Wish You Were Here

Coming home on the night ferry from Victoria I saw so many things.
I was bundled and standing at the bow, the stars were legion, the big dipper closer than I’ve ever seen it. In the dark of Active Pass the ferry illuminated the islands, giving the forests a gently supernatural glow in the moonless night, and glinting off the whitecaps lurching from its wake. As we came out of the pass there was an arc of cloud formation crossing the sky, Tsawwassen twinkling beneath it on the horizon. The arc seemed to hang over the city, but as we got closer the perspective shifted and I realized the arc was low and close, out over the ocean, forming a sort of gateway we would pass under. The clouds looked like a parade of woodland creatures, each running at full speed, and at that moment in their strides where none of their feet were touching the ground. Fox, hare, stoat, vole, possum, badger... and all the little ferries criss crossing the water underneath, tiny jewel cities set adrift on the night sea. 
All this celestial and corporeal phenomena, the stars, the clouds, the boats, the trees, the twinkle, the glow, I could witness it all at once, my face in the wind, wide open with awe and joy.

Swimming Versus Falling

The fever scratches at my door

I yell from the kitchen that now is not a good time

The scratching pauses

In the silence I sink back into myself, like wading into a cool swimming hole, the leaves of the surrounding trees fluttering like nervous birds, but my naked body is calm and neither in the future or the past, just here in the lapping water

The fever scratches again, more insistently, and my body is pulled from the water, a tumult of words churn the treetops and the leaves are no longer anxious birds, but angry dogs, hungry ones, and the barking along with the scratching

I yell again IT IS NOT A GOOD TIME and there is no pause and the scratching has become banging and the door breaks down and I can feel the fever heat spread towards me across the floor and up my body and I am burning and shaking and I can not discern one noise from another from words or meaning 

All there is now is please please stop make it stop 

I promise to stop wanting what I want

I promise to let go

Please let me breathe

Please give me silence and return my nervous birds to me 

But the trees shake themselves out of the ground and come crashing into the kitchen and through the floor and through the foundation and their weight forcing a hole in the earth and me and the kitchen and the trees crash right through magma and out the other side and into a landscape that might as well be the moon 

And all the silence of being lost and alone should be terrifying but instead I find myself breathing and still

The landscape unfamiliar

 But the scratching stopped

I look around for somewhere to swim

The Present Breath

Biking home from beach and very satisfying ocean swim, at magic hour, I stopped near my house, on a rise where you can still see sky and all the way to the mountains, and where there is a little park, with whorls of long grasses. That light, just the moment after the last bit of the sun has sunk behind the horizon, and everything glows, and your vision starts to play tricks on you. That light embraced the whorls of grasses, and the particular gold of them, dry and almost in sheafs, hints of green in the tenacity of other plantings - that deep gold, those traces of green, colours that take the path that goes from my eyeballs to my heart, and further, into my soul and everything that made me who I am. The peace, solace, the little wind that rises to rustle the grass, the description of ages on top of ages carried on that breeze. The giddy, lustful time right before all becomes sere, and fuel for fire. I could live in that moment, the sweetness of the smell, the warm wind on my bare arms, all time before and forever stilled and captured on this in-breath.

Reasons I Find It Hard To Wake Up

You should see the Chinatown I dreamed last night.
Rooftop dumpling and noodle cafe, looking over a courtyard bustling with humans and leafy shade trees, surrounded by crumbling brick buildings, held together by ancient layers of multicoloured, peeling paint in graphic shapes. Windows filmy with time and steam, tall windows framed by brick arches and packed with hanging plants, drummers practicing inside.  At street level grocery stores with avocados and yams as big as your head and tea counters full of all the artists, talking, crying, laughing, their exquisite shoes in various states of disrepair, and having to ask them to move to get to the precarious stacks of giant produce, everyone laughing boisterously when a pile rolled onto the creaky old wood floor.  Friends’ apartments in odd shapes at the peaks of buildings, with window seats and skinny steep stairs down from sitting rooms to kitchens to bedrooms.  Soft pinks and lacy curtains.  And kissing old friends met on cobblestone, music in their eyes and mouths, as we laughed about how hard it was to come down from trips to Calgary.  I wondered in my dream how I hadn’t known this Chinatown existed, after all my years of living here, and how I could live in one of those falling down places, draped in silk, home with my tribe.

What I Would Have Said To You If You Had Ever Been Born

I saw a man and a baby, the man was jogging, pushing the baby in a stroller. The man looked like it hurt so much, to be jogging. I thought, that man is going to drop dead of a heart attack on the seawall, leaving that baby alone. Then a few minutes later the man did drop dead, and I saw him fall, and I was there. I called 911 and took that baby out of the stroller and held her on my knee while I talked to the 911 operator. Someone asked to the general crowd where the baby from the stroller was and I said I have her, and everyone could see she was happy there. 

"It's going to be okay, little baby," I said, "don't worry, don't worry."  We both looked at the mountains a while. Then I sighed, and said, "No, it's never going to be okay." That baby listened. She held eye contact and furrowed her brow and pursed her lips. 

"It will be with you all through your life, informing your choices and identity. You will search a long time, baby, for that missing piece of your heart. But this is your story, and it will make you interesting, and complex, and you will have to decide how to be all those things, use them. Let it happen, baby."

Then the fire department came and then the police, and finally an ambulance. Not very reassuring if you're waiting to be saved, but that man wasn't waiting, he was dead. There was activity and questions and then someone took that baby out of my arms and she started wailing. Some time her mother arrived, too, and started wailing, too, and they nearly harmonized. I noticed the resonance specifically. 

The Inevitable

I am nearly ready to get the laundry from the dryer.  Right after I bang on the wall a bit, to let the neighbours know the thumping bass is penetrating even the concrete between us. I bang on the gyp rock wall, not the concrete one, though, so as not to break my hand, and so there's a possibility of being heard.

I believe myself to be the crazy lady. Do you know what I mean? I talk to myself a lot in my home, and often wonder if anyone just stops in front of my apartment door and listens to me. I speak in voices, do scenes with myself, angrily rant about what's broken in the apartment, how cold and stupid it is, complain to myself about the dumbassness of people, cry sometimes, very occasionally wail, and, once, such protracted screaming that I was surprised no one came to check on me or called the police. Every once in a while in life, the only thing that works is a good, long, loud scream.

Are the gods wrathful or kind? Within me or without? It is hard to tell because even when things don't go my way I can never be sure if it is because of the gods, or in spite of the gods, or if it is the exact thing I need at that exact moment, and the gods know, so I ought to just accept it. "Enlightenment is cooperation with the inevitable." This is my favourite thing I have heard lately, and I'm really, really sorry, but I can't remember the man's name who wrote it in a book. If you look it up on the internet, using a search engine of your choosing, the whole sentence, you'll find the writer lickety split. I know, I've looked it up before, but forget now. "But, Riel", you may well be gearing up to ask, "you're using the internet right as you're writing this entry, so why wouldn't you just Goo(my hand pops out and clamps over your mouth, to stop you from using that damn word as a word and to use other words to convey your meaning so you do)I mean, why wouldn't you just look it up using a search engine of your choice right now right while you're already most of the way there?" Good question. Sigh. One sec.   


 Just hum a little while you wait, to pass the time. Hmmm, hmm, dum de dum, la la la, mmmm, hhhmmm,


Anthony de Mello is the fellow who wrote the quote in a book.

I came on here to talk about depression, and this is what happened instead. Ain't life a funny old bear?

xoRH

Royal Oak Burial Park

Had a strangely beautiful afternoon with my dad at the Royal Oak Burial Park in Victoria this past Sunday. We went to look at the green burial part of the cemetery, because he's started thinking about where to be interred. Or whether to be cremated. Or what. It was an easier and more beautiful conversation and walk than you might imagine. I personally think he's going to be around for quite a long while yet, but I'm glad he's not scared, and is willing to talk about what he wants. Our cycle is what it is, no matter how hard people try to stop aging and cheat death, and his making peace with the process is an inspiring thing. Probably this cemetery won't be his end game, too much highway noise plus a realization that maybe being cremated and having a little of himself scattered in all his favourite places in the world would be better. What's funny is how he is not afraid of dying, but he is worried about spending eternity in Victoria. I hear ya, dad.

I Dream In Not So Subtle Analogies

I woke so many times and each time felt fatigue flood my body, forcing me back to sleep, going back to the same dream, until it had concluded, like I was in an alternate reality that would not let me go until my task was completed.  I slept so late.

I dreamed fascism came to us.  It started in the schools, where else?  I saw it coming and tried to escape slowly and quietly, but was thwarted at every turn by doors that were locked, guards that appeared suddenly, first jovial and in costumes, under the guise of keeping the students safe.  A festival was named, there was food and a circus atmosphere, so that most did not feel the yoke tightening.  The more I tried to run the harder it was to move my feet, and the more I felt myself whispering instead of yelling.  Those whispers, though, they found their way to the ears of those who also recognized the signs.  We spoke falsehoods out loud to each other as a diversion, while writing the truth in notes.  We made borscht, giant pots of it, and from under the sound of the rhythmic chopping of the beets and onions - we chopped yams and carrots and sweet potatoes, too, but only as a distraction, they were never intended for our soup, just a pile of colours to dazzle scrutinizing eyes - from the rhythm of the chopping was born a plan.  More joined us, and we continued to make individual and easily detectable escape attempts, to be thrown back over and over.  But quietly we built strength, and with coded messages and well timed precision, one night we ran en masse and I was thrown far over the wall by the hands of many who sacrificed themselves for the cause, so I could run and run and spread the word, to free us from the isolation of silence.

Before this I also dreamed a talking horse would not let me out of buying it, for the steep price of seven apples.  So who am I that my dreams are to be trusted?

Me and the Atheist

A few weeks ago I found myself trying to describe to an atheist what I feel about God.  The atheist is a very, very smart man.  An exceedingly talented writer, director and performer.  He is also an absoluteist, in my estimation.  He is fun to talk to, but sometimes can get so loud and smart and certain that I begin to feel like he's not really in it for the exchange but for the delivering.  The conversation went to many places, including my feeling that atheists can be zealots on the same level as evangelical religious types. Atheists don't like it when I say that I feel atheism has become its own religion, that you can not merely point to the absence of A god, and the lie of THE god and sit back and say, "See, I've cured the human need for spiritual fufillment".  I'm not here to tell you about that part of the conversation, though I'll expound on it if asked.  The end of our discussion was when the atheist pointed to the dictionary definition of God when I suggested that I had formed my own meaning, my own relationship.  He said because of the dictionary, (the atheist bible!!), (I am gonna get myself yelled at, I can tell), there is no room for discussion about the meaning of God.  I have been thinking about this for weeks, I felt unfinished with him, and wanted to think more clearly about what I meant. Then tonight I wrote the entry before this, about love and hunger and sadness, and then  had to write him an email, because I felt I had clarified something for myself.   I have excerpted the email here, because I want to keep talking about this and finding my own way. It is as follows:

"I have been thinking constantly since you and I spoke at the party, since I attempted to describe to you what I feel in my heart and soul is my connection to God, and what it means to me. I wanted to say to you that I have been bothered by your assertion that the dictionary definition of God means that I can not develop my own idea of what God is, my own feelings, because once the definition is set, there is no longer room for growth.  I can not accept this, as I can not accept that there is no room for evolution and interpretation when it comes to language and the poetics of the soul.  I do not subscribe to the Bible as truth, nor do I feel that the organizations of specific religions are doing the world anything but harm, unless you are a fat rich white man, then organized religion is totally your friend! I do, however, feel a strong connection to the divine, to a powerful force that is created by the collective energies of humans and nature. It is, on a very large scale, much like the entity that is created when two humans fall in love. The nurturing of that tender and fragile relationship allows a third thing to be born, something alive because of the two people loving each other, but also separate from those two people, and available for them to draw strength from, but also able to turn dark when not properly negotiated and tended to. I hesitate to suggest symbiosis, because that isn't quite it, but certainly the love can not exist without the humans, and the humans can not rise up without the love.

I feel there are so many more words for love that we have not even invented, because there are so many kinds of love, and the same is true for God. We have defined it narrowly, but it encompasses so much more than Oxford or Merriam-Webster can describe. I will continue to use the word to find common ground with other humans, to be a beginning of a life long conversation and exploration. I do not think there is a single being that rules us all and decides our fates and eternal dwelling place, but I think that all humanity continually creates something together, a temperamental and divine, humming consciousness that both gives and takes, can be unpredictable though comforting, and which you can not always find, even if you are looking, because it can also be petulant. Just like love.

I have not written this in a draft after draft fashion, I'm just thinking and talking. I believe language to be malleable, and love and God to be ever searching for their own place in the lexicon."

That is what I wrote to him, but it just scratches the surface of what I mean, and leaves out the details of a lifetime of divine experiences and the reception of both destructive and inspiring energies from beyond myself.  It is, perhaps, the continuing search that keeps me alive and breathing.

Love,

Riel

But you're in love!

As if it can save you. As if the fragility of romantic love can withstand the cloying pressure of being the only source of happiness, of health. Trust me, it can not bear that kind of weight. Romantic love wants tender ministrations, it needs seeing to, watching over, particular and detailed negotiations. It can not thrive in darkness, it can not sustain when it is only drawn on and never replenished. It will be bled dry, left sere and cracked beyond repair. It is so temperamental, unpredictable, a river which alternately floods its banks and is reduced to a trickle, if there at all. There is no resting state, no compromise. It can not save you for it is always asking to be saved.

So, certainly, it has been wonderful to fall in love, it has even felt transformative along the way. But in the face of what I perceive to be irretrievable sadness in me, when all I desire is silence and stillness, the entity that we have created between us, that draws its own breath, it can not be asked to stop breathing, to put aside its own insatiable hungers and thirsts and look only outwards. It will always be greedy.      

Why I Left Facebook and How I Am Doing Now

The process of my quitting Facebook began, if you don't mind a bit of fucking dramatic license, the moment I signed up.  I resisted Facebook for a while, kept hearing about it in 2007, dewy skinned pretty people kept telling me I just had to join.  I was living a quiet little life, had taken a break from comedy and wasn't really in the mood to get, you know, CONNECTED.  Then I guess I was, because I did it. I don't remember much about what that first experience was like, I remember being reluctant to post too many pictures, wondering about ownership and whatnot, and enjoying the way the status updates were formatted, that they always started with your name, encouraging, if not forcing, you to tell your stories in the present tense.  "Riel is excited to announce she bought a pair of pants that seemingly fit." I don't know, I can't remember my status updates and I can't go back and research them because I never, ever want to sign in to Facebook again.

Honestly, I'm peacefully hopeful that I am part of a domino chain, that the speed is increasing, and that Facebook will ebb off into the ether, destined or doomed to the realm of specialty or niche social networks, like Friendster or Myspace.  I also know you're not all with me.

I could have done the French goodbye, left the party by quietly slipping away, leaving my 1,500 connections to wonder what they'd done to deserve being unfriended and possibly blocked by me, none of them wanting to address the teeny tiny voice at the back of their brain, whispering the suggestion that I may actually have just up and gone. Deleted the whole shebang. I could have done it that way.  I didn't, though.  I announced it. I created a stir. I made regular status updates over a week or ten days letting people know they could still reach me via email, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Soundcloud and my blog.  Disconnecting, my ass.

At first people scoffed, "YOU? You leave Facebook? Preposterous! You love Facebook! You'll never do it, you don't have the GUTS to do it!" I smiled to myself, knowing I did have the guts. My very first step, before announcing it, was to delete it off my iPhone. That step was a revelation, freeing up my mind and beginning the healing journey of expunging "like" out of my brain as my first reaction to any joyful, interesting or engaging experience. The comment threads on my status updates were steady, repeating choruses of "Why?" Why, you asked, and I told you.

My relationship to Facebook was not healthy. I spent too much time there and, because of the oft repeated message in the entertainment industry that you must promote yourself via social media, that there is no career for you if you don't maintain a presence, a page, where everyone can like you...because of that message all the time I spent there gave me a false sense of productivity. I could spend hours going down the rabbit hole of reading articles and commenting on statuses and writing the story of my day, and chatting on messenger. It felt like I was doing something important for myself, that somehow this would all lead to success. Really, though, all I'd done was avoid my real work, writing, for another hour, two hours, three hours...

Success. Reason number two I left was the anxiety, depression. It was increasingly apparent to me that everyone I was connected to was having a more adventurous, prosperous, joyful, fulfilling life than I was. And I felt like a big liar knowing that due to my desire to keep any whining to myself, what I presented to Facebook made everyone else feel the same things about me.

I also felt like I was losing a sense of proportion about how much time and energy I was supposed to be devoting to friendship, and with whom. I have spent the last couple of years examining my behaviour within personal relationships and cleaning up my act. I wanted to learn how to be honest and calm, thoughtful and receptive to the humans I most wanted to keep close. It took practice and there were some mistakes made, some embarrassments had, some painful separations, and some extremely surprising revelations. The result is a smaller group of people who are close me, who I feel myself with, both because I show them my true self and because I let them love me. I have also found a romantic love that surpasses all the hopes and expectations I ever had of such an experience. As I made these changes and fostered these relationships, Facebook seemed to drift farther and farther from my value system, became a glaring example to me of the person I did not want to be.

When the private messages started trickling in, along with the phone numbers and email addresses came feelings. Many people applauded me for my courage (?!) and berated themselves for not having the strength (their word!) to do the same. I was a little surprised by the language around the topic being so filled with guilt and shame, so like addict language, of the apologies for being weak, but I remembered using all that same language around my relationship to Facebook. I was more surprised by the angry responses. I was called selfish, chastised for my lack of professionalism and dedication to my work as an entertainer, accused of abandoning people and their ability to keep in touch with everyone they like but don't have time for because they have children and jobs. How dare I!

Well, I dared. At the decided time on the decided date my finger hovered over the keypad and I bit my lip and then I did it. I felt nervous and exhilarated, and proud. I did it! I was free! As I'm sure you would suspect, my immediate instinct was to proudly announce it on Facebook! I resisted. And then Facebook told me I would have 14 days to really really decide, it would keep my account warm for me, the home fires burning, should I want to be embraced back into the fold, the family. I made that my private date with deletion. I kept away for the two weeks, never peeking, never checking to see if it was still there, never succumbing to the jones I was having for praise. In those 14 days Facebook mysteriously reinstalled itself four times on my iPhone, taunting me. I stayed true to myself, though, and found myself coincidentally, or not, flossing more, going to bed earlier, biking to the pool to swim a kilometer each day and reading more books.

My boyfriend says I spend way more time on Instagram and Twitter now that I don't have Facebook, but we're just getting to know each other, too, and he isn't entirely aware of what life was like before he came around. I think Facebook took up the space where he is now, the space where my nightly talk show at the Fringe is now, the space where I am writing for a living now.  I left the virtual love behind to make room for all the tangible love I can get my hands on, and I am delighted to report I feel solid in my footing.  Attached to the planet and connected to humanity in a more visceral, exciting and consistent way than I have in five years. I know less about 1,500 people than I did a month ago, but get to put my hands on their shoulders and look them in the eye and say thank you for your time and affection after I've run into them on the street and they've filled me in on the goings on.  It's nice to look people right in the eye when they're telling you their news.

It's a new era in some ways, and a return to something older, too. Something human.

Feel free to share this blog post, you know, on Facebook.

Love,

Riel

Dispatch from Marin County

Just overheard the quintessential Northern California Lady conversation at the health food market.  The phrase "I hear you, and for me..." was used multiple times by both parties, as were "personal growth bootcamp" and "I now see my needs as blessings".  I just ate my beets and blueberries and felt glad to be loved.

The Wasp

I am watching a wasp try to escape through a glass window.  It must be so frustrating for him, banging his head against the glass that way.  The intensity of his buzzing ever increasing as he takes harder and harder runs at it.  At first, because I loathe wasps, I am inclined to think, "What a dumb fucking wasp", and snicker derisively to myself.  I think of him in the same category as a fat, slow fly, who will not fly out the nearby open door no matter how you try to shoo him in the right direction.  I try to make a Vine video of the wasp, because I think he's funny, which I think I will title "Dumb Wasp", which is why I watch him instead of killing him, my usual first instinct with wasps.  There is a nest close by, which we have located and plan to dispose of with harsh chemicals in the dead of night.

As I watch this wasp through the lens of my iPhone, on the tiny screen, over and over again erasing and reshooting the six second video trying to make it perfect, I become intrigued with his system of searching for a way out.  He is not like a fly at all, just hitting at the same spot over and over and over until he drops from exhaustion onto the windowsill, his wings listlessly and desperately buzzing with less and less frequency until he finally expires, with so much time to wonder where it was he'd gone wrong.  I stop trying to film the wasp and just watch him.

I have time to watch him, as I am holed up at my mother's, contemplating my future and wondering about the paths I have chosen, and which ones to choose next, and going in circles in my mind, day and night.  I have all the time in the world, until I die.

The window he is trying to bust through is made up of nine square panes of glass, each about 10 x 10 inches.  He starts in the middle pane of the top row.  He crawls every which way he can on this pane, then buzzes intently and bashes against the glass.  At first it seems he is going to go around and around it forever, and at one point really makes a run at it, backing way up from the window and throwing his little body, dare I say shoulder, furiously against the resistant pane.  He must feel so close, be so frustrated to be able to see outside, right in front of him, and not be able to get there.  I start to feel like I am in for a long day of watching this guy.

After a few minutes of crawling diagonally, then all the way around the perimeter, then more diagonals, then lots of buzzing and crashing, he pauses for a moment and his front legs gently stroke his antennae, like a cat pausing to clean itself, like he is thinking.  Then he surprises me and crawls over the wood frame to the next pane.  He does not take so long to explore that pane, does a bit of buzzing, once round the perimeter, not even the whole way, and crawls back over the frame to the original pane.  More pausing and antennae stroking.  He walks over the frame again, to another pane, and does an even shorter explore.  Another pause, stroke, think, I can almost see his little brow furrowing.  Then, very quickly and with clear intent, he briefly investigates each other pane, quickly and obviously coming to the conclusion that they are all the same as the much explored first pane.  He makes a decisive move away from the window, forcing me to duck, and while I worry that he is going to fly up my skirt and make the necessary adjustments, he, no pun intended, beelines past me and right out the wide open door, and suddenly the sunroom is silent, buzz free.

Just now a fly has come in and is frantically thrashing about from window to window, all over the room, mad and making wild, irrational guesses, ignoring my attempts to urge him towards freedom.  Stupid fly.

Now I am thinking about sneaking up to the wasp's home in the middle of the night and ruthlessly killing he and all his brethren, seeing his application of logic and inference, his easy acceptance of the evidence.  That fly and his slow, regretful death on the sill, am I him?  I would rather be the wasp.  I am holding his story up to my own and wondering when I will see that this window is not my way out, and that maybe I ought to just turn around and use the door.

Another One (a poem)

I dreamed you were a blond coyote

I held you and we cried because your blue eyes were so clear

And your smile was genuine
Not Cheshire or gritted show biz face

You were so blond, standing, leaning on that porch

Cool as the day you were born into your thirty names

Our Geronimo

In the morning after waking to a tear stained pillow

And your face in everything

I had a run in with a coyote

Not a blond, but still

Blue blue eyes and ragged

Not too long ago soft and beautiful, hope soaked and playful

Pacing, confused, back and forth in front of the little church

Things That Don't Belong on Twitter or Facebook

I have the tenderest heart and I can't figure out how to protect it from always being broken by people who claim to love me but actually misunderstand me or want me to be something different than I am. I just get to feeling like myself is good when I get knocked back again by being told I'm too aggressive, or too honest, or too sensitive, or too....everything. Where on the planet do I go to not be received as just too much?

postmortem (a poem)

when I am dead

wash my body

run your hands slowly over the parts

recognize and discover

tenderly clean my pallid, stony skin

then smooth oils scented with geranium into my skin

and my hair

spread fresh rose petals across my body

and wrap me in linen

carry my body, wrapped this way

carry my body through the streets

let the parade form behind me

let them sing and cry out loud

let everyone know I am dead

call them into the streets

dance beside them and all around me

let ribbons fly and drums be beaten

when I am dead set the dogs to howling

and open the bird cages

let time stop when I am dead

Tiny Ways (a poem)

Tiny Ways

The threat of a long arc of forgiveness

raises questions for me

Mainly, is the steadfastness of your love

tethered to the consistency of your morning ritual?

If your eggs are runny,

will I pay in a thousand tiny ways, long into the future?

A thousand tiny ways

one would be silence

another would be noise

a third would be distance

maybe chatter would be on the list

and absence

persistent drunkenness

wandering eye

revealing arsonist tendencies

subterfuge

sending postcards when traveling for work, but only writing famous, vaguely applicable quotes on them instead of your true sentiment

teabags in the sink

water on the bathroom floor

dirty dishes beside the bed

interfering with my crossword puzzles

getting a cat without telling me

letting the garden die

never fixing the broken stair

not reading my work

keeping the good wine for yourself

your leaving taking me by surprise

Letter to a friend who lost a friend

Dear G_____,

A couple of years back one of my closest friends died. A touchstone, a measuring stick, a bawdy, brave, beautiful man, a craftsman, a wanderer, a gentleman, an intellectual, a collector, a dandy, a hobo, a trickster, a voice of reason and a bottomless well of unconditional love for me. He died suddenly.

A few years before that my dad died. Well, my stepdad, but, you know, my dad. It was awful and eviscerating. He was sick for three years.

When my dad died, even though we'd had so long to get things up to date, he died with lots of anger and much unresolved between us.

When my friend died we were up to date, we knew how much we loved each other, and had no stone left unturned.

My mom and I had an interesting conversation not two days ago, about dream visits from our dead friends and family, and how lovely and how hard they can be. We were talking of the kind of dreams where they come back and tell you they'd never died, but hadn't told anyone, and we wondered whether we'd be mad or happy or what if they came back. I realized if my friend came wandering into the room, I'd be so blissed out that he was back, I wouldn't care if he'd died or not died, I'd just be grateful. But if my dad came back, I'd be furious. Where had he gone, why hadn't he told us, etc...etc...

I am not clear on the exact root of the different feelings, but I know this. My friend is deeply embedded in a beautiful place in my heart, and when I need him, I can hear him. He is with me all the time, and sometimes I have felt his physical presence so strongly, mostly in the form of a hand on the small of my back, encouraging me forward.

I am so so sorry for your loss, G_____.  These friends that we count on, that we carve out space for in our lives, when they leave us before we are prepared it is a devastating blow, and leaves a hole the size and shape of them that can never be filled. But we also store their love in us, and I am surprised and delighted to report that he feels as alive and present to me now as he did when I could touch him. I miss him terribly, and still really crave holding his rough hands in mine and trading dirty jokes with him, but I am constantly amazed at how much of him lives in me.

I hope you get to have a dream visit from your friend, and I hope you find some solace in the piece of him that lives in you, and that can't be dulled by time or experience, because he's part of who you are now.

Love,

Riel

Oh, Country That I Love

Dear Canada.

I love you. So much that today I am in a funk over your imminent descent into a dark place, thanks to the Harper government. I still believe, Canada, that you have all the potential in the cosmos to be an innovator, a leader on the world stage. Your youth, your open space and rich stores of fertile land and raw materials, your well educated population, all of this positions you so well to be great - to gather the world behind your skirts and show them the way forward into a future we have only imagined. Instead, though, you are being dragged under a rock. Held hostage by fear and greed.

Do not despair, Canada, even though my own visage may be clouded with worry and stress, with the strain of concern for my entire nation. Do not despair, my beloved country. Though we are about to be plunged into an ideologically dark time, we can plan and plot and organize and never stop making noise. Let us not let bill C-38 deflate and disarm us, but let us use it to fuel our certainty, focus our energy, and bind us together as one force, one voice, one engine of change and forward momentum. We have been set back, but let it only be the curtain that is pulled back, revealing to us all the blights, that we may begin to cure the ills, and build a country that reflects us, impresses us, represents us.

Love,

Riel

Assignment #22 - Adriana Bucz - First Kiss

This is true, as I remember it.
 

Jake was a blue eyed red headed boy of five.  The kiss was in the barn. We must have met before that day, but I don’t remember meeting him, I just remember the kiss.

We were a vagabond gang of children, wild haired and sly eyed, brothers and sisters for life, not bonded of blood, but of experience. Gypsies.  Hippies.  Theatre people.  Parents young, and caught up in their own fantasies of running away with the circus.  We were, from as young as 2 or three, left entirely to our own devices.  You know how in the Peanuts comic strip, you never see the parents, and on the cartoon they just sound like a wah wah pedal when they speak….that’s what it was like for us.  Send us up the quarter mile long dirt driveway to the schoolbus in the morning and hope for the best.  Often times Jake and I would take an alarm clock and our bagged lunches and head off into the woods for the day intsead of getting on the country school bus that would take us to Armstrong.  Just time it right so we’d be back when the bus was, and no one was the wiser. 

But that was later, and on a different farm.  Jake started as the sweetest gift to the world.  Blue eyes that stared you down, even at that tender age, and plotted.  With a devil in his smile, and a little lilt in his troublemaking giggle, Jake was always looking for the best way to tease you.  He would, by the time were seven or so, already be displaying a prodigious talent for playing the guitar. At age five I fell in love with him.  And it stayed that way until we were seventeen, when he was struck down by a mental illness, one that would rip him from his friends and family, and from me.

At five we are playing boys chase the girls, or girls chase the boys, in the barn, outside a town called Tappen, in the Shuswap region of  BC.  On all the farms we stayed at, the hay barn always became our place.  We’d sleep there at night, and dare each other to do dangerous things.  Walk the beams, or close your eyes and walk on the stacks of hay bales, guaranteeing falling between two bales and lacerating your legs on the sharp straw.  We made forts and nests and brought bedding and supplies, holing up for days, cajoling and ridiculing, talking and laughing, playing games and emulating our young, wild parents.

Boys chase the girls.  Jake catches me.  We sit on a hay bale. Freckles and a sweet little tongue.  Blue eyes open, I can tell, because I open mine.

I love him for years and years, always assuming he loves all other girls better than me. I make up songs about it and sing them to myself in the woods, in the fields. This tortures me through our childhoods and into our teenaged years.  I am sensitive to him, and shy around him, because I think he only wants to be around girls who are pretty.  Until a time we are both at the  Caravan Farm for a party.  There is a campfire, and music on the gazebo, and so many people.  And all these girls I don’t know, who look like dancers, and are tall and pretty.  And they are flocking to Jake.  This exquisitely handsome young man, grinning all the time.  I leave him alone because I think he  would want to be with them.  I sit at the campfire by myself, in a teenaged slouch.  And then, Jake comes over, sits next to me, puts his arm around me, wonders where I’ve been all night.  Right here.  I ask him how come he’s not dancing with the pretty girls, he says he has only wanted to be with me all night.  He loves me best, and that’s that.  I feel suddenly and simultaneously connected to the earth and untethered from it, rising into the night sky with the sparks from the fire.  We talk into the night, make plans for futures, dreams, ideas of our lives to come.  Wonder how it can include each other.  My heart is flooded with understanding.  It is not about the outside, and I don’t know how he sees me, but it’s not the way I see myself, and for that I am grateful.

It is not long after this night I get a call.  We are 17 now.  Jake, the caller tells me, something has happened to Jake.  He and one of our brothers spent three days doing acid and now he’s lost his mind.  They found him wandering down the highway, naked, and his tongue lolling out of his mouth, swollen from him chewing on it incessantly.  They’ve brought him home,  Home.  Where they feed him whiskey and dope, living in the woods.  Not to the hospital.  They are not taking him to the doctor.  I want him to go to the doctor, I don’t think it’s right, but I’m far away in Vancouver, and not really part of the scene where he’s from.  Dope growers tucked into the mountains, living on the sly, avoiding the establishment, suspicious of western medicine.  I call him.  We have the strangest conversation.  He’s calm now, but not thinking straight.  He’s on his front porch and he’s looking out at a view I know, can imagine.  Looking down from the hill, over the lake, the blue of the summer sky matching Jake’s eyes.  He is worried, he tells me, because there are a few clouds in the sky, and one is littler than the others.  And this little one is lower down in the sky, and he looks so small and lonely, Jake is becoming overwrought that there is nothing he can do for this baby cloud, who he thinks must be in mortal anguish at having been left behind.  His voice is thin and far away.  He doesn’t laugh, there is nothing of the trickster in him.  I want to go to him, but I don’t know what to do.  I think he must get better.  Of course he will get better.  This boy wonder.  This musician.  This heart of my heart. 

But he doesn’t get better.  The reports filter in to me at UVic.  He has become violent and aggressive towards his friends and family.  He is out of control.  But they still won’t take him to the doctor.  He is becoming more isolated as less of our extended family want anything to do with him out of fear for their own safety.  Then, the bomb drops.  I get a call, Jake has been arrested.  He has taken a little girl, 2 and half years old, out to the woods, where he has molested and assaulted her.  He is incarcerated in the hospital for the criminally insane.  Our friends, our brothers, and I gather.  We don’t know what to do.  One of us goes to visit him, but I don’t.  I can’t.  I don’t know how to be with him, I am afraid to see him.  I talk to him, but he doesn’t sound like the friend I had, the love I knew.  He sounds dead.  I begin to mourn him as if he were dead, because I don’t know what else to do. 

He is in the hospital for many years, and during this time I receive letters from him.  The letters are intense, insane, but with an undercurrent of love that rips my heart out.  He talks of me as being the love of his life, he asks me to come for conjugal visits.  I am so scared and upset, I cry and I don’t write him back.  Maybe once I do.  I avoid the subject of visiting him, and really avoid the subject of visiting him conjugally.  After he has been in there for a couple of years, when I hear some reports of his progress, I agree to see him.  He gets a day pass and comes into Vancouver and we have dinner together.  I am shocked when I see him, he is so puffy and bloated.  He lines up the various meds he is taking on the table for me to see.  Lithium, and I don’t remember what else, but an array of colours, shapes and sizes.  The lithium gives him tremors.  The other meds have made him fat and his speech is muddy.  Slurry.  The onset of mental illness at seventeen has left him age arrested.  I am in my twenties now, and he still talks like we are sixteen.  I find it disconcerting and don’t really know how to talk to him, am afraid of him.  He takes my hands at dinner, and expresses to me again how he has always loved me.  I wonder is he playing guitar in the hospital.  No, he can’t.  The tremors in his hands from the meds make it too hard.   And he doesn’t really remember how.  His bright red hair has dulled, and he has grown a beard.  This magical boy, the most magical boy, has been erased.  There is so little left of him, I realize that my mourning him has not been unwarranted.  He is not coming back to us, our Jake.  But this is Jake, too, and I struggle with what the obligation is to someone you have loved for so long.  I send him home after the dinner, we hug hard for a long time, and he kisses me a little on the mouth.

I am so angry at everyone for letting this happen.  I go through a long period of time where I believe that if the family, his mother, had just taken him to a doctor, then he would be okay.  That little girl would be okay.  Her family would be okay.  We, our brothers and me, would be okay.  We wouldn’t be trying to understand why the brightest of all bright lights was snuffed out.  I see the movie “The Butcher Boy” with a friend.  The movies is about a blue eyed, red haired boy, a sparkling lovely little human, who goes crazy and is driven to do violent things.  I cry and cry, surprised how much grief is still in my body.

I see Jake a few years later.  He is out of the hospital and living in a halfway house in Kamloops.  He comes to the Caravan for a party.  He is still fat, and his eyes are more grey than blue, but he seems steadier.  He picks up a guitar and plays and I cry some more.  I have to leave for a while and cry on the steps because I feel like his playing makes me want to hope, but I know that the time for hope is so long past.  This is our Jake now.  But it is good to see him out in the world.  And he still writes me letters sometimes.  Now he lives on his own in Kamloops.  He has a job, he plays soccer, a couple of years ago he sent me a photograph of himself playing in uniform, and sounded so proud.  And he plays in a band.  He’s not who he was when we were beautiful, but he’s somewhere, and he’s forward, and he has a life.  He’s medicated and slow and will always be thinking like a boy. 

I just got his address from his mother, and I’m writing this story so that I can bring myself to write him a letter.  I want him to know how long I’ve loved him, and how many forms that love has taken.  And that I’m not afraid of him any more.