lost ambition

I should go riding today. I'm having a day where I feel gloomy and trapped inside my house, and I miss her. The cure is riding, I think. I know I should go. I know I should go.

But I know that I won't go. I know that I'll curl up on the couch and close my eyes because it's easier to do nothing than to work on your goals. It's easier to just go to sleep than to think about your heartache.

There is nothing stopping me but my lost ambition.

tribute

I want to write a book about her, about us. I am afraid. I'm afraid I won't do it right, and then what kind of a tribute is that?

nonwriter

I don't really feel like a writer, today. I feel like a pretend-writer. Someone who thinks that somewhere, vaguely, in the space above her head is a writer, but still prepares to go to bed at a reasonable hour so that she can go to her insipid non-writer job and not thinking about writing all day.

Why?

news at noon

Here's what the news at noon just told me:

A man approached three eleven-year-old girls at a playground in Edmonton. He sexually assaulted one of them, while the others ran away. There was a witness. The witness, rather than rushing to the aid of the little girl, video-taped everything and called the police once he/she had gotten the incriminating footage.

I don't think that's what I would have chosen to do.

song

Song

The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction

the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.

Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
in human--
looks out of the heart
burning with purity--
for the burden of life
is love,

but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.

No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love--
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love
--cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:

the weight is too heavy

--must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.

The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the centerof the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye--

yes, yes,
that's what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.

Allen Ginsberg

little pieces

"There are days I drop words of comfort on myself like falling rain & remember it is enough to be taken care of by myself."

-- storypeople.com

In animal totemry, butterflies represent courage. As tradition goes, when you are visited by a butterfly, it's to bring you the courage and heart to do something important. Last Thursday, the day before I was to pack up my things and my horse and head out to the first horse show in three years (the first attempt at living the way we used to before she passed away), I butterfly fluttered in front of my face in the car on the drive to work. It landed on my dash and sat blinking its pure white wings at me. Saying, "be brave!" from behind the steering wheel.

I was pretty brave, I thought. I wore butterfly socks underneath my riding boots for extra courage, and I wasn't as nervous as I thought I'd be. I did okay.

So now I know that it's possible to have a little piece of what we used to have back again. It's not the same, of course. It's drastically different, but it's a little piece of what she encouraged us to be, and I'll take whatever I can get.

"bridal shower"

there was that day in autumn – three years ago,
blue sky, yellow leaves and the country road.
i sat next to you all afternoon; you opened gifts
(muffin tray after muffin tray after muffin tray)
and thanked everyone for coming.
it's a photograph, now. it’s barely a memory.
it's you and me on that couch on that autumn day
smiling like nothing could ever go wrong
while everything blurs at a million miles per hour in the background.

where these dreams go

and you wonder where these dreams go
cause the world got in your way

I feel derailed, sometimes. And sometimes "sometimes" approaches "all the time," and that's when I just want to curl up under the covers and quit everything in my life. Just close my eyes and forget about responsibility. Forget about the part of myself that went missing one early summer's day and never came back. Fill that dark, shadowy part of myself with years and years of calm, peaceful sleep.

We had so many plans. We are so different from the people we were becoming, back then, before she passed away and everything changed. If she were still here, I'd be eventing pre-training by now. I'd look forward to riding and growing. LB would be showing at recognized dressage shows. LU would be the confident, aggressive rider that she was when Tanya was there to encourage her. Dani would still be riding. These aren't guesses or extrapolations; these were our goals. These were the tracks we were on -- the tracks we decided together to be on, and then we crashed and got scattered in a million different directions.

I spend every day torn between feeling like I could never be the person I was on the way to being, and feeling an intense desire not to disappoint her by being lacklustre and scared to live my life. Where does that leave me? I think about that long drive through the prairies, talking about the future. Picking out show names. Discussing how fun it will be when all of our horses are going, when we could all show together. Feeling glad to be part of a team. Feeling proud of ourselves and excited for the future.

I am scared to do the event next weekend. I've been trying to be excited about it, but I am nervous and scared, because sometimes when I drive home from the barn after a lesson with someone else, I wonder if I can even do it without her. I wonder if I'm just too different now. And then I immediately become scared of disappointing her, so I fill in the forms and mail off the entry. And I want to go light the mailbox on fire to destroy the form.

Why can't we go back to the people we were becoming? I was so happy to be going down that track. Now I'm somewhere so far away.

twenty-first

My twenty-first year will be marked by poetry. By wordswordswords, like all the years before, only this time there are spaces between them that declare things like, "I am twenty-one and trying to be an artist, can't you tell?" Even these words could be a poem if I just hit enter instead of space a little more often.

"morning"

finding sighs between the lines around your mouth
i can tell you're really thinking, now
my fingers find their way up your spine
counting the notches like years of your life.
lie here with me for a while without speaking --
it's only our breath, now
only the air between the thoughts between the sighs
only the lines of our arms and legs and fingers and faces
only the shapes of our shadows and the last breath
you took before opening your eyes and noticing
the light.

"ghosts of our old lives"

I saw your family today.
They are full of brave smiles
and unending hospitality.

I stepped inside your favourite place
expecting to feel familiar
but I felt like an outsider in a time capsule.

Like I was standing on the set
for the Sunday-night movie
someone made about your life.

Not that it was the real thing.

I touched your old things today.
Ran my hand down a stack of your breeches,
felt the weight of your riding bits,
touched your hats, your jackets,
your brushes, your tack.

Every last piece of material
that defined who you were --
and all of it will be gone.

I lay in your pasture today.
I sank into the grass and closed my weary eyes
against the bright white lights
of your Alberta sky.

I felt like sinking my whole body down.
Like growing into the earth beneath me
so that I could be closer to you.
So that I would be a part of you.

"I can't believe it's over," I said,
and looked up at the white clouds
in the bluest sky
And thought about the ghosts of our old lives.

the time is nigh!

I am quitting the greenhouse. Today.

Possibly even right now. I'll just close this window, get out of my desk, go outside and while leaning against my car like someone Really Cool, I will phone in and tell them it's over.

I'm not good at quitting. I'm not good at breaking up with employers. It's awkward. I always feel bad. I always wonder what they must think of me. If they think I was a waste of time.

Okay. I'm going.

It is time.

don't know what

I need to get out of this. How can I get out of this? Of the maddening rush-hour commute to the farthest reaches of the city? Of the alternative: standing behind a counter at a greenhouse, trying to look busy, wiping down the espresso machine for the eighty-five-thousandth time?

I feel that it's socked right in for the rest of the summer. And then I don't know what.

"the start box"

Early morning, quiet except for the munching sounds: animal jaws closing around mouthfuls of sweet hay, stamping little rhythms on the bed of shavings beneath their feet. A low nicker, the scattered sound of grain splattering into the bottom of a bucket.

Then, an hour later in the start box: the slap of leather after triple-checking the girth. The familiar clink of spurs on the stirrup irons. Puffs of air from the horse's nostrils, air condensing into a fog. A whoosh and a snort, steady. The beating of your heart in your own ears.

"Five, four, three, two, one..." the start box attendant says, and at once the sound of hooves on the grass take over, and then the sound of your own breath -- all you hear is hooves and heartbeat and shaky sharp inhales and exhales.

Then the first jump: all sound suspends in the space in the air above the jump that you occupy. You hold your breath, the horse holds his hooves in mid-air and the silence is like all your sounds rushed out of your ears until the landing, when they all rush in again.

"limited edition, at night"

To enter the barn is to step into a breathing entity, filled with muffled stamps of hooves against straw, equine jaws munching hay, old incandescant lights buzzing overhead. And the dark yawn of the tack room door -- no lights inside there, to conserve electricity. The saddles, brushes, veterinary supplies -- pieces of equipment lie low in the dark, sleeping between use. Collecting the dust that perpetually hangs in the air. Hearing swallows pad their nests with horse hairs in the loft up above.

"neon green"

There was one line on the constantly scrolling marquee
in Times Square that hollered out to me
in a blaring neon green voice every time I walked by.

You smoked your last cigarette on my balcony.
You stood facing the street. I watched you
from inside and wondered how long it would be.

Smoke slipped from your lips, curled upwards
from the balcony and slid towards the sky.
It wasn't very long.

You moved your things out the next weekend.
The neon green letters hollered at me,
"Choose your best self."

fear and writing in las vegas

I am feeling an intense urge to do a book of short stories and poetry for Tanya. About her, and my friends, and our stupid little stories, and the ways our lives were changed. And I want it to be illustrated.

But I'm not working on it yet, because I am afraid of it. I'm afraid of a real project. And I'm afraid of revisiting my old ghosts, because I don't know what they will say to me.

"letting it be," edited version

The night he phoned me from Vancouver was the same night I put a letter in the mail for him. It said, "I will be good to you," and I included a cutesy little photo of us that we did in a photo-booth at the mall. We are cheek-to-cheek in the little black-and-white square and our eyes seem like they belong to other people, now.

He phoned me from Vancouver and he sounded far away. Farther than the west coast; like he was calling Edmonton from China or New Zealand or the South Pole. I was just about to say,
"I've been thinking of you," when he blurted it out.

"There's someone else," he said, and coughed. There were several beats of silence while I thought about the letter -- in my mind it was already floating magically through the clouds across two provinces, knowing its destiny. It was following an imaginary line from the red mailbox down my street to the little cubby that has his last name on it, in the lobby of his apartment building (because that's how mail gets around, in my head, anyway). And I want to snatch the letter out of the air. Send a trained falcon after it, or a skydiver, or a seven-forty-seven jet airplane.

"Oh." This was all I could think of to say. I was seeing our black-and-white faces, now -- our cheek-to-cheek grins.

“It's been this way for a while," he said, and coughed again.

"Okay," I said, thinking about the way I'd signed my name with a heart next to it. Thinking about my saccharine little x-o-x-o.

"Be good," he said, turning the tone of his voice upwards, trying to sound amiable. I found this little sentence enormously ironic, and maybe if this had been happening to another couple, and if he and I were just standing together on the sidelines watching, I'd mention that fact to him and he'd laugh and say, "you're right; that is ironic," but as it stands I didn't think I should comment on it.

"I guess so," is what I eventually came up with, and he muttered a strangled-sounding "be seeing you" and I pressed the phone down into the receiver.

Outside, at the end of the street, I approached the red mailbox. I opened the little slot, peered inside, tried sticking my hand in. I tried jiggling the box to and fro, as if that would suddenly make my letter shoot out from inside and land safely in my hands. I thought about going back home and getting a screwdriver: maybe I could dismantle the entire mailbox, sort through the pile of birthday cards and bills-to-be-paid, locate my letter, and then put the whole thing back together. I thought about contacting Canada Post: maybe they would bring down some sort of Postal SWAT Unit, maybe they already have such a team in place for emergencies like this one. Maybe I could throw a lit match down the little slot. As a last resort, I kicked the mailbox and then jumped around in pain on one foot for a while. None of these ideas, while brilliant, would work.

So I went home. The roll of stamps was still on the kitchen table. There were no messages on the answering machine, no laughing voice saying, "Darling, I was only kidding! Got you good, didn't I? Anyway, I love you, and sweet dreams!" Just my dark apartment, and my enormous, empty bed.

"I will be good to you," I said aloud to the cat, who looked at me strangely and left the room. I let out a snort of laughter -- this whole thing reminded me of a sitcom -- and sat down on my bed. Maybe I could write another letter, to counteract the first. It could be all spiteful and mean, and I could include a photo of us together with his face all inked out with a Sharpie, and there would be no adorable x-o-x-o, and no heart next to my name -- no, I wouldn't even sign my name at all! The paper and stamps and envelopes were just in the next room. If I did it tonight, he'd get both letters at once.

Then I thought about his Someone Else. Someone Else is beautiful and serene, and she'd open the letters before he got home and then they'd look at them together and laugh and think about how glad they were that I was out of the picture, and the two counteracting letters would solidify their relationship. He would smile lovingly at Someone Else and know that he'd made the right decision.

If this were happening to another couple, and he and I were standing together on the sidelines, he'd grimace and say, "She should not have sent that second letter!" And I'd agree, and we'd watch the story unfold in all of its gory detail. He would think that sending a second, spiteful letter would be a bad idea. He'd say, "She should know to just let it be."

I curled up on my side of the enormous bed we’d bought together seven months ago. I stared across the white sheets where he used to lay on his stomach – he would put his face right into his pillow, and I never understood how he could possibly breathe, but miraculously, each morning he’d get up and make the coffee and turn the shower on for me to stumble into. His face would look all crinkled and pillow-indented.

So I tried pressing my face into my pillow, then. It felt cool and comforting, like drawing the curtains on a bright morning. I stayed like that for a long time, breathing in and out through the fabric of my pillowcase. Even when the cat jumped up onto the bed and walked across my back with its prodding little paws, I kept my face in my pillow and my arms at my sides. I was actively letting it be.

With my face in my pillow and the cat curling up at the base of my spine, I decided to cling to the faint hope that he’d feel guilty when he received the letter. He’d look across the kitchen table of his apartment at Someone Else, and wonder if he’d made the right decision. Instead of tossing the letter into the trash, he’d secretly keep it in his sock drawer. Someone Else would find it one day while packing for a romantic weekend trip and confront him. There would be an enormous fight, and Someone Else would leave him, and he would lie for hours with his face pressed into his pillow.

What I hated most about the whole thing was that, either way, there was nothing I could possibly do to change anything. I took my face out of the pillow. I turned my head sideways, and after looking at the emptiness of our fabulous bed, I shut my eyes against the reality of my impending loneliness.

less cold

I'm trying to write Trinity a letter, but I just feel like I could go on and on and on forever and never finish. I feel like there are billions of little things that I could say, and no one letter will ever in a bazillion years encompass all of who Tanya was and what she means to me.

I spent some quality time this morning with best friends. Okay, one best friend and two horses -- one of which is a best friend, most of the time! We rode out in a green field in the misty rain and she said, "we'll just pretend it's Ireland!" and that made it feel less cold.

head up

I sent Eric a lengthy email, listing my woes. I felt bad after I sent it. I don't mean to ruin his good time in England with my sad, Canadian life. But I missed him so much last night, while I cried about Tanya and the memorial and Christy's wedding, and my friends, and my poverty, and everything else that's been compounding over the past week.

"Head up, baby," he wrote back. That is such an Eric thing to say. And an Eric thing to do. Be brave and strong and put your chin up and live your life. That's what he would do.

That's what she would have done, too.