Thoughts on Gord.

Like a lot of thirtysomething Canadian kids, Fully Completely was one of the first CDs I owned. I was 13 or so when I first listened to it. I thought Wheat Kings was the most beautiful song I'd ever heard. I kept listening to the Hip all through highschool, but somewhere in my early 20s, I developed some innate hipster superiority complex, eschewed anything sincere and patriotic, and kind of stopped following their music. Then one summer day, I got a letter from one of my best friends, who was out in Alberta planting trees for the summer. At the end of several pages of scrawl, she'd taken the time to write out one of Gord Downie's poems from Coke Machine Glow, because, she said, "I think you need to read this." I don't even remember which poem it was, but I remember that the words struck enough of a chord with me that I hunted down the companion album.

Falling in love with Gord's side projects was the start of my path back to Hip fandom. A few years after its release, as I nursed a profoundly broken heart from the confines of my Kitsilano apartment, Vancouver Divorce felt like it had been written just for me. That's the beauty of Gord's lyrics, that he could find some metaphor, turn some phrase, that somehow encompassed you, your country, your stories, your heart, all at once. I started listening to Hip records again, in spite of myself. I saw them, and Gord, live, when I could, which wasn't hard to swing, given that my best friend and her husband were the loveliest kind of obsessive fans. So obsessive, in fact, that when they finally decided what song they wanted me to sing for them as part of their wedding ceremony, they chose Every Irrelevance, a funny, moody, weird little ditty about the inconsequential moments that make up the sum of love. I wasn't sure I'd be able to translate Gord's essential strangeness into a version I could sing and play myself. I started by open-tuning my guitar, a trick I'd learned as an adolescent Joni Mitchell obsessive, and got to work arranging it. It worked out, somehow. I sat on the stage in a tiny country church as the bride's sister held up a copy of the lyrics for me, just in case, though I didn't end up needing them in front of me at all. "I can't believe you said Arse as part of our wedding ceremony," they kept telling me later. It became the stuff of legend, a chapter in our collective history.

Around that time I found myself living in Kingston, a town where serendipitous Hip sightings happen with delightful frequency. I went to see Gord Downie and the Country of Miracles at the Grand Theatre. Gord gave a shoutout to his parents, who, it turned out, were sitting right across the aisle from us. "Shit man, that's Kingston for you," my then-boyfriend whispered. I leaned into him as Gord serenaded the room and made incredible art with some magic combination of food colouring, fans, and shadow puppets on an overhead projector. It was the last good night we had together before a protracted breakup that festered over the next couple of months. I left Kingston shortly after that. I left it the way you leave a place you love too much, a place full of countless good memories that are overshadowed by one tremendously shitty one right toward the end. I'm glad I got to see Gord there before I left.

The autumn before last, my newish boyfriend told me he'd bought tickets to see the Fully Completely front to back tour that coming winter. He kept talking about it, dancing around it, till one night, sitting in front of his laptop, told me that he happened to have the seating chart up on his screen, and wouldn't you know, the seat next to his was still free. "Do you want to come with me?" he asked, and I said, "Well, yeah, of course I do." Later, we both admitted that the proposition had terrified us, just a little, because in asking, and answering, we were both acknowledging that secret (or not so secret) hope that we'd still be together that February. Isn't it funny, the things you want so much to happen, that you can't even bring yourself to say them out loud.

We went to that show, with his best friend and her partner, and when they got to Wheat Kings I leaned into him and thought back to the first time I heard it, the long line between then and now, the shows I'd been to while living in cities all over the province, the way your life ends up in a place you never could've imagined.

Tonight we're going to see the Hip again. That now-not-so-newish boyfriend and I are getting married next spring, and just last week he talked me out of including a sincere lyric from Ahead By A Century on our invitation, which is pretty rich given how my cynical post-adolescent heart once railed against such frivolity. This will be his zillionth time seeing them. It will be maybe my fourth, not counting the solo Gord shows peppered here and there. I hope it isn't the last time, but it might be. I like the idea that everyone in that audience tonight has a rambling story about their Tragically Hip fandom, just like this one. I like the idea that we'll all be there together, falling in love and having our hearts broken open, all at once, one more time.

Fortress of Solitude.

I wrote this one awhile ago, and am now working on an eventual part two, so here's part one, for clarity's sake.

It's a relief to find that relationship-related contentment has done little damage to my penchant for intense self-reflection.

August, 2015.

If you know me at all (and given the size of my readership I think it's safe to say you know me pretty well), you know how much I value the lone reed ethos. I spent the better part of the last ten years on my own in one way or another. Ten years ago I was still in Vancouver, and the love of my life (the previous five years of that life, anyway) had just broken my heart in a single telephone call from the Eastern time zone. That breakup sent me reeling for a long, long time. Putting myself together took awhile. I walked a weird and not totally unpleasant line between wearing my heart on my sleeve and building a wall around myself. I fell in and out of love several times over. I trampled and was trampled upon in nearly equal measure.

"Less martyr, more slut," my best friend advised me at one particularly sad-seeming point early on in my singlehood. I took it to heart, sometimes. Other times I wallowed in my solitude, letting the hardship of it all wash over me. It wasn't always easy, but I'm glad I did it. I learned to love being alone. I revelled in it, knowing that no matter what happened on whatever horrendous first date I was hurling myself into, I'd still get to go home to whatever wonderful, perfect hidey-hole I was currently living in (and my goodness, there have been some perfect hideouts). At the end of it all, to borrow a phrase from Sloane Crosley, you're not really single, not the way they might think, if you have yourself.

Living alone has always been my jam. I haven't had a roommate since I left Tara waving goodbye outside our Arbutus Street apartment in Vancouver in 2006. (And then there were the three ill-advised months living out of a garbage bag in Freya's guest room--"guest room" is a generous term here--in Hintonburg upon arrival in Ottawa, but that's another story.) I've treasured the time I've spent on my own, home alone, puttering around. I've gotten a lot done. I've planned yoga classes, planted gardens, baked cookies, drunk gallons of cheap wine with whoever wandered over. For a a lovely couple of years my best friend Kat was living back at home in Dundas, which turned my house into the de facto hangaround joint. Those years made me feel like I was back in highschool, my parents perpetually away for the weekend. We solved a lot of each other's problems during those evenings. We didn't need anyone else. The difference between Needing and Wanting was a big one, though. It was sometimes a scary thing, when what you want just doesn't seem to exist in anyone. It's a good thing we became so skilled at the long game.

I spent my solitary years treating dating as my hobby, and it was actually a lot of fun, even when it was absolutely fucking terrible. For every apalling first date I went on, I fell in love somewhere else, ten times over. I was always looking for love, although I didn't really expect that I'd end up at the same end point that most people seemed to. I never imagined myself with another person. Years ago I remember reading an article about Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter and their arrangement, which involved separate houses connected by some kind of a tunnel. Ah, I thought, how sensible. (It's worth noting that their relationship is now over.) My number one priority in my twenties and the early part of my thirties, was preserving my personal autonomy. Boys and men came and went. Some lasted longer than others. I never really let any of them in, though. I also maintained a comically ridiculous level of geographical distance between myself and whoever I was dating, falling in love with back road-dwelling hermits and boys in other provinces. I know, I know, I'd always say. Because I DID know. I didn't want to lose myself in a relationship again, or risk making a sacrifice for another person again. How was I to know that once I found someone who offered to make that sacrifice first, for me, WITH me, that suddenly, amazingly, letting someone in would be the only thing that made sense.

So I've spent the past few weeks getting my house ready for someone else. This has involved throwing out a lot of floral printed things, and scaling back my collection of pictures of cats dressed up in human clothing, and generally mourning the end of my lone reed days, stumbling over my past with every box I walk out to the curb. In Yes, Please, Amy Poehler tells a story about how she isn't afraid of getting older because she's learned the secret to time travel: She hides past treasures and reminders of hoped-for futures in purses and on high shelves to discover at intervals. A movie ticket stub, a bathing suit bought on a dark, difficult day for a trip next summer. And when she rediscovers these objects, she is transported forward and backward in her own life, existing simultaneously in multiple moments. You can imagine how thrilling I found this, as a professional nostalgist.

Getting ready for this perfect clever bearded weirdo to move into the house I've lived in all by myself for the past few years feels a lot like time traveling. In the process of organizing and purging and shuffling things around, I've stumbled across so many moments from along the long line of my life. An invitation to my 14th birthday party, typed on an ancient Mac and printed on neon pink paper. A photo from the Spectator of my dad playing the guitar on the roof of Jackson Square in 1981. The autographed program from the original Pantages production of Phantom Of The Opera, a gift from my much-beloved piano teacher, who was in the orchestra. I've started hiding bits of my future around in drawers and baskets, pieces I'm not ready to talk about yet, reminders of incredible things that hopefully lie ahead for us, beginnings of a story that belongs to two people instead of one. This is the first time I've ever helped clear out a boy's apartment and genuinely enjoyed doing so. This won't be the last time we pack and unpack and upend ourselves. It's terrifying, and it's wonderful, and it's life.

Greatest Lit Hits, 2015.

People often ask me for book present recommendations around this time of year, and I often respond in the same way that any self-respecting librarian would--by talking about books I've never read. (It's a really useful party trick, too.) That said, I actually DID read some wonderful books this year, so I figured I'd write them all down and offer them to y'all as you toddle (or sprint drunkenly) through your Christmas shopping.

Most of these are relatively new releases, although there are a couple of classics and midlisters in there, because I am nothing if not inclusive. Please feel free to share, dispute, or ask questions.

Fiction:

The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan. An emotional gut-punch of a short story and essay collection, written by an incredibly gifted young writer who died just days after graduating from college. Each piece is beautiful, emotional, dark, rich, and heartbreaking in its own right, and doubly so when you begin to consider the massive tragedy that this is all we'll ever read from her.

Hellgoing by Lynn Coady. Beautifully rendered short stories for the slightly depressed, morally ambiguous CanLit lover in your life, with a healthy side order of BDSM.

The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer. My favourite kind of book--the story of an intelligent and somewhat well-intentioned family as it ebbs and flows between order and chaos over a couple of generations. This one takes place against the backdrop of turmoil in the 1970s, with the Jonestown Massacre providing a strange frame of reference for the children as they come of age. Packer writes familial distress like no one else.

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. I loves me some post-apocalyptic dystopia, especially when it has an emotionally resonant heart. This novel is so wonderful and creepy, following a bunch of seemingly unconnected characters from the night a superflu hits Toronto during a performance of King Lear, through the months and years that follow. It is gorgeous and heavy and weird and amazing.

Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead. My OTHER favourite kind of book--the story of an intelligent and somewhat well-intentioned family as it gathers together in a small space for an important milestone, in this case, a daughter's wedding. The Times called this "smart and frothy," which I love. Like modern John Cheever, with happier endings.

The Maples Stories by John Updike. Speaking of Cheever, or at least Cheever-adjacent...who doesn't love tales of domestic unrest? Updike wrote this series of stories over a number of years, following the Maples from early marriage to divorce and beyond. I think Updike is at his best when he's conveying the dark ugliness that sometimes comes with intimacy, and this collection has that in spades. They also serve as a really lovely chronicle of the 20th century.

Everybody Rise by Stephanie Clifford. I LOVED this book. It follows an ambitious 26 year old woman trying to establish herself in the New York high society scene in the mid-2000s, and it manages to be somehow satirical and sincere at the same time. It's also peppered with allusions to Sondheim, Bernstein, and Broadway in general, and has one of the best covers of the year to boot.

In The Unlikely Event by Judy Blume. Based on the incredibly surreal true story of a period in the early 1950s when planes just kept crashing over Elizabeth NJ, this is Blume at her very best. A massive cast of characters, tons of intrigue and love and heartache and secret-keeping, perfect details of the 1950s that just bring it all to life. As an aside, I read this during 2 days of sicktime and it is essentially the perfect read for a cold grey day.

Non Fiction:

Death On Diamond Mountain by Scott Carney. If you like true crime and yoga in equal measure, you will love this strange and creepy story of Geshe Michael Roach, one of the most renowned Buddhist scholars in the West, and his onetime partner, and their descent into spiritual madness and murder.

Savage Harvest by Carl Hoffman. More true crime, with a side of American imperialism, indigenous art appropriation, foolish Rockefeller sons, and CANNIBALISM.

Gender Failure by Rae Spoon and Ivan E Coyote. A collection of memoir essays and song lyrics from their live shows on each writer's lifelong struggle to find a gender identity. It's so lovely and sad and funny and such an eye opening read for anyone curious about what gender looks like in a non-binary world.

Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari. A really fascinating and often hilarious dissection of contemporary dating and wooing practices that basically feels like Tom Haverford reading a sociological essay, in the best possible way.

Scandals of Classic Hollywood by Anne Helen Peterson. Chapter after chapter of gossipy, impeccably-researched stories about the great actors and actresses of the first half of the 20th century, from Mary Pickford to Bogart and Bacall to Carol Lombard and Marlon Brando. It's also fascinating as an examination of the rise of tabloid culture.

Street Gang-A History of Sesame Street by Michael Davis. I think I know enough Muppet Obsessives to know that this one will be a hit for SOMEONE on your list. The level of detail and primary sourcing in this one is just astounding. This book will make you long for your childhood.In a good way.

Women in Clothes, edited by Sheila Heti and Leanne Shapton. This book has everything, and everyone, from Jonathan Goldstein interviewing his mother about her favourite clothes to Lena Dunham talking about her best outfit to pages and pages of random women talking about the rings they wear on a daily basis. It's a beautiful book to give as a gift or keep out on a table and dip into once in awhile. Everytime I pick up my copy I discover something new. This book is the literary manifestation of getting dressed and ready to go out and meet your girlfriends somewhere, or hanging around getting ready all together, which is, I think, one of my favourite things to do. Come to think of it, if I could just do the getting ready part and then just have us all stay in and watch movies, I would be living my ideal life.

Graphica:

Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast. A harrowing and often hilarious comic book memoir by one of my favourite New Yorker cartoonists as she details the horrible experience of her parents' declines and deaths. Not for the faint of heart, or perhaps even for folks who have recently experienced a great loss, but oh so worth the risk.

Seconds by Bryan Lee O'Malley. By the author of the Scott Pilgrim series, a new graphic novel about a young woman chef trying to make a go at getting her new restaurant up and running, as it becomes increasingly clear that otherworldly forces may be at play in her new space. Lush, gorgeous illustrations that are both complex and traditionally comics-y.

Locke And Key (series) by Joe Hill. One of the creepiest and most nightmare-inducing series I've read in awhile, like illustrated Stephen King. There's murder, magic, demonic possession, and highschool angst rendered in illustrations that were often so scary I had to hide the book in another room before going to bed. In a good way.

Hawkeye: My Life As A Weapon by Matt Fraction, David Aja, and Javier Pulido. I've been getting back into some superhero comics lately, partly a welcomed side effect of cohabitating with a man who has excellent taste in comic books (truly I have found my equal). Fraction's version of Hawkeye is quick witted and intense and somehow more lighthearted than a lot of superhero stuff I've read. I mean, as lighthearted as you can get when lives hang in the balance.

Sex Criminals by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky. Okay, this series is categorically perfect. 2 star-crossed lovers (one of whom is a hot librarian, so of COURSE I love her) discover that they can both stop time when they orgasm, so they decide to rob a bank (to make money to SAVE THE LIBRARY). Obviously, mayhem ensues. There are 2 volumes out so far, and they are GREAT. (Also they are BEYOND racy, which probably isn't a surprise, and which may not be your cup of tea!) Chip Zdarsky is a national treasure.

Step Aside, Pops by Kate Beaton. Everyone needs more Kate Beaton in their lives. EVERYONE.

back and forth forever.

Six years ago today, I left Ottawa. "So long, suckers," I posted on facebook (thank you, On This Day app, for enabling my debilitating nostalgia addiction) before unplugging my modem, walking it back to the Rogers store around the block, and dashing back home to pack up the last of my things (mostly VC Andrews paperbacks and half drunk bottles of wine). My then-somewhat-boyfriend drove down from his hideout in the woods to help me move that final load. In a particularly hilarious encounter, he and my first floor neighbour, an odd sort of duck who had both a heart of gold and a propensity for conveniently practicing guitar shirtless in the hallway of our apartment-house whenever I was arriving home, ended up sharing the burden of loading my mattress into the back of the truck. It was the closest I've ever come to causing the kind of macho posturing that I think is known as peacocking. A well-intentioned civil servant-slash-aspiring playboy and a ponytailed hermit carpenter, competing for my affection with some version of brute strength. As I watched them, I sought out the metaphor, something about my horrendous fake-white-collar past in Ottawa and my potentially amazing hipster-hippie future in Kingston bumping up against each other.

"Let's get the fuck out of here," my carpenter yelled, pulling me from my reverie.

We convoyed down the 416 and the 401 all the way to the Division Street exit, and got to my new North of Princess apartment just as the sun was setting. I had never been so glad to leave one place and arrive in another.

This is it, I thought. This is definitely it.

I spent most of my twenties moving, swearing each time that this would be the last one, this would be home, this one was for life. I called myself a reluctant nomad. I've always been a homebody, so if nothing else, I got really good at putting down roots as quickly as possible wherever I ended up.

In the six years since I left Ottawa, I've survived a few more moves. Four years ago yesterday, I picked up the keys to my house, and unlocked the door to this little cottage by the train tracks, and cried.

This is it, I thought. This is definitely it.

The thing is, though, you never know when you're done moving. You always think you are, but you have no idea. Life has a funny way of spinning you around in circles just when you were getting comfortable where you were. The good news is, for this perpetual homebody, it never takes too long to unpack, to get settled, to bury those roots, and bloom where you're planted. I've gotten better at it over time, the subtle art of finding a place to call home and landing there. It's the journey that can be the hardest part, but I know I'll arrive sooner or later. We always do. We can only wander for so long.

Good Fridays.

For the last little while, I haven't felt much like writing. It should come as no surprise that I can graph my level of creative productivity with my level of despair in a fairly straightforward way. So I guess I should feel glad that I've somehow, miraculously, absurdly, found myself with a contented form of writer's block. For the first time in a long time, looking back with anger (or nostalgia, or schoolgirlish regret) doesn't have the same appeal to me. And it's kind of wonderful.

Something I think a lot of us come to realize is that being happy is cumulative in nature. It doesn't happen all at once. You have to put your time in. There will be a lot of false starts. And once you've happened upon it you almost won't believe it. A lot of people describe their changing times as lightbulb moments, psychological seismic shifts. For me it was more gradual. I spent a few months in a state of reassuring flux. It was like one of those overcast afternoons, when you'd turn the lights on one at a time as the sky darkened, until suddenly, around dusk, you'd realize that the house had gotten brighter inside even as the sun had set.

Oh, you'd think to yourself, isn't that nice.

Real happiness, when it arrives, is absolutely fucking terrifying. It's even scarier when it arrives late, or perhaps just later than you'd expected it. When you've spent more than a few long years under the weirdly enjoyable spectre of mild existential ennui, when you've gone to strange and not entirely unpleasant places in search of anything that might mean something, when you've maybe even half-talked yourself out of the notion of it, finding yourself suddenly not just content but elated can be paralyzing. Oh god, what did I DO to make this happen, you wonder silently, your pulse as rapid as a baby bird's, and how on earth do I hold onto it. I don't know if I'm alone in the tendency to imagine all the ways in which the universe could potentially just rip it all from my arms. I might be. It's amazing and awful, isn't it, to realize you've finally really let your heart bust open after years of just wearing it quietly on your sleeve. It's a complete goddamned beautiful mess.

I don't know that I have a really tidy remedy for all that, other than to try to snap the hell out of the panic. It won't always be this way, dizzy and new and strangely familiar. Sink into that. Save the worry for when you need it. Replace sadness with compassion. Lean on their shoulder. Sleep a little late. Don't set an alarm you don't really need.

A couple of Fridays ago it was Good Friday, and after ramen for lunch and running into my little brother on Queen Street, we went to see the piece of the Douglas Coupland exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. It was delightful and comforting somehow, and as we wandered between digitally altered Group of Seven paintings and Lego towers and pulled each other by the arm toward the pieces we wanted to tell one another about, I was thinking of a line from Generation X that has rattled around in my brain since I read it in eighth grade. "Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad lasts for very very long." We held hands and went home for a nap. I woke up hours after he did and wandered out to the living room, knowing exactly what I'd find there.

I couldn't help remembering how I spent Good Friday last year: meandering along the Sunshine Coast in a hilariously sporty rental car, alternately enjoying the shit out of every moment with my best west coast friend Tara and long-distance text-fighting with a guy the way you do when you want something completely different than he wants. My life was exceedingly complicated in a way that was entirely my own weird doing. I can't believe I drew a line between that day and this one, I thought to myself.

Isn't that nice.

The Best Records of 2014: A Narrative Analysis

Unlike last year, when I basically had the collected works of the National on repeat, I actually listened to some current music in 2014! Imagine that. Here are a few newish albums I really liked, in no particular order.

Bahamas--Bahamas Is Afie

For a brief period in the middle of the year I was some kind of weird magnet for Bahamas. Everytime I turned on the radio, no matter what station (full disclosure, I only listen to three stations: CBC 1, CBC 2, and Indie88 when I feel SAUCY), there he was, charming the pants off me with that sweet sweet falsetto. (Side note that didn't get mentioned in last year's list because of my utterly destroyed mental state at the end of 2013: one of my top musical moments of THAT year was Bahamas' encore cover of Hey-Ya by Outkast at Wolfe Island Music Festival. Its awesomeness was made all the better by my best friend's presence in the audience, because as she and everyone around us already knows, what Andre 3000 is REALLY singing is Frey-Ya.)



Alvvays--Alvvays

Speaking of Wolfe Island Music Festival, these guys were such a standout at this year's show. Apparently my musical sweet spot is a distant Rankin Family cousin with bleached blonde hair and jangly guitars and a vague connection to Charlottetown--GO FIGURE.



Bry Webb--Free Will

And speaking of Wolfe Island AGAIN, Bry Webb and his band were so good they hurt my feelings. When they closed their set with a cover of China Cat Sunflower by the Grateful Dead and Bry called the audience a bunch of hippies (in a KIND way) and commanded us to dance, I died of happiness. There are those who might say I am an easy mark.



Hamilton Leithauser--Black Hours

Hamilton's old band The Walkmen have saved my life a few hundred times over the years. This solo record is such a fucking treat. It has a bit of a Hungover Vegas Showman vibe and is rife with gorgeous tributes to relationships gone awry. I think it was my brother who said that Hamilton Leithauser is the kind of guy who you can imagine just going down with the ship, leaving it all on the floor, screaming his last breath. Yeah, I get that. I really get that.



The New Pornographers--Brill Bruisers

Perfection as usual. No further comment.



Shad--Flying Colours

I threw those last couple in just to throw you off the chase, but here is ANOTHER amazing album by ANOTHER Wolfe Island Music Festival alumnus (Frontenac County, I'm forever your girl). Shad is amazing and he raps about Jack Donaghy and being a feminist ally and when we saw him live Freya's kids threw their hands up in the air immediately and sincerely when he instructed them to and it was adorable as hell and that's pretty much all you need to know about that.




Beck--Morning Phase

Beck is one of those artists whom I'll pretty much always enjoy. I especially dug this record because it reminded me of Sea Change, which came out in like 2002 and at the time made me want to open up a vein in the best way (there's a story there for another day, I promise). Morning Phase was also given to me, on vinyl, by a boy, which, as you can probably guess is a fairly ultimate Flirting With Caitlin situation. The boy turned out to be the kind of disappointing dud who ruins your birthday weekend and breaks up with you twice, but we had a good run, I guess? ANYWAY.



Beyonce--Beyonce

I know this album technically came out last year but if you hung out with me AT ALL in 2014 then you are uncomfortably aware of its impact on my world, not to mention my FEMINISM and also my pumpkin carving choices.




It's been a hell of a year.

August, unencumbered.

I wrote this in August, but forgot about it till this chilly October Sunday morning. It's funny to look back on it now, especially since only a few months on,for the first time in a long time, I'm so blissfully attached to someone (just one someone, oh how lovely, how novel, how perfect) else. But nevertheless, I don't think I've lost my weird lone wolf streak just yet, and I will always sing the praises of strong and independent women, so here it is.


Unencumbered.

So, I'm on vacation this week, and I've been doing an embarrassingly shitty job of unplugging from technology for the duration, something I swore I'd do. I informally (secretly) polled two of the men in my life on this one, to see what their reactions would be.

The one who is 30 years old said that the prospect of unplugging seemed so absurd as to be a joke. "My life's online," he said. "Well," I replied, "my friends told me they missed me on Facebook when I was gone, so."

The one who is 40 smiled supportively, again, and told me that social media is a waste pit, again, and was utterly thrilled to hear that I had accidentally booked us a campsite without an electrical outlet for next week. "I'll just turn my phone off," he said, nonchalantly. "Where did you come from," I replied.

So you see what I'm dealing with here.

But no matter, because on Saturday I up and left them all behind. I drove off to Grey County with no burdens on my shoulders. Just past a new detour through Eden Mills (2014 is the Summer of the Detour, and my eternal lifemate Kat's mom is the Detour Queen), I drove into a blinding thunderstorm, sheets of lightning and wild winds whipping around my poor little car. When the clouds finally parted I felt so badass and brave. I arrived at the sunny side of the lake just in time.

The next day Kat and I drove up to Red Bay, on Lake Huron. We've driven up there before, in varying stages of preparedness. It is a little bit like the Bermuda Triangle of the Bruce in that no matter what you do to get ready, no matter how many scrawled directions you shove into the console, you will always get lost.

"I so admire your willingness to go on a sketchy road trip," I told Kat as we embarked down Irish Lake Road, thinking of my own sense of immortality following yesterday's thunderstorm in Eden Mills. "I recognize in you the same risk gene I see in myself."

"We don't do things in half measure," Kat replied.

This outing was not unlike all the others, armed though we were with maps and a drunk GPS system and an information phone that kept losing its signal. It wasn't a big deal, though. We passed the time eating cheese curds and discussing the perils of dating non-feminist men.

"We really are the first generation of women who've had a mostly socially accepted choice in whether or not to settle," she pointed out. "Men don't consider that the way we do. I mean, what choice did our mothers have? Wife or lonely academic, that was about it. Our mothers may have broken that mold, but a lot of their peers couldn't, or wouldn't."

I kept considering that all afternoon, as we arrived at Red Bay as one always does, just in time. I thought about it as we laid out our picnic, swung on a swing set, gossipped and smoked and swam like mermaids, out past the breaker in water that felt like the ocean. As we flipped somersaults and scoped out cute dudes in the water nearby and reminisced about elementary school gym class, as we felt ourselves so gloriously unencumbered and free. We have chosen this life, beaten our own trails. Each moment on the path to this afternoon on this beach was one we had decided on, consciously or unconsciously. We may have struggled with existential malaise at nearly every turn, but the fact remained that we COULD engage in that struggle, that while we might be lonely, we'd never be pariahs.

Could our mothers have stood here a generation ago? Maybe. I feel like our particular mothers were built of strong, resilient stock. I know they could have been brave and noble in complete independence too. They'd have been an anomaly, though, women whispered about. It's still this way, I think. Women without traditional partners scare other people. For better or worse, we still represent a rejection of a norm. People still speak to us with a sort of patronizing admiration. It's so amazing that you're so independent, they sometimes tell us. I don't think I could ever live like that, by myself.

Hell, I want to tell them. Most of the time I don't think I can do it either, and yet, here I stand. And besides, I'm not alone. I'm held up by a vast network of secret sisters, coupled and uncoupled, mothers to their own children or to other people's or to no one at all. I do just fine. And so would you, if you had to, or even just wanted to. I know you would.

I don't know if I'll ever be the mother of a daughter. It's okay, it really is. I'm a feckless surrogate auntie to so many lovely and amazing children that I know I'll be alright. But if I do have a daughter, I hope she will be brave in ridiculous situations, and pay attention to orienteering. I hope she will feel the same desire to keep swimming, out past the boats, past the pier, past the break line. I hope she will one day feel fearless.

Happy Birthday.

Today my best friend's oldest kid turned 6. This is alarming for numerous reasons, not least of which being that I remember the day he was born, and it really does feel like yesterday. A yesterday that found me two cities and several broken hearts away from where I woke up this morning, but yesterday nonetheless.

"I don't know how he could be this old, when clearly we are still the same age," I told her this morning.

"Speak for yourself," she replied.

He was born on a Monday.

In those days I was still living in Ottawa and running away to Frontenac County every weekend to stay with a man I loved in secret. That secret hung between us, and I knew on some level that he felt it too, and our relationship often felt like an eternal standoff to see which of us could hold out the longest.

I never said I was good at matters of the heart, but what I lack in sense I make up for in enthusiasm.

On my way out there that weekend I'd stopped in at my best friend's place for lunch. She shuffled around the house, massive and cranky and looming over all of us. She wasn't due to pop for another couple of weeks, and it seemed as though if it didn't happen soon, horrible pain would befall us all.

"You sure you don't want to just hang out for awhile?" she asked as I skulked off to my car.

"I better not," I replied. "He's waiting for me."

It had been a weird summer. As my best friend got more and more pregnant, I felt like we had less and less in common. I had no idea what was going to happen once that kid came into the world. I basically assumed I'd be losing the partner in crime I'd held close for so long. But I couldn't say that, not now, with her lumbering around in exhaustion, with me running off yet again to some characteristically ill-advised decision. Uncertainty at both ends of a long county highway.

Things changed that weekend, though. I love you, that strange hermit of a man told me, as I stood in the doorway on Sunday night, trying to decide whether to stay one more night or just drive home. Neither option seemed particularly stabilizing. I love you, he told me, and I cried, because that's what I always do. I love you, he told me, and I stayed.

The problem was that I could never stay for long.

I woke up the next morning at 5 AM, feeling the very specific anxiety that comes with knowing you have a 2 hour drive ahead of you, 2 hours of gridlocked distance to put between you and a man who has finally opened his heart, followed by a meeting you have to chair, followed by Christ only knows what other professional disasters. I listened to Ron Sexsmith on the drive, just to hit the heartaching panic right out of the park. I drove past the Ottawa sign on the highway and cried for the second time in 24 hours. I had no idea what I was doing.

When I got back home, I had about a half hour to spare before I had to be at the library. I checked my messages, and heard one from my best friend, from the night before.

"Hey dude," she said, sounding disturbingly tentative, "So I THINK I might be in labour. No worries though!" She spoke as though she were trying to convince herself, and not doing a very good job.

I called her house immediately, and her sister, another of my very best people, picked up the phone.

"Oh yeah, we're in full swing here, pal," she said. I could hear a horrifying scream in the background. "If you stay on the line, you might even hear this little guy get born."

"I'm late for a meeting," I said quickly, "Gotta go! Big hugs! Call me when he gets here!"

An hour later I got a text. He was here. He was okay. Everyone was okay. Our mutual best friend (there are a lot of Best Friends in my life) called me from her office in Toronto.

"I'm just going into a meeting," she said. "I didn't know what to do."

"Me neither," I replied, welling up again, predictably.

The rest of the day was a blur. After chairing the worst meeting of my life I hit the road once more and drove from Orleans to Almonte. Trust me when I tell you that this is a hellish drive. Those were the days when I still occasionally smoked cigarettes, the days when I also still smoked in my car. (Don't tell my mother.) As I crept through gridlock and puffed out the window, I felt so spun out I didn't even know where to direct my nerviness. I was heading to my best friend's house, one of the most familiar ports in a storm I'd ever known. Only this time, I had no idea what to expect when I got there.

I tore into the driveway and gingerly knocked on the door, not wanting to disturb any quiet. I needn't have worried. In the kitchen, sisters and grannies grampas and husbands bustled around, a massive dinner already in the works. My best friend sat on the couch, a tiny swaddled peanut in her arms. (Not so tiny, I'd soon learn, not so tiny at all.)

"Oh my GOD," I said, and sat down beside her. "How WAS it?"

"It was HORRIBLE," she said. Obviously all those feel-good hormones hadn't yet wiped the trauma of childbirth from her memory.

She handed him over to me. I held him, just hours old, so new, so untouched. Oh lord, I prayed silently, please let the second hand smoke on this filthy pashmina not hurt him in any way. And then I cried. Again.

"Rough weekend?" my best friend asked.

"Not just that, but yes," I replied. "But we don't need to talk about that right now."

"But we can," she said. "That doesn't change."

So we did. I unloaded, briefly, as I held her life against my chest. I stayed for dinner, surrounded by the love and disbelief that descends on a home that is suddenly one heart larger. I drove home after dark, listening to Dylan, somehow certain amidst uncertainty that it would all be fine. How could it not be? New lives and new hearts are born every day, every hour, every moment. There would be room enough in the world for all the aching, all the joy, all the fear and all the hope that we could possibly imagine.

Live through this, and all that.

In the grand tradition of Bruce McCulloch’s Hangover sketch, and because putting all these thoughts in just one place seemed MILDLY less destructive than live-tweeting the past couple of days, I give you a modern girl’s guide to breaking up.

Saturday.

11:15 PM. 45 minutes before Shoshanna-style Day Date, receive extremely unbelievable text from supposed Main Hang. Think to yourself, The nerve of some goddamned people. The goddamned nerve. Think that, but with more frustrated texting and swear words and air kicking. Feel yourself cracking open.

12:00 noon. Through tears of rage, make a mental tally of the outrageous ways in which you have been broken up with over the years. Decide that the Text Breakup trumps all, even the Cross Country Time Zone Spanning Phone Call Breakup. Realize that this is not a productive exercise.

1:30. Run away. Do it. It's so rarely so deserved, or so convenient. Throw a few bathing suits and several cans of cider into a tote bag. Drive up Highway 6, past Grasshopper Imports. Keep driving. Keep moving. Turn up the radio. Think some thoughts. Feel some feelings. Sing some songs.

3:30 PM. Arrive at the lake, and jump in. Can we listen to the country station? Your best friend will politely ask your host. Fuck yeah, will be the reply. Fuck yeah.

5:00 PM. Go for a sail. Rationalize the particulars of your romantic failure as your best friend tells you when to tack. Allow the sail to hit you in the head, but only in passing. We could see the bottom of the boat on that one turn, your host will announce as you careen gracefully back toward the dock. My mom thinks I have the risk gene, your best friend and first mate will observe. I think we all do, you will reply. I think it just manifests in different ways in different people.

9:00 PM. Let the sun set. Swim out to the middle of the bay. Survey the land. Decide which piece you want for your own. This really does seem like the ideal time to take out a second mortgage, you'll observe, bemused.


Sunday.

9:00 AM. Run away again, just around the lake and back. Get chased by the same goddamned enormous dog you always get chased by. Try to treat it as an object lesson. Learn the dog's name (Betsy).

11:00 AM. dive into the water, which is colder than expected. Swim out to the point with your fellow mermaid in tow. Let the waves crash against your face as you make your way back to shore. Let yourself be pulled under, just for a moment.

12:30 PM. Depart the lake, and allow iPod shuffle to lead a journey of intense introspection. Begin planning the Breakup Catharsis playlist, which includes generous helpings of Sam Roberts, The Walkmen, and Bob Dylan (namely, Most Likely You'll go Your Way and I'll go Mine).

3:00 PM. Arrive home just in time for a radio documentary about Joni Mitchell's Blue on CBC 2. Lie on couch, overcome. Nod vigorously in agreement at the observation that Carey perfectly articulates the irresistible lure of the bad boy, that addictive itch, those perpetual butterflies. Think back to that risk gene. To each her own.

3:10 PM Resolve to never again date a guy who doesn't have the radio tuned to the nation’s public broadcaster for at least 5 hours daily.

5:30 PM. Call mom. Always call mom.

6:00 PM. Decamp to hammock in backyard with a stack of novels. Endeavour to remain there 3-6 hours.

7:00 PM. Drag body out of hammock for absolutely essential dinner break. Pull rhubarb and kale from the garden. Consider making a cake. Open the windows. Let the wind in. Let it swirl around, through doorways and hallways. Let it find its way into your dark corners.

9:00 PM Go Full Margot Tennenbaum in the bathtub. Tie a TV to the radiator. Find yourself an ashtray. Know on some deep, secret level that this is all going to be fine. Allow yourself to ignore that deeper truth for just a little while longer. Dunk your head under water. Hold your breath. Exhale.

Polar Vortex.

Look, no one needs you to tell them that it was a long winter. This was some Laura Ingalls Wilder style insanity. One for the record books, an absolute fucking horror show of emotional turmoil and spiritual reckoning and depression-addled blanket burrowing. No, no one needs to hear that from you. They've already heard it. They covered it daily on the public radio news that is your only accepted current events source. "How can it still be so cold?" they asked, dumbly, bewilderedly, each morning, as you brewed scalding hot strong coffee and toasted toast and died, over and over, dreading those first steps outdoors. Everyone knows that part already. They lived it too.

The winter started before the cold, though, and you rang out the old having your last real conversation with the one you'd first talked to nearly exactly a year earlier. It's horribly easy to end things over the phone, you thought to yourself. Horribly easy. Your best friend insisted on picking you up on New Year's Eve, benevolently helping you avoid the terrible Bridget Jones cliche of the suddenly single gal home alone, Joni Mitchell on the stereo. You were thankful for the charity. You enjoyed that perfect, surreal, lawless moment that arose whenever anyone was in transition, that brief point at which anything was possible, when everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

The deep freeze began the next day, it seemed. A sudden plunge, frozen cheeks and frozen pipes and that looming feeling that nothing would ever be right again. You rode out your days and hid out each night. You found a silver lining in the fact that a polar vortex is a hermit's dream. You inherited your brother's old record player and a TON of your parents' old records and declared this to be the winter of smooth 70s rock, a perfect follow-up to last year's mixtape 90s binge.

"We don't listen to enough Fleetwood Mac anymore," you told your best friend one night as she nodded vigorously in agreement. One afternoon you plucked a Steely Dan CD back from the weeding pile at the library and checked it out and told yourself you were doing the best thing you'd done in months. You tried not to look back in anger.

You didn't have much choice but to look for things to be hopeful for.

They weren't hard to find, not really. Some of them came on slow. Some of them came back from the past, unsurprising given your penchant for nostalgia. Some of them brought presents and were never really heard from again. Some came to visit and made you feel electric and goofy as a schoolgirl, holding mittened hands and wandering in the art gallery. Suddenly some were around a lot. You found yourself picking up raspberries at the grocery store so there'd be something in the fridge for breakfast. There were more teacups around the house than usual, more books askew, misplaced objects, the cozy clutter of a lived-in space, a warm warren in a frigid world. It could be a good thing, you realized, this shared space.

One night someone who was around more often than not those days helped you dismantle your shitty old Ikea bed frame one last time, a job you'd done over and over and over again in towns across the province, a job every man in your life seems to have been a part of, from your boyfriends to your dad to your brother's college roommate.

Afterwards you cooked him dinner. "Division of labour," you joked.

"It tastes like more," he told you.

"Help yourself," you replied, and he did.

Helping yourself. That's how you got through it. Those long cold nights seemed interminable, but you got through them. You found what you needed. It didn't look like what you thought it would, but nothing ever did. That much you'd finally learned.

the Valentine Project, part 5.

I'm reviving my Valentine Project series, because there's not enough wistful heartache in the world, there's really not. You can catch up here before traveling backward through time once more.

February 14, 2005, Kitsilano, Vancouver, BC.


I took the bus up to the airport to meet his plane. It took nearly an hour. When I saw him waiting by the baggage carousel I ran up behind him and threw my arms around him (thank heavens for the chilled out attitude of YVR airport security). We splurged on a taxi back to my little Arbutus Street apartment and spent the following days wrapped around each other in the way that you get when you're 24 years old and newly-reunited with your one true love after two months apart.

He stayed for a week and I don't even remember what day was actually Valentine's Day amid a hazy, dozy slew of golden afternoons. I think maybe my roommate and secret sister, Tara, might have come home part-way through and joined us for dinner. We definitely watched The Wedding Singer for the twentieth time. I know we ate crepes at the little place down the street at some point, wandered along the Sea Wall, watched the sun set over English Bay through the picture window in the living room. I dragged him to Stanley Park one day, and got lost as I did every blessed time I ever went there. The woods spat us out close to Lost Lagoon and we wandered around the edge of the water, vaguely bewildered, utterly comfortable with one another.

He left a few days later and I cried at the airport (my years living in Vancouver were the ones during which I honed the sacred craft of the Airport Breakdown). I could barely let go of him, already counting the days till we'd see each other again in April. I could not bear the thought. It was the beginning of the end of us, though we didn't know it then. I didn't see it coming, though everyone around me sure did. That's the thing about me. I never quite see it coming.

telephone.

My longest relationship (with a BOY, I mean) lasted five and a half years. That still seems like an INCREDIBLE amount of time to me, which probably explains my firm commitment to serial monogamy. They were five and a half long years, if you know what I mean. A lot happens between the ages of 19 and 24. In hindsight I'm glad I had a buddy through all of it, dramatic though we may have been. We had five years of post-adolescent intensity, weekend trips back and forth to each others' hometowns each summer, nights sleeping over in the guys' dorm, mixtapes and heartache. We were in it for the long haul. Then I moved to Vancouver, and things went south as I veered west.

After a year of long-distance agony (and ALSO a couple of insanely fun visits, nights under the stars on the beach and heartfelt declarations and good sushi), and mere days before I was scheduled to come back to Ontario for a month, he broke it off over the phone. It's an awful way to end things, over the phone. If you're on the receiving end, there's nothing you can do, no one to grab onto, no door you can barricade to keep the other person from going. If you're the one going, it depersonalizes it, makes easy an act that has already ripped your heart to shreds from the agony of deciding to do it in the first place.

No one wins, really.

When he broke up with me that afternoon I didn't even know what to do. I sure hadn't expected to be on the receiving end of something like that. I felt like the rug had been ripped out from under me (and that rug really tied the ROOM together, man). I flew home from Vancouver in the fetal position, re-reading Franny and Zooey. I was not in a great place, emotions-wise.

"Five and a half YEARS!" I cried to my mother. "It's a quarter of my LIFE!" She nodded, and made sure I got a lot of fresh air and hugs during the next couple of weeks.

I never thought I'd get over it. For a long time, I didn't, till suddenly, i did. Sometimes I wonder if I spent more time getting over him than I actually spent under him (or beside him, rather). Sometimes I wonder if things would have been different if I hadn't run away, but I know that particular hypothetical would NEVER have worked for me. Because I'm always running away, even when I don't even know it. Always with the escape route, for better or for worse.

albums of the year, 2013.

Honestly, I feel like putting together this list somehow deceives people into thinking I listened to anything other than The National this year. At any rate, I don't get too many opportunities to deceive others, so let's just go with it.

In no particular order, here are the new records I was obsessed with this year. This isn't a Top Ten, because I don't think I even listened to ten new records this year. Lying on the floor listening to Matt Berninger mirror your soul back to you in song takes up a LOT of time.

(Please note, this is an Arcade Fire Free Zone.)

Neko Case--The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, the More I Love You
(I want to be her when I grow up.)

Laura Marling--Once I was an Eagle

David Bowie--The Next Day

Vampire Weekend--Modern Vampires of the City
(My mother called these guys Zombie Weekend last week, that was pretty great.)

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs--Mosquito

Haim--Days Are Gone

The National--Trouble Will Find Me



This album is perfect.

Solstice.

Interesting things always seem to happen on the darkest day of the year.

Four years ago, it was my first Christmas in Kingston. The weekend of the winter solstice, my best friends were having a holiday party. It was a Friday night, and I had to work the next day. This solemn fact didn't really propel me toward anything resembling responsible decision making. The signature cocktail of the party was Moose Milk, which is, to the best of my recollection, equal parts ice cream, Baileys, vodka, and sin. On my well-past-tipsy stumble home (oh, the joy of living stumbling distance from best friends), I phoned up the man in my life. I hadn't had a cell phone for very long at that point, and the novelty of being able to call people (not to mention the novelty of having someone to call) hadn't worn off.

"I'm gonna keep you on the phone," I told him, "in case anything happens to me on my way home. I might need a witness of some kind."

"Jesus Christ," he replied, probably not of much sounder mind than I. "Get the hell off the streets."

"Oh, I'm fine," I assured him, sidling into a snowbank. "I have to work in the morning, anyway."

"Jesus Christ," he repeated. "Call in sick, you idiot."

I probably should have heeded his advice, but some semblance of professionalism won out instead, and I struggled through a busy, crazy Saturday at the library, half-asleep and probably still off-gassing vodka from the previous evening. He picked me up that night outside the library, in not much better shape than I, and we drove out to Brockville to visit his parents for Christmas.

The thing about him and me was, we spent a long time pretending we weren't as attached as we actually were. We danced around one another for a ridiculous span of months and years before we admitted to one another what we actually felt. Once we did, we kind of went into Full Steam Ahead mode, zero to sixty in ten seconds, that kind of thing. From flat out denial that we were in love to barreling down the highway toward Brock Vegas for Christmas dinner. It had been a long time since I'd had anyone in my life for whom I cared enough to spend a hungover Saturday night with family, eating a chicken casserole that was his mother's version of vegetarian cooking. His mom had gifts for both of us, a Trivial Pursuit game and a bag of chocolate and toothpaste and new slippers and stocking stuffers. He was embarrassed by it, but not so much that he apologized for it. The novelty hadn't worn off here either.

That night we slept in separate single beds, him in his brother's room, me in his. In the morning I woke up to him jumping on top of me and telling me to get ready to get the fuck out of there. He was a big fan of the Irish Goodbye, leaving unannounced and then calling from the road. (Those apologetic phone conversations comprised about forty percent of our communication during the first year of our relationship.) This was a hard feat to pull off in your own parents' house, though, so we toughed it out through breakfast before burning rubber.

We took the long way home, down past Smith's Falls, coming into Kingston over the bridge from the east side of town. Everything was snow-quiet and still. That afternoon, my best friend was playing a solstice concert at the Mansion. He hated going out, but I convinced him to come with me without much prodding. We sat on bar stools, drinking pints of Guinness, listening to some of the best musicians in town play the best kind of folk music. The sun was setting on the darkest day of the year, the dimming-down outside making the Christmas lights twinkling around us in the bar seem brighter by the moment. We walked home shivering, fell asleep curled up together to keep warm. It was so cold that he let the dog jump up on the bed, which he never did, as a rule. "It's my bed, not his," he'd say. But that night that he begrudgingly allowed an exception. Sometimes you have to do that, go against your own code for the sake of someone else. Sometimes the most important thing is just to stay warm. Sometimes you do what you can to find light in the darkness.

the days we hit the coast: halloween.

If you've ever felt that, in the words of Ron Burgundy, you IMMEEEDIATELY regret a decision, Then you know how I felt in the fall of 2004.

I'd just moved to Vancouver from Toronto, leaving behind the love of my life, to start grad school. I was living in a college-style graduate residence on the very edge of the UBC campus, practically falling off the edge of a cliff into the Pacific Ocean. There were mountains all around me, long shorelines and beaches below. It was overwhelming. I'd read somewhere that the West Coast is a good place to go if you'd like to get lost, and now I saw that it was true: even her cities seem capable of swallowing you up.

Within a few weeks of my arrival, I knew that the college wasn't for me. It felt like a sort of haute bourgeois frathouse. It was beautiful there, but oh so wrong. I met a handful of lovely people, but I still felt so uncertain. I began to worry that I'd made a huge mistake by moving out to the coast in the first place. What in the fucking WORLD had prompted me to believe that the best thing I could do was leave behind my boyfriend, my family, and all my friends and take off to the other side of the country? I am an idiot, I told myself as I walked back home through the UBC rose garden, wandered past the massive totems at the Anthropology Museum up the road. I am in over my head.

Then I met my friend Tara. She was in the same program as me, and she was a few years older than me, and from the moment I met her I wanted her to be my cool big sister. We spent the first few weeks of school politely eating lunch together, progressing to trips to the movies and getting stranded after the buses stopped running, (goddamn you, Translink), consuming as much free beer as possible at the library school's social events. It was a strong start. But it wasn't till Halloween that we really fell in love.

I somehow managed to convince Tara to come with me to a Grad Student Union sponsored party on Friday night, in spite of ALL of our better judgment. It was a complete and utter gong show, a middle school dance populated by shit-wasted philosophy TAs in sexy angel costumes. I was dressed as Margot Tennenbaum, and Tara went high concept as The Morning After: lipstick smeared across her face, hair a mess, skirt tucked into her tights. No one quite got it.

Let's get OUTTA here, we agreed, and I walked her to the bus loop. It was one of those wonderfully windy, rainy coastal nights. "Halloween weather," my boss at the time called it. The wind whipped around us as RCMP cars whisked past-drunk revellers to the nearest paramedic. My mangy Margot fur coat had the heft and scent of a drowning racoon. Of course the buses had stopped running (goddamn you again, Translink) and so I told Tara she could stay at my place. It was the first sleepover party I'd had in years.

We made our way meanderingly back to the college, trolling the grounds on our way. We climbed the fire escape of Cecil Green House, pausing to consider the weirdness of this oceanside mansion in my backyard. From the top of the stairs we could see the Georgia Strait and West Vancouver in the distance, the mountains beyond. We tumbled back down and past the former inground pool, now filled in and turned to a garden space. What a strange place I live in, I thought hazily, momentarily glad to be so far outside my comfort zone, relieved to have someone to share it with.

Tara slept on my floor that night, and I think we watched The Big Chill before we passed out. The next morning I took the bus back to Kitsilano with her and we spent the day doing what Tara called the Epic Hangout: brunch, Sally Ann shopping, beach walks. Man, it gets hard to find people who are up for it, Tara said. People couple off and then it just changes.

I realized then that for the first time in a long time, I was completely unencumbered. Half my heart was still back home in Toronto, and that hurt more than I could bear. But suddenly, my days were completely in my own control. My life was all mine. I walked the Sea Wall with Tara that afternoon and felt so glad and free.

A month or so later, Tara's roommate situation imploded, and my itchy feet got the better of me, and she asked me to move in with her. A few weeks after that, I borrowed a family friend's car and drove all my worldly goods down the mountain to Arbutus Street. There are a lot of other stories that ensued, which I will tell one day. But the moral of THIS story is that I think of Tara every Halloween, of how she always went full-bore when she committed to the absurd, of how things were never ever dull with her.

When you're getting to know someone, you're tentative, unaware of how this person may weave into your life. It's so funny to think back on those first moments of a friendship that is now so essential.

Departures.

...reblogged from my new(ish) Tumblr,, where I endeavour to re-imagine my own day to day conversations as excerpts from bad chick lit. Please check it out.


"I don’t know why you want to get here so early," his sister told us as we got out of the car at the airport. I wasn’t sure either, really. I guess I wanted to get it all over with, skip past the horrible goodbyes to the part where I was drunk on the plane. That part came easy.

When we got inside I found out my flight was delayed. I felt like I was going to throw up. Ridiculously I felt like someone waiting to head on over to the electric chair—I’d steeled myself, told myself I had exactly this much time till I’d say goodbye, convinced myself I could survive till the moment of departure if I just took deep breaths. Adding another hour of waiting should have been a blessing, but instead it felt like torture.

He was a real good sport about waiting with me—he usually was, I’d discovered. “Do you have any change?” he asked me. “I’m kind of thirsty.” I did, and I bought him a drink, some orange pop I’d never heard of before. “They make it here, he told me, passing the bottle to me for a sip. “It’s the best orange pop in the country.” He talked, and I listened, and leaned into him. We babbled, as we’d been doing for days. There was something about the way we could talk to each other that calmed me down. I avoided looking at the security gates. I tried to keep myself as close to him as I could, practically burrowing into the sleeve of his hoodie. Only days earlier we’d shared our first awkward hug in the Arrivals lounge, just steps from where we now sat. What had felt so tentative before now felt so steady and certain.

They called my flight and I started to cry, which wasn’t anything new at this point. “You’re SUCH a good crier,” he told me again, and I laughed and snorted and generally looked like a soggy toddler in the midst of a tantrum as we kissed and hugged goodbye one last time. I couldn’t even turn around to wave to him one last time; I thought it might kill me, vaguely believed it might turn me into a pillar of salt.

Months later he told me that after he called his sister to come and pick him up, he came back inside to see if I was still there, but I wasn’t. The couple who’d been sitting down the row of seats from us in Departures asked him, “Did you guys just break up or something?”

"NO," he told me he replied, as though it were the most absurd conclusion anyone could ever come to. "I mean, really," he said to me, "do couples who’ve just broken up spend every last SECOND together like that?"

"I don’t think so," I replied, "but weirder things have happened."

Labour Days.

It's been eight years since I flew back to Vancouver from Toronto. I'd been home for the last few weeks of the summer, nursing a brand new broken heart, travelling around the province by Go Bus and Via train and back seats, I was crashing on couches, eating my mother's cooking, trying to get it together. "Keep it classy," my best friends advised me on my last night in Ontario, heading out to a party at my old house on Crawford Street, running into my now inexplicably former love, travelling into the past. I kept it classy, or tried to, saving my tears for the run up the block after the party was over. My first day back in Vancouver was the Saturday of Labour Day weekend, and it rained on the walk back from the Granville Island Market, and in a moment I could feel the damp sink into my bones. I could tell the summer was over.

It's been five years since I drove back to Ottawa from Hamilton. I had come home to host a wedding shower for my best friend Danielle, a sunny, perfect afternoon in my parents' backyard that devolved into a regrettably boozy evening out on the town. Driving back to Ottawa with a hangover added insult to injury. What am I heading back to, I wondered, smoking out the window of the Civic, blasting Amy Winehouse to keep myself awake, unable to stop thinking of the man with whom I suddenly found myself in love. I was terrified to say it out loud, even more scared to ignore that feeling, push it down. A week later our emotions would get the better of us and we'd admit, exhaustedly, what we felt deep down, admit we were completely wrong for each other, admit we had no idea what we were doing. But I wasn't quite there yet.

It's been four years since I drove back from Almonte to Kingston, after my best friend Freya's sweet baby boy's first birthday. Everytime I drove back to Kingston I felt so relieved. I was in a happy daze that weekend, making jam, doing yoga, walking quiet and dilapidated streets around the North end. On Sunday the man who'd seemed so wrong a year ago called me up, as he often did now, and asked if I wanted to go for a swim. Of course, I replied, of course I do. We drove out to the secret little beach just past Porstmouth Harbour, and he threw the frisbee for the dog while I paddled back and forth along that oddly lagoon-like bit of Lake Ontario. We ran into Freya's sister on the way back to the truck, off to run her own dog, and I felt safe in a town full of familiar faces and easy intimacy.

It's been a year since I woke up on Sunday morning, and called my best friend Kat to tell her I was on my way over to convoy up to her cottage. We'd spent that Saturday at the Harvest Picnic at Christie Lake, wandering between Gord Downie and the taco truck and the beach, feeling sunburnt and stoned on music and so happy to be home. Something was happening, someone new was around, and for the first time in years, really, I could feel my heart opening up again. It wasn't long after that it all blew up in my face, as, perhaps, I always knew it would. But I wasn't quite there yet.

This year I realize I've spent the past three Labour Days running away from Hamilton. It's been awhile since I called any town home for longer than a couple of years; not to mention I never could've conceived of once again calling Hamilton home. That teenage vow to leave and never return could only last so long--the pull is so strong, the visceral realization that you need to get back to your own magnetic North. And as safe at home as I may be, sometimes I feel my feet start to itch. Usually there is a direct correlation between the level of my heartbreak and the urgency of my need to escape. This year I'm holding tight to my heart, tending fresh wounds, hoping beyond hope that I can stay patient and kind as things apparently get weirder and more magical with every passing moment. I'm still not quite there yet. I might never be. As safe at home as I may be, I keep an escape route in my back pocket. I figure it can't hurt to have a secret dream.

on mermaids.

Earlier this summer, I was up at a cottage on the Hawk River near Carnarvon. Every day we'd head down to the local public beach on Halls Lake, which is arguably one of the finest lakes in Ontario. It's deep and clear and dotted with midcentury cottages, tiny wood cabins built into the Canadian Shield, not a Muskoka monster boathouse in sight. Even better, for a long time it was a dead lake, so the frightening fish sightings are few and far between. For those who don't know, while I love lake swimming more than most other things, I am not a fan of underwater life. My worst nightmares are ones in which I am trapped between aquariums. My mom used to pretend to pour bleach into the lake to convince me she'd killed everything off before I'd dip so much as a toe into the water. A few years of partnership with a dude who lived on a wild and fish-filled lake (and the consequent desire to not look like a total wuss) have lessened my terror somewhat, but not much. All of which is to say, ecological concerns aside, a fishless lake is my happy place.

So we'd go to Halls Lake at least twice every day. A couple afternoons in, some local yahoos were blasting Thin Lizzy from their car on the beach while they drank Bud Light on the floating raft a few metres from the shore. The noise pissed me off to no end (for all my big talk of respect and acceptance I am surprisingly intolerant), but luckily my mother talked me out of just reaching into the car and turning off the stereo. Treating it as an object lesson, I dove into the water and found silence under the surface.

A few minutes later, I noticed an older woman asking them if they'd mind shutting off the radio. She had a sturdy, confident look about her, grey hair and tanned shoulders and a towel wrapped around her waist. She seemed fearless. The yahoos heeded her request, and soon there was quiet above sea level as well as down below. It felt like a relief. I watched the woman out of the corner of my eye as I swam back and forth. She stopped to talk to my friends back on shore, and later I learned from them that she was from Germany, that her sister married a Canadian after World War II, that she had been coming to visit her up here every summer for years. In the following days, I saw her with her sister, swimming long, steady laps back and forth in the deeper part of the bay. I loved the narrative arc of it all. I loved her strength. I loved watching their solid, hearty bodies moving gracefully through the water, their heads bobbing above the surface as they talked and talked.

Last week, I found myself diving into yet another lake. This time it was Irish Lake, a shallow body of water randomly plunked down in the farmland south of Owen Sound, where my best friend Kat's family has a cottage. Last year that little lake became my sweet escape from an adolescent and melodramatic summer, and it felt so good to be back there. Kat and I have always had this way of cancelling out each other's neuroses; our key methods include Vinho Verde and secret bacon breakfasts and long, lovely swims.

"The Irish Lake Mermaid Squad, reunited at last," Kat said as we dove in that first night. We've been referring to ourselves as mermaids since sometime last summer; one of the best things about best friends is the unabashed permission to behave like a ten year old at a slumber party.

Every day, Kat and I swam out to the deepest point in the bay, both of us feeling quieter and more at peace than we'd felt in weeks. One windy afternoon we canoed around the lake, me and my embarrassingly weak J-stroke at the helm. A few weeks earlier, Kat had sent me an article about how mermaids were the new vampires.

"We're ahead of the curve," she informed me.
"Always," I replied.

One evening as we swam slowly back toward the shore, I thought of that woman at the beach on Halls Lake, gliding across still water, catching up with her sister, making the same movements she had probably made a million times over a million summers. I wondered if she felt any older than she'd felt the first time she came to visit. I wondered what it was like for them to be reunited that first summer. And I wondered at what point she became fearless, unfettered by thoughts of drowning, unconcerned about the reactions of others, calm and confident and grounded in herself. It's a point at which I hope to find myself one day. It's a point I work towards with every breath, with every laugh, with every dive into the deep. We grow more graceful underwater, I think. Softer, more alive, more aware of our movements. It's a feeling I want, always. It's a feeling I can find, over and over again.

summer mixtape.

Prompted by the fact that I never update my iPod anymore, and also by my obsessive love of summer playlists, here is a short but sweet compilation of albums by bands I have been listening to for a depressing amount of time (more than ten years, to be precise) and who, as such, remind me of my own horrible mortality.

The Strokes--Room on Fire

Even though I've been listening to this record fairly consistently since it came out ten years ago, it really reminds me most of my first summer in Kingston back in 2009. I think I put Reptilia and The End Has No End on every mix I made that summer. Arriving in Kingston I felt freer and younger than I'd felt in years. That August I drove out to Almonte along the gorgeous back roads of Frontenac County, on my way to my best friend's wedding, listening to the Strokes and Plaskett on repeat. I felt like I'd finally figured out where I belonged.




Weezer--the Blue Album

I know I reference Weezer and kissing boys a LOT, and I don't want to put too fine a point on it, but look: If I'd had a baby with the first dude I kissed while listening to this album, that baby would now be nearly finished college and asking if it could move back in for just a few more months while it got its independent coffee shop/performance space up and running (my imaginary babies are INCREDIBLY creative and intellectual).



Thrush Hermit

I've loved Thrush Hermit ever since they did the theme song for Street Cents on CBC back in the early 90s (I have been a public broadcasting nerd for a long, long time). I found a used copy of Smart Bomb at Dr. Disc when I was 13 or 14 and listened to it all the damned time. I couldn't get over their clever, poetic lyrics, the wordy jokes they made; I'd found my nerd-rock gods. A little while later, my best friend made me a series of amazing mixtapes to listen to on a family trip out west, and she put The Great Pacific Ocean on one of them. I rewound it and listened to it over and over again. We had a complicated, overwrought, intense friendship, and I missed her like crazy while I was on the other side of the country. Listening to that song I felt my heart leap and sink and break and mend a thousand times.




Elliott Smith--Figure 8

Here's a fun story about this record: I bought the CD at Chapters on Bloor Street in Toronto, during my second year at Trinity. The dude who worked in the music department there was really cute and nice, and he seemed pleasantly surprised to be helping someone find an Elliott Smith album rather than something operatic or otherwise Yorkvillian. "Are you a Nick Drake fan?" he asked me, and I admitted that I had never heard of him. "He's an amazing singer songwriter who killed himself before he really got recognized," he told me, and found me a copy of Way To Blue: An Introduction To Nick Drake, which, naturally, I bought. I stopped by my boyfriend's residence room on my way back to St. Hilda's to show him my purchases. "You didn't know who NICK DRAKE was?" he asked incredulously. "Well, did YOU?" I countered. Of course, he did. He then got really sore about the fact that a cute boy had prompted me to buy a record and we got in a fight. A year later, we were both in a Canadian Literature class and there was this British guy in the class who looked and sounded EXACTLY like Nick Drake, and when I pointed it out to him, my boyfriend declared me a genius. It was one of a handful of running jokes that somehow carried us through an ill-advised year of sharing an apartment. A year or two after that, Elliott Smith killed himself, and I wondered if I had somehow made it happen by buying his album at the same time as another misunderstood suicidal genius.



Belle and Sebastian--Lazy Line Painter Jane

The same boyfriend put this on a mix tape for me once. During our first summer, both of us lived back in our hometowns, and we'd take turns hopping on the train from Hamilton to Oshawa to visit each other. One Friday night he picked me up in the dark at the Oshawa GO Station, and blared this song on the drive back to his parents' place. It was dark out, and chilly for a June night. I'd heard Belle and Sebastian plenty of times before, but never this song. The sound of it made me want to lean against him, burrow down, nod my head till I nodded off. But we weren't that close yet, or maybe we just weren't that honest yet. So I just told him, "I really love this song." It was a time when it was easier to tell him I loved a song than that I loved him. "I figured you would," he replied. "It's on the tape I made you."

music to like boys to, volume 2c: postcards from tiny islands.

Third in a series. Catch up here, and then here.

You arrive on a rainy Thursday, feeling somewhat crazed. He's not waiting for you by the baggage carousel and for a moment you wonder, did I make him up? Is this a trick? And then suddenly there he is, and suddenly you're hugging awkwardly, and suddenly you're in a taxi to the Best Western downtown. You lean into him carefully as the cab crawls down wet streets. Don't tell them you're sharing the room with me, you warn him, suddenly certain that you want him to stay. Do you WANT me to share? he asks. Of course, you reply, I just don't want to have to pay the extra ten bucks. It's more than that, though. It's also that you like sharing a secret.

One day you rent a car, and at first neither of you see quite sure what to do with it. You drive to his house so he can pick up a change of clothes, and then downtown, and then finally back to the hotel to park it before walking back up the block to the pub. It's cool and drizzly out, and after a walk along the waterfront you scurry back to the hotel for a nap. You fall asleep as he bearhugs you close. When you stir, and decide to roll over, he doesn't seem to wake up, but he loosens his hold, opens his arms, lets you get settled before gently wrapping them around you again. Oh man, you think. Oh man.

The next morning you head out on the Trans Canada toward the west side of the island, en route to a cottage on a cliff occupied by an old friend. He doesn't have a license, or much of a sense of direction. You hate driving. I hate driving, you tell him, white knuckles on the steering wheel. Maybe let's pull over and check the map, he replies. He's steady, somehow, in spite of it all. He buys you a bag of Cheezies at the gas station. I've been here before, you think.

Having found your bearings, you keep driving. He puts on the latest playlist he made you and tells you why he chose each particular song. Your heart melts and you get only slightly lost on red dirt backroads. At the cottage there are little girls offering copious high-fives, treks through sleeping lofts and power tool nooks and half-built forest forts. Your dear friend leads everyone down to the beach as the tide is coming in, and as you dip your feet in the shallow water, tiny crabs scuttling around your feet, he wanders off and looks at the erosion lines along the red rock. It's pretty neat, he says, interested and excited at the idea that his little island is sinking into the sea. I read somewhere that in a hundred years none of this will even exist anymore, he tells you. Leave it to you to find the endearing quality in someone fascinated with end times.

The girls send you on your way with a bouquet of wildflowers in a juice glass and you drive onward. You choose to trust the insane GPS on your new Fancy Phone and it leads you down every unmarked country road between Bedeque and Cavendish. Everything is so green and so vast. He is an incredibly good sport about following you around Green Gables. In the front entry you spot a 1980s era phone on a low shelf and shout, Look, it's Anne's original touchtone. The historical interpreters are remarkably cheerful about your outburst. Well, she had to call Diana SOMEHOW, one replies. That was surprisingly fun, he tells you in the car on the drive home, soundtracked by Joel Plaskett. You feel warm and tired and if you weren't in the driver's seat you'd lean right over and put your head on his shoulder.

The afternoon nap becomes a ritual, and when you wake up in his arms again you don't move right away. You don't want it to be over quite yet. You order pizza and watch episodes of the Simpsons with the commentary track on, half listening and half narrating the episodes to each other. It's Saturday night, and you head to the bar. The guy working the door is a friend of his and gives you a deal on the cover. Later when he goes back to thank him, the doorman smiles knowingly and says, I didn't want you to look bad in front of your guest. The bar is packed and his cousin's band is playing but you spend most of the evening out on the back porch, giggling and giddy. At one point when you return from inside, it takes you a few minutes to sneak your way back into the seat next to his, and when you make it he tells you, Boy am I glad to be sitting next to you again.

Me too, you reply.

Later on, you walk back to the hotel in the rain. You have an umbrella, but you don't bother to get it out. This is something, you both admit to each other. This is definitely something.