small cow

I want to spend time with you, just be with you, but where are you?

Tearing up, morning sun spotted leaves, wind rustling, green rustling, sky sojourn.

So rarely do I write a joyful post on here, so rarely do I subject myself to a continuation of my own happiness, whether it be fragile, tormenting, or bursting, that I feel a gratitude, a forgotten relief, to cement these words.

I can believe it can continue, that I can continue.

I will oblige to an unceremonial departure. Familiar bike rides, the rustling of forests, budgie songs—these things I will miss. Time, I will always miss. The forgetting of expectations, late morning beginnings.

I was wrong to say, last summer, that there was nothing in this city left for me. I believed and now I retreat. We are leaving this place, but we grow tired for it.

What we think are the least serious changes, can often be the hardest. Changes come quickly, but the changed do not change so soon.

There is a death that festers in the unworded.

I consider cutting my hair four times, watch my face contort in tears and redden, punch the wall and scrape a small piece of pinky skin.

My period cramps me.

The little birds bounce across the cage and rub and peck their beaks to each other, creating the sweetest sounds.

In a repressed mood of visceral memories I google NSFW questions.

If I don’t finish The Origins of Totalitarianism I cannot leave Winnipeg.

I feel useless and I’m lonely.

That summer when the four of us would don our navy pencil skirts and reddish, brownish silk ties and conspire around the wood table in our fan-cooled basement office, at least two of us were virgins. The season was hot and mosquito-ridden, and I had just pierced my ears, one tiny diamond embedded in each lobe, often on the verge of inflammation.

C was the closest to my age, then R, then D older than all of us. I was the baby, and they called me “Gracie.” We each had our little grey locker, and in the morning some of us would just change right then and there, while the rest of us would slip into the change room. Then, we would refill our paper pouch with pins of the province (flag, owl, prairie crocus, white spruce, golden boy) and the first of us would head up the marble stairs to greet the rare visitor of the day’s first tour.

The rest of us would read, talk, have breakfast. We had two supervisors, two women who were in their womanhood, one who occupied the private office in the back and one who shared a room with us girls (although D was a woman, definitely). A, the latter supervisor, loved to hear about our lives—the gossip, the boys. I was fresh from my first of year of undergraduate in the big city, one unrequited crush and no first kiss to recount. C, beautiful, boisterous, was turning circles about this one guy—they had made out but he was flaky. I remember that he might have skateboarded, might have been lanky. We laughed a lot, raised our voices a lot. V, our other supervisor, would read quietly, and sometimes she rolled her chair to her door to say something in solidarity.

The visitors were mostly old, or families, or school children. There was one intern whom we set our eyes upon, but without much digging we discovered he was engaged. Our uniform did not do us much service, but I think we were praised regularly for being intelligent young women. We knew and understood the building and were good at pinpointing—earlier than later—what people would be interested in; we could be light-hearted and we could be serious. Once during a group tour, when an elementary student asked my why the Golden Boy wasn’t a Golden Girl, I smiled and praised her. Overall, we did our job well.

When the weather was nice we would have lunch outside on the green trimmed grass. C loved the sun and R and D had pale skin so we would settle by a tree’s half-shade. C usually changed back into her sleeveless or off-the-shoulder top with short shorts; she would lean her arms back, squint her eyes with contentment, her skin glowing warm. Most of our chats escape me now, but I remember near the end of the summer, C and I became obsessed with the way Edna Mode introduced herself in The Incredibles, and we would watch the video and repeat after her, giggling, soaking up the sun.

Afternoons were busy and languid. We tried to stay in air-conditioned areas (the ballroom and the assembly room) as much as possible, and the visitors were grateful too. As soon as we came back to the office, our burgundy vest was off and we’d gulp down water and hog one of the fans. I mean, I am unsure if the state of our bodies was always so visceral as my recollection, but I remember washing my white button downs—stiff cotton polyester, hemmed at the sleeves by A’s cousin—quite often.

So the day would pass like this and we would wait until a couple of minutes to five o’clock to slip out of our uniforms because in a previous year the girls had changed earlier in the four o’clock hour and gotten reported by a security guard. V and A didn’t care, but they also told the girls they didn’t want to aggravate anyone else, make them believe the visitor tour program was not doing its job properly.

D drove or walked home, C walked or bussed home, R bussed or got a ride home, and I got a ride or occasionally biked home. On the majority of days where my mom and I would drive back together, I sat in the passenger seat of the car and turned the channel to Classical 107 or Bluetooth connected to my Spotify. We must have often listened to hers and my dad’s favourite Chinese songs, which had become my favourite Chinese songs early on in life. After 30 to 45 minutes our suburban neighbourhood would greet us, and I would go shower, and my parents would make dinner, and we would watch Dream of the Red Chamber on the big screen. It was summer, and the sky was bright until late.

Your room faced West, like mine. Two rectangular windows, one bed, one desk, one drawer, a vertical dresser, two chairs, and a low-ceiling (really low-ceiling) storage unit in the back. You crammed those top shelves of your desk with books, books you had read and hadn’t read, spine against spine, cover on cover.

When you took off your shirt for the first time I noticed the gold chain around your neck. And I noticed, by your bed, The New American Bible on the windowsill; the crucifix beside it; the framed pineapple art above the crucifix. You told me your mother gifted you the chain on your seventeenth birthday. I looked at my own gold panther necklace and realized—my mother had gifted it to me on my seventeenth as well.

Sometimes when I would kiss your neck I would bite into your chain. It was delicate, too thin to taste metal, or the coldness of metal. It was you, that’s all.

The last time we lay in bed together (which was only, perhaps, the fourth time), we were nearly sleeping by the end, and I carefully pulled the blinds open and the sun, the bright warmth, the early evening, flooded in. I traced my fingers on the skin of your hips. It was soft, light. Paler than mine.

The first time we truly spoke, we talked about our imminent departures from Toronto. I think that day was the warmest of all days we spent with each other, sun-filled, a surprise. “I’m not here anymore.” “I’m just kidding, I’m here, don’t worry.”

Nearer the end, we hiked to the beach and raced to the waves. The wind seemed to be perpetually against us. I gave up competing, stood with my hair dancing around me, and admired you admiring the horizon. I did not take a picture—but if I could have taken one picture of our three weeks, that would have been the moment. You, the bright gray landscape, your forest green backpack, your figure—solid and easeful—…the beauty of what I saw beyond me.

Later that evening, I sat on your bed, I held a book you loved, you leaned your arms against my crossed legs. You asked me about the boundaries I had asked for; I told you I had grown fond of you. I said our friendship made me happy, and I buried myself in the nook of your shoulder.

The first time I leaned against your shoulder, the back of your sweater was covered in pine leaves of trimmed shrubs. It was sunset. I went home cold, confused. Many times did I feel that way, not during, but after. I cried, I despaired, stone-heavy on the moss yellow carpet of my room. I felt shameful and unprepared. I thought, too soon, not enough, not for me.

But you still listened. And my friends listened. And even in that one late night, when my resentment seeped into every corner of your room, and you told me you were tired, you still kissed me goodbye. And I still sobbed on the way home, but later I tried to make it better, because you had tried to make it better, and my friends reassured me I could make it better.

Now that some sort of end is approaching, I think—thank you.

To live life, to live life.

When was it, when I began to wake and slip forward into a still-to-be-lost time?

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Oh sun, sun shine, sun forward, sun lost.

Tell me how to live a life without pity.

Do you not fear, to be doing the right things wrongly?

Why do I hate myself? The indulgence. The privilege. The privilege of calling myself privileged! The falsity of my indulgence! The inability to be authentic, genuine, as other people! The fallacy of comparing myself to other people! The knowledge that soon I will be not okay! The knowledge that soon I will be okay! Not being satisfied! Feeling bitter and envious about other people! Only being happy through recognition and attention! Pathetic thinking! Pitying and pitiful.

Leave me under the blue sky, I will colour myself.

I have spent many lonely hours biking to the Harbourfront and sitting lonely by the half real water, listening to the seagull behind me wailing like a newborn child, pretending the colder wind bothers me not. Stuffing my face with a garlic shrimp rice bowl, or a small organic apple from a Koreatown fruit market, or tasteless cucumber, I supress the thought that there is something or someone waiting for me, edging closer to my periphery like some daytime star. I play it cool, I lean my legs against my bike, I write bubble letters in my notebook, those too-good, overused Yeats lines.

On a crowded Sunday afternoon an East-Asian man asks me if he can take my picture. He’s a banker, but it’s a drab job. I say yes; I position my braid on my right side and look intensely. He shows me the pictures, I’m morbidly disappointed. I look disheveled and the framing too. I grab my notebook, write down my email, and tear a sliver of paper. It’s been a few weeks, still no pictures—he had said he would Photoshop them.

For a while I sat on the water taxi dock. Then it was roped off.

There are so so many dogs by the Harbourfront. They all seem quite well-behaved. I mean, the owners too. I personally don’t mind if they don’t wear masks, as long as they’re not spitting to my face. I don’t wear a mask either. I am usually far from people enough.

One thing is that I am constantly surprised by the dearth of Harbourfront lurkers at night. By 11 PM I can usually get away with dancing to 2.5 songs without any inherently awkward encounters. Is there no better place to dream than the water? To scream? To cry? To wonder, what is beyond, what is beyond me?

Call it bullshit; I call it too.