I try on new selves on my morning walk. I’m having the best, coolest, hottest, wildest, most exhilarating summer of my life. I’m at concerts and on top of mountains and in grad school. I am invited to every party. I churn strawberry ice cream for everyone I love. I cut off all my hair, no wait, I dye it blue. I live out of a van in Manitoba! I run an extremely famous art gallery! I am obediently married! I am everlastingly single! I stretch my imagination as far as I can until it springs back, and I am jolted back to my planet, under an overcast galaxy, surrounded by barren trees, in my wretched park, in this wretched neighbourhood, with my wretched self.
I check my neighbourhood Facebook group for updates; bake sales for Gaza, a request for yogurt containers for someone’s 10 year old’s school project, complaints about unleashed dogs, someone selling a Reformation wedding dress, complaints about the complaints about the unleashed dogs. I delete Instagram, I delete Twitter, and my world grows quieter. I stop caring what people eat and where they go, and I learn that they quickly stop caring too. “Friendship is witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs,” Yanagihara wrote in A Little Life. I register the ones who remain to witness my misery, the ones who are content to let me cry on their shoulders and tell them how I feel and the next day, tell them how I feel again, even if it was the same as the day before. I don’t spend my newfound time off to get smarter; I have no delusions that I will read more of the news, or pick up my half-read Anna Karenina. I don’t do anything actually, except wait for the time to pass. I invent new ways of tracking it. Three hours since I took my vitamins. Two weeks since that conversation in his car. One week since he said he wasn’t ready. Two months since he said he was. Around me, the world moves on, and I don’t pay attention to it.
expectation / reality
Expectation: I get quality time with my dad. We talk about life, who’s sick, who’s getting married, when we think the fridge will get repaired, if I should finally maybe get a car. I stare out at the city that I was raised in, and feel some type of misplaced relief at being back here.
Reality: I space out while he talks. I think of the last time I sat in a passenger seat, dread percolating in my gut and mingling with the contents of my brunch as I looked at the driver. I think of happier times too—rolling the windows down and turning the heat up to stare at the night sky, queuing up music only to skip through it, speeding past windmills on sunny winter days, our cares left behind in the dust. I’m jerked out of my reverie; I blink and feel a rush of loathing, directed for once, at only myself. I decide that I have officially thought every thought that could ever be thought. Love is embarrassing!
notes from 03/2024
here is an alternate reality. a fantasy. in this parallel universe, i am exactly the same, and you aren’t afraid to be with me. this is a reality in which you welcome the challenge of making it work because the alternative is a prospect too awful to bear. you ask me to be with you, and i say yes, i mean obviously. as we wade through the murky waters of our twenties, we tug on this thread that now connects us, tentatively testing its tension, finding comfort in its elasticity. i call you while unpacking my groceries, you call me while doing your laundry, and life stretches out before us like an open road with no end, a conversation without a conclusion, a summer day that never sees a sunset. and one day, we fuck off to quebec. in this reality, the world still sucks, but i cling to the one thing that doesn’t. this is a made up, daydreamed up reality of long drives and inside jokes, whispered secrets and fierce promises and all the things i had the audacity to hope for before i was put in my place.
excision
The act of meeting someone feels like a process of fissure: on one hand there is you, the you who moves through the earth, the you who has been here all along. But now there is another version of you, and you have no control over what she does and says. That version of you lives in their heads, and she will live a life entirely of her own. Their memories of you now are continually reformed and overwritten by your dual selves, coexisting in harmony sometimes, and at war others. I scour my past, thinking of friends I have lost, classmates I no longer talk to. They have faded entirely from my recollection, or so I think, until the flash of a particular shade of purple, or a comment about a TV show I haven’t watched in years unearths memories from the recesses of my brain.
These memories too, are of people frozen in time, fifteen year olds who now have careers and house plants and husbands. I am as much a product of these people, who I would hardly recognize if I ran into them on the street today, as I am the people in my life right now. This thought—that I will forever bear the indentations from long-forgotten relationships, is unbearable.
I think I should be able to excise people out of my life, because my city of ten years feels foreign to me and I look around it wondering if it was always this grotesque, and they say my smiles don’t match my eyes, but I only half-listen. I’ve been looking for my joie de vivre for a while now, and it’s nowhere to be found. I am instead surrounded by new things I don’t want—a distaste for dancing, a flossing habit, contours of myself that I used to hate but no more, a phone that doesn’t light up with morning texts—none of which can be boxed up and returned.
magpie
It’s 5 in the morning, and I am staring at my ceiling, thinking of the snow that ruined my hair and washed off my makeup the night of our first dinner, the glow of my phone late at night as we talked later that week. I have flashbacks to running flushed through a train station, the time I demanded he autograph my crown and he insisted I stay on the phone a little longer. I think of how there was no buildup, it felt like we just came into being one cold day, and winked out of existence just as quickly. But before then, there were the early days spent calling each others bluffs and holding our cards close to our chests. Funny, I can’t remember when that wariness turned to disbelief at this turn of events, but I remember wondering if it could really be this easy, remember warning myself not to get used to it. I recall my head spinning in Michigan, muffled laughter and stolen glances, the lucky dollar bill I spent on us, the wind in my coat and my fingers numb as they clung to the merry-go-round we thought was broken. I relitigate throwaway comments and careless jokes and rolled eyes and awkward pauses, and pore over conversations I’ve filed away. I perform this exercise most mornings, taking the memories I’ve hoarded like a magpie out of their boxes, polishing them even as they begin to rot from age and I can’t separate the truth from my fanciful imagination anymore. They are the most precious and wretched things I own, poisoning the present, but caressing me even in misery, reminding me that there were times I felt wonder, and that someone felt it for me too.
It wasn’t a real relationship, I insist to everyone. This distinction is childishly important to me, because I refuse to assign it any more importance than it deserves. It was just a thing. Not a relationship, ergo, not a breakup. The process of living through a not-breakup, I learn, is one of reconciliation. I have to wearily teach myself to hold two opposite truths in my hands, that someone could be as equally capable of tenderness toward me as they were of apathy. I have to accept that emotions are fluid, that affection can warp and morph into distance overnight. It is also a process of forgetting. On forgetting, Michelle Lyn King wrote — “The price of moving forward, out of the muck of heartbreak and into the realm of living, was forgetting the details of the world that we’d constructed together. We had our own language and no matter how long I lived or how many more people I loved, I would never again speak that language”. The future beckons at me, unwritten and expectant, but I can’t bear to look at it in the eye; I feel bereft and miserable.
notes from 04/2024
the sun is shining today. there’s a warm breeze in my hair and i am stirring awake to the sounds and smells of spring. i observe my heartbreak renew as anger, my anger reincarnate as grief, my grief wither away to allow for something new to bloom: not quite the amnesia I desperately wanted, but my streets look more beautiful to me every day. your name is occasionally a foghorn blaring without warning at dawn, but mostly a murmur that is drowned out by the routine of my day. a constant refrain in my head, nevertheless: where are you right now, i’m lonely, i wish you could see this cake I made, what are you doing, who do you drive around in your car, i’m not afraid of my apartment anymore, i’m going out again just like you said i would, and guess what, i finally watched that movie, and you know, i just realized it’s been six, ten, seventeen months since that night, and i think i’ve actually forgotten your face. and by the way i was just wondering, do you also spend your days feeling weird but also that this was probably for the best anyway and in spite of that reminisce about it in those liminal moments before sleep claims you and when you wake up to a world without me