riding my bike further than the library in town. Nice clear images to cherish forever.
I can tell you the mean thing that every teacher I had did ever did or said to me. Mrs. Hooftman’s split grade 2/3 class – on movie day, getting grabbed by my ear, dragged out into the hall and smacked into the wall for the first movie; getting put in the corner for the 2nd movie, and finally being allowed to take my seat for a short health film. My crime against humanity was flicking a spitball off my desk that someone else had just fired at me, and Paula M. freaking right out. The fact that there were already other spitballs clinging to me didn’t serve as a defense but further proof of my transgressions to a teacher who was on health leave, when she shook another child so violently, and threw in him into a desk that he ended up with a concussion.
There were even a few teachers not even my teachers who got into it – Mr. Reid the Special Ed teacher, slamming me into the wall at recess and threatening to ‘whup me’ if he ever heard me say ‘that word’ again. Then I had to apologize to his student. The word was ‘retard’; it wasn’t me, but Craig K. who said it; and I still didn’t know what it meant for another week. Mr. Fisher, holding me up by the throat for not having gone to his classroom to get assigned lines after recess, for having thrown snow – not a snowball, just loose fluffy snow. I could see other teachers watching – Mr Stewart, Mr Farnell and Miss McKinnon, but not until Mr. Cober the vice-principal came by did I get put down. And I got double the lines.
That was a grade school. I couldn’t wait until I got to high school.
Grade school was purgatory compared to high school. I did make one life-long friend there, my opposite. We decided she was the pessimistic optimist (life sucks now, ergo can only get better), whilst I was the optimistic pessimistic (you think now is better, it’s going to get worse, ergo enjoy it now).
It was then that I formulated first my dream: move away from this horrible place, go to the city, find people like you, and live happily ever after.
Experiments in faithful Christian formation
Living the best life, one fabulous thing at a time
