November like a racehorse

I turned thirty and I had friends from school over, plus my brother, and we sat around my dining room table. I like having people over for dinner, and in my new place I always knew I wanted a table big enough to fit at least six. And then I moved here and had no friends. I looked at my new table and thought, why did I get rid of my old table? It comfortably fit one and generously fit three, and in this new city I would have had to work to find the three. But then I panicked too soon, as I always do, and then when it came down to it, it wasn’t that hard at all to find six people. When we sat down for dinner, I thought - my table’s full. My table’s finally full.

Grad school is more like I thought grad school would be like. It’s definitely more like I thought grad school would be like than how I actually through grad school was like when I first started. This week is reading week, and I've been meeting various friends on campus every day (downtown today because campus is closed) to do homework together. We had an event for the school and then a dozen of us went out afterwards. There is that easy kinsmanship that I imagined. There’s a lot of homework, too, but I can write papers pretty quickly.

One of my classmates, Marcy, had her sister and her friend come to visit over the weekend, and they wanted to go out dancing. I don’t like going out dancing, even though at moments I like going out and at moments I like dancing. Marcy’s sister is sweet and married and used to be very good at flirting with strangers at bars, and now likes to set up other people with strangers at bars.

I think there’s this stupid perception of women being competitive with each other that I have never experienced in real life. In real life, a friend’s sister, who theoretically must only like me vicariously, decided that I didn’t have enough confidence, and felt compelled to tell me every time a guy looked at me, and what about him, what about him, what about him he’s been looking at you all night.

I have had kind of a lot of nights like that. I wonder, how insecure do I seem? It’s accurate, I guess. I hate myself and then I don’t hate myself and then I do again. I’m good at making friends, I know that. Marcy said the theme of the night was slutty, so I wore a short but loose dress, red with black polkadots, and one of those harness bras. Every time I see one of those, I feel compelled to buy them, even though I don’t actually love the way the style looks on me. It was easy to make friends with Marcy’s sister and her other friend; we were showing each other our bras within the hour.

It’s funny what a difference familiarity makes, how uncomfortable I am around strangers. I liked dancing with Marcy and her sister and her friend and her friend’s cousin, but I didn’t like it when her sister brought over a guy for me to dance with. There’s something about people in clubs. They must be real people. All people are real people. But when I’m in a club, everyone who is unfamiliar to me seems otherly. It’s not just that I don’t know them: they are Other. I don’t want to get to know them. I don’t want to dance with anyone I didn’t come with.

A girl came up and told me I was beautiful, and I thought, that was nice, and then I thought, I wonder if she felt sorry for me. I think that’s probably why Marcy’s sister thought I needed a confidence boost, even though I didn’t tell her, or any of them, what I thought. I’m probably a little drunk now, even though I do feel like the jagerbombs sobered me up. At the end of the night, we got drinks with tangerine vodka and redbull and they tasted just like Flintstone vitamins. I think I hate myself the normal amount, but I know it’s easy for me to make friends. I’m doing well in school, but that could end at any moment. I guess sometimes strangers like the way I look, but I never notice them noticing me, and I don’t like it when other people point it out.

It’s funny to meet new people because they have different perceptions of you than your long terms friends. I’ve heard quite a bit from new friends about how it seems like I overthink things, and how much of a type-a I am.  I actually don’t know if that’s different than what people who have known me for years think. I don’t think I’m type-a, just a normal achieving kind of person who wakes up through the night and can’t fall asleep because she’s worried about everything she has to get done. I was up this morning at six am - not accomplishing anything, of course, just fretting. It’s late now. I had to write out this post as a distraction from how genuinely unnerved I felt being around that many strangers and, at least in little slices, having to acknowledge that those strangers could see me. But I guess it could also just be the redbull. Thirty isn’t that different from twenty after all.

Settle In

So we stayed up late one night to try and get our problems right.

I was sitting on the bus, riding home from campus, scrolling through my Instagram feed when I realized that I had gone all week without feeling homesick for Toronto. It’s strange to phase in and out of connectedness. I live here now; I used to live in Toronto; I miss it; I haven’t thought about it in days. It felt like I had never lived here. I was so dissociated for all of my teenage years, it’s difficult to believe they actually happened. And now I’m back here again and the city is starting to feel real for the very first time.

I didn’t like the people in my program and then eventually I did. I remember when I was taking social psychology, like ten years ago, the professor talked about who a guy came to class every single day wearing a garbage bag, and at first it was like, “what a weird, off putting guy,” but then by the end of the semester, the students loved garbage bag guy. Was that a study or something that actually happened in one of the professor’s classes? I can’t remember. In my program, it was more like the various garbage bag people were blocking the nice ones from view and it took me a long time to track them down.

Tonight I went to a potluck with the ten of us who are doing the same specific focus. It’s what I imagined grad school being like: that kind automatic belonging with your cohort. One of the guys brought his guitar, a girl her fiddle. Two of the girls sang New Romantic, by Laura Marling. I watched them and I watched the room and then I watched myself watch the room. That’s like dissociation, I guess, but I don’t know how to experience something without also experiencing the process of experience it. Discursive institutionalists call that sentience.

I’m turning thirty in a week. My classmates asked me what I was going to do. I said probably just dinner with my family, nothing too exciting.

One girl said, “You should do what you originally planned. Do you remember what we talked about?”

I shook my head.

“You said you were going to go pick up young guys at a club.”

I laugh. “I said I didn’t want to go to a club and be a cougar.”

“And I said that you didn’t have to hit on younger guys if we went out.”

“Well,” I said.

I think the usual crisis of turning thirty is the achievement crisis, but I haven’t felt it. I’ve talked about it with other friends who already had their birthdays, how their lives aren’t where they imagined they would be at thirty. Maybe I should be feeling it more because I’m back being a student, but going back to school hasn’t made me feel any younger. I feel like a thirty year old who’s gone back to school. I’ve done a lot of things; those things counted.

Except then I’ll  feel like maybe those five years when I worked were just a dream. The entire closet in my second bedroom is full of blazers. I tried every single one on last night and they all looked terrible. My boobs are too big for blazers; it’s not a style of clothing that looks good on me. I have a whole closet full of clothes from another life and now it’s so obvious they don’t fit. I remember sitting in my office at work and thinking that I was going to start screaming because I felt so trapped and sad and bored. Office life is a fishbowl. Everyone else is just as bored and so they’re watching, always watching, and I always felt like the weird prawn trying to swim with the goldfish.

Going back to school is still full of all kinds of stupid conflict, but I just don’t feel upset like I used to. I think about how much I drank before, and how much pot I smoked. I don’t know how to reconcile the genuine happiness and connection I felt with the people around me with the number of nights I self medicated until I was numb enough to fall asleep on the couch while Netflix autoloaded the next episode of whatever show I was rewatching. I feel like I spent my late twenties becoming my most genuine self and also like I was a bad imposture muddling through someone else’s life.

I don’t know how to reconcile how nice my parents were when I went to their house for dinner last night with how horrible they were all summer. They didn’t end up getting divorced.

I was seventeen when I started my first degree. I was dating someone. My hair was sort of short. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. A couple of people from my class were saying that they were going to interview a woman for one of our assignments, and I realized I knew her. We had gone to high school together, and now she has the kind of position that grad students want to learn from. Thirteen years and I’m sitting in the same classrooms in the same university. I keep hearing the same names.

Coming back, it’s felt like time is a circle. I’ve never lived here before; I’ve never lived anywhere else. I was probably nineteen the last time I walked through the specific area I live in now. I didn’t have a specific idea of what my life would look like when I was thirty. I could never imagine myself married, I could never imagine having kids. I think I’m able to skip the Turning Thirty Achievement Crisis because I never had a strong idea of what I thought my life was going to look like. I just wanted to be happy.

Sometimes I think I’m happy.

More and more, these days.

I'm the first to admit that I'm still pretty young.

tape it up, walk it off

I started grad school today.

--

Earlier this summer, mom asked, "Are you still using your purse these days?"

"Yes."

"Well I was going through your backpack and your wallet’s in there.”

I texted Karen: Why was she even going through my backpack?

And Karen texted back, And then what happened?

And then nothing, I said. And then I was quietly mad about it for however many days I stayed mad about it until there was something new to be mad about and then I was quietly mad about that too.

“Everyone knows it’s difficult for adult children to come back to their parents’ house,” my dad said. We went back and forth about that lot: it was normal for everyone to be upset all the time; it wasn’t normal and there was something wrong with me; it was just to be expected; it was unacceptable.

I went out with friends from high school and a girl who I hadn’t really been close with before but who I very much liked now said, “It’s like after a certain point, parents regress. Like they’ve raised us and now that we’re adults, they can be kids again.”

Her parents had gotten mad that she’d tried to eat some of the dip they had been making for their own dinner. That night, she’d slept at her old place in a nest of blankets because the rest of her furniture was already gone. She was moving to another city for a new job.

--

I slept at my parents’ house last night because the seagulls keep me awake.

When I decided I was moving back, I didn’t know where I wanted to live. Then I found this place right across the street from the ocean, and it was like, oh, yes. I’d missed the ocean. Toronto is not a beautiful city. It would be hard to leave, but it would be okay because, look, I would be living across the street from the ocean.

And then the flooring was delayed two months. The painter finished 90% of my condo but not the rest. I lived at my parents’ house while the work was getting done, except it seemed like the work never would actually get done. I bought a dining room table and delivery has so far been twice delayed. After that going away party, I didn’t see any of my high school friends for the rest of the summer. I looked at the pictures they posted on instagram of themselves partying. Somehow I had forgotten that the entire time I had lived in Victoria, I never had real friends. Before I moved, my brother who lives in Vancouver said that I could come visit him, but then he got a girlfriend and I didn’t hear from him all summer. My parents fought constantly, claimed they were going to get a divorce. They didn’t. I told my brother about our parents' fighting and he didn’t respond.

I felt trapped and miserable, but all the friends I still had in Toronto said it would be okay once I had moved out of their house and into my condo. I just needed to wait until school started.

In the beginning of August, suddenly my knee started hurting. It was like that pressure that comes before you need to pop a joint, only my joint would never pop, or it would, but that didn’t make it feel better. Sometimes the pain was sharp. It ached when I lay in bed on that side.  

--

A couple of weeks ago, my mom was mad at me. After giving me the silent treatment the entire day previous and then yelling at me that morning, she said that the thing she was really mad about was that I seemed so scared of her and Dad. She wanted me to stop acting like they had traumatized me.

--

I had slept at my parents house the night before school started because mom thought it would be easier for me to sleep there. They lived on a mountain where there were no seagulls. I brought the cat over. In the morning, Mom made me scrambled eggs and toast and saw me off, which was nice.

Then, while I was at class, she emailed and said that I needed to come back, get the cat right after class, and sleep at my apartment from now on because her and Dad were fighting. When I came for my cat and my chargers, it felt like I was getting kicked out, never mind that I already lived somewhere else. She sent me back to the condo with leftover meatloaf and chicken breasts she had made just for me.

I got back to the condo and did homework, because I already had homework. The program seemed hard and boring and was full of people I didn’t like as much as the people I already knew, only I didn’t live in the same city as those people any more.

Before the sun set, I crossed the street and went for a walk along the ocean by myself. There were two fit girls running away from me, but then they doubled back and ran toward me instead, except it wasn’t the same girls after all, just two different sets of fit running girls that looked identical. When they passed each other, it must have caused a glitch in the matrix. There were a couple of guys lingering at the rail, talking about how high the tide had risen. The waves sounded very slushed where they were hitting the boardwalk. The seagulls were loud.

I looked at the ocean and thought, This was supposed to replace everything else.

I was mad at how thin the waves sounded. School had started.  I was living at the condo. Officially living at the condo for good, now that I’d been kicked out of my parents’ house. I was in front of the ocean. The sky got dark, but I couldn’t see where the sun had set.

--

When I got home after the walk, my mom emailed and said that Dad had left her and was now going to Vancouver. My brother called to find out what was going on for the parents the first time that summer, finally worried now that Dad was going to be coming to see him in Vancouver. Dad called as he drove to the ferry and said that I was supposed to go over to their house that night to look after Mom.

I stayed at my condo, called my mom, twice, but didn’t go over. I fed the cat, made a cup of tea. This blog post is now longer than the pre-assignment that is due tomorrow. It took a lot less time to write.

--

When I went into the massage therapist about my sore knee, she said she didn’t know what had happened because knee pain usually came from a trauma, and mine had started out of nowhere. She said I could tape it up when I walked, like in the shape of a U or an X.

She said it would get better, but that, as I knew, knee pain held on for a long time.

true happenings

December, the hero flies in to Vancouver to see her brothers. Gets sick through the night and throws up in the sink. Close up on: the hero’s brother reaching one hand in through a crack in the door to turn on the bathroom fan.

January, the hero watches the first season of The Walking Dead and barfs all night. What are the chances of getting food poisoning twice within a month?

February, the hero has to cut her Saturday night hangout short to barf immediately after her friends leave, damn fish tacos, imagine getting food poisoning three times in three months or maybe it’s the flu because the hero feels ill for days afterwards. She watches the entire season of Bloodline.

March, the hero watches all of Marry Me that night but is still sick as the sun starts to rise and watches Assbackwards as well. NO ONE CAN GET FOOD POISONING FOUR TIMES IN FOUR MONTHS say the hero’s peeps GO TO THE DOCTOR.

I’m having some weird stress attacks, the hero tells her doctor, just like food poisonous related stress attacks.

We’re only going to call it stress as a last resort, the doctor says.

Cue: BLOOD TESTS
Cue: ULTRASOUND

Cue: U HAVE GALLSTONES U FOOL, says the hero’s bff Clara.

Cue, U HAVE GALLSTONES U FOOL, says the doctor but Clara called it first so credit.

I have gallstones, the hero tells her mother.

Those are very painful, the hero’s mother says. Did you have pain?

?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!???????????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, says the hero.

The hero’s mother comes to visit. The hero get sick again and stays up all night shaking.

Why are you doing that? the hero’s mother asks while the hero watches Captain America.  Are you cold? she puts a blanket over the hero’s shoulders.

Close up on the hero sitting in the surgical specialist’s office.  They couldn’t find your gallbladder in the first ultrasound, says the surgeon. I can’t remove an organ if they can find it.

Exposed as a hypochondriac, the hero goes for a second ultrasound, feeling deep shame. She knew she shouldn’t have gone to the doctor about this, but it’s too late now and she has to see it through.

Could you find my gallbladder? the hero asks the ultrasound technician who was very nice and not at all awkward about making the hero take out her navel ring. Imagine if after all this I was born without a gallbladder.

You have [something something echo something]. There are so many stones that we can’t see your gallbladder, just the ridge where it connects, says the ultrasound technician, who is still very nice even though she got a lot of ultrasound lube in the hero’s belly button.

You have stones and need surgery, says the medical receptionist lady at the surgeon’s office. We’re booking people who were here in March for July appointments, so you’ll probably be in September or October. In the meantime, just got to the emergency room and they will give you morphine.

Can’t be too serious then, the hero tells everyone. Obviously I’m good to wait for a long time.

You can’t actually go to the ER, the hero’s mother tells her over Skype. The hero’s mother is very concerned that she will become addicted to prescription medication.

PSYCH, the medical receptionist lady says, one week ago.  The surgeon said you can’t wait that long and to give you the next appointment. How is the Tuesday after next AS IN ONE WEEK AND CHANGE AWAY, NOT EVEN TWO WEEKS AWAY.

Cue: MOAR BLOODTESTS

Cue: Pre-op doctor’s appointment

Your airway looks good, says the hero’s family doctor’s replacement who is there while the hero’s family doctor is having a baby. They won’t have any trouble intubating you.

How very dare you, says the hero. I will not be intubated, that’s a pass on that one.

One other thing, the hero says, is that I heard being a regular pot smoker can interfere with anesthetic. NBD but I’m asking for a friend and also I haven’t smoked pot since I found out I had gallstones.
How long?

Like a month, the hero says, because that time last weekend didn’t actually count as it was with friends.

You’ll be fine, the hero’s doctor’s replacement says.

Cut to, the hero in a meeting at work. This will be our last meeting until mid June, the hero tells the group, because, like a true hero, she runs the meetings and they don’t happen when she’s not there. I am taking the next two weeks off work for surgery.

I had one gallstone, one of the men at the meeting says. It was very painful. I was doubled over. He looks at the hero meaningfully.

Yes, the hero says after a pause. She doesn’t know why people keep telling her that gallstones are painful as if she wouldn’t already know that.

Cue: TODAY, Thursday, five days away from surgery.

Cue: SPOILER ALERT, I am the hero.

Cue: THIS HAS BEEN A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT GALLSTONES

Cue: YOU PROBABLY WOULDN’T KNOW UNTIL SOMEONE TOLD YOU BUT THEY’RE QUITE PAINFUL.

Gallstones, nature's way of making sure you're caught on all the TV ever made.

giving thanks

The first time I went to Clara’s house was after I found a cockroach.  

I was living in a studio apartment that was less than 300 sq ft. It was the summer in between my first and second (final) year of my second degree, and I wasn’t doing much so I went a bit unhinged.  I took one of those intensive courses that was full time for a couple of weeks, had to write a paper, but then that was it and I was just left to my own devices.

Some people use periods of extended free time to work on projects, but I crumble when I don’t have structure in my day.  I hadn’t fully figured out how to feed myself and was living on microwave popcorn and rum & Cokes.The humidity was brutal, and though I had a free standing air conditioning unit that attached by a tube to the outside, my place was oppressively hot all the time.  My days and nights were backwards, so I would stay up until 4 am, sleep until noon. By the time I was coherent enough to leave the house, it was getting on seven p.m. and the city had started to shut down. I felt like not only was I abandoned in the world, I was out of sync with it.  Karen was in Switzerland, Casey was back on the West Coast for the summer, any friends I had made at University were gone or working or both. I had lived in the City for a year, and it’d felt like I had settled in okay, but I hadn’t.

I tried to go places by myself, and for a while I managed one outing a day - the St. Lawrence Market, AGO, a walk around Queen’s Park.  When I still had the paper to finish, I tried to go to different coffee shops to work on it.  But going places alone is still being alone, and mostly I just sat all day long on my loveseat and rewatched the entire series of Grey’s Anatomy.

One day when I was on the computer, a bug walked across my hand.  I started and shook it off, and couldn’t find it again after that.  I didn’t think anything of it until I told someone about it and they suggested it might have been a cockroach.

Now I feel like: cockroaches, whatever. Bedbugs are where true fear lives.  But at the time, my only idea of cockroaches were the New York City cockroaches, which are half a foot long and will survive a nuclear holocaust. It was time to clean my apartment.

I want to say my place was a disaster because it was so small that there was nowhere to keep things, but the apartment I live in now is nearly three times larger and it’s still a pigsty.  I’m messy.  I’m always trying to get better, but my natural instinct when something falls to the floor is not to pick it up, it’s to step over it until the end of time.

That day I started to tidy up some of the clutter. Did the dishes. Took out the recycling. Went to clean the bathroom.  There were two open bandaid boxes, so I tried to dump the remaining bandaids from one box into the other. Consolidate.  Instead I dumped the cockroach onto the counter.

It’s something that doesn’t sound scary in the retelling, but it was the most primal fear I’ve ever felt.  There was a cockroach in the box of bandaids. Why was it there? I hadn’t expected it to be there. I hadn’t for a second thought that it would fall out when I tipped the box.

I left the box where it fell and ran downstairs to tell the building super.

They didn’t believe me that there was a cockroach, but one of the girls came up with me with a can of bug spray, and searched through my bathroom until she found the bug.  We both screamed as she sprayed it and sprayed it, and when it died we put it in one of my little bowls, covered in plastic wrap, to bring down to show the other people.

“Fine,” the manager said. “It’s a cockroach.”

They were going to spray my apartment, but first I had to take every single thing out of the kitchen and out of the bathroom.  Since it was a studio apartment, the kitchen was also my bedroom.  I didn’t have a car then, so I had to walk to Staples and then carry all the boxes back so I would have something to put all my stuff in. I remember how brutally hot it was, how at odds with the city I already felt. If I could have lit a match and burned my apartment to the ground instead of dealing with it, I would have.

I packed up everything in my kitchen and everything in my bathroom and piled it onto the table and loveseat and bed - which were technically in the kitchen.  Everything was technically in the kitchen. Everything was technically in the bedroom. I got so sweaty that I felt gritty with it.  Every time I pulled out a dish, I was scared a cockroach would fly at me. If they were in the bandaid box, they could be anywhere.  There was no longer anywhere to sit in my apartment.  Sweat ran down my back and I thought it was another bug.

I had complained online about the cockroaches, and Clara asked if I needed to sleep over at her place.  At the time, we had gone to a couple of concerts together with other people, but had never hung out one on one. I had never been to her house.

Growing up, my mother’s number one mantra was, “You can’t trust anyone but yourself.” We didn’t have family friends and had no relatives that lived in the same city.  Our house was insular and my friendships were often a source of conflict.  I didn’t know what it felt like to be part of a community. I had no idea how to ask for help from friends.

But Clara was nice, and, if you look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, I was subterranean.  All of my stuff was in boxes. I was constantly terrified that I would find another cockroach.  I didn’t trust anyone else - yet - but  I also didn’t trust myself.  I told Clara that if it was alright with her, I would love to stay over.

Clara and her husband owned a house in the east end.   I’d never been to that end of town, but she came to meet me at the subway station for the two block walk to her house.  It was 10 pm by the time I got there because I’d spent all day packing, and I was a gritty, sweaty, panicked mess.   She lived in an established neighbourhood, on a tree lined street, in a semi-detached house.  I’d been downtown exclusively for the previous year, and I had forgotten what a neighbourhood felt like.   It felt like walking through Eden.

The entirety of my apartment consisted of a desk, desk chair, love seat, small table with two chairs, single bed, and bedside table.  Clara’s home had a kitchen, a living room, and a dining room that all separated by doors. She had an entire second floor with three bedrooms. She had a backyard and a basement.

I went for a shower first off.  One of the things they tell you online is that cockroaches can lay eggs everywhere, so I was a little bit worried that my clothes would be covered in cockroach eggs and that I would infect Clara’s beautiful home.  I felt like a leper, but if she was worried about me bringing cockroaches, she never showed it - even though she didn’t know me very well at the time, even though I was a mess.  All summer  I felt like I had been living on another plane, entirely disconnected from the rest of the world, but that mustn’t have been true because I was sitting with her in her living room.

The next day I headed out first thing in the morning because I was worried about imposing. She and her husband were going away overnight but said I could stay in their house, so I waited until the evening to come back. I checked in on my apartment. They put pink gel in lines in my cupboards and dumped a load of dust all over the floors - including all over the power cables for my computer. My apartment had a slightly sweet smell that was a bit medical. It made me want to throw up.  

I bought dinner and took it back to Clara’s house in the evening.  I watched The Proposal, which she had recorded, and felt better than I had all summer.  Not just after finding the cockroach, but the whole lead up to it.   That summer wasn’t the saddest I had ever been in my entire life, and it maybe wasn’t even the loneliest, but it was the closest I got to the abyss.  I always feel like I’m at the edge of a cliff, looking out into this vast nothingness.  Sometimes I’m on the cliff but there’s a guard rail and I’m wearing a parachute and tethered with cables,  so it doesn’t actually feel like I’m going to fall. But that summer I felt like I was right at the edge where the rocks were small and loose.

They say you’ll never find only one cockroach, but I never found another one.  Eventually I vacuumed up the dust, but even though I kept waiting to find carcasses of the bugs that the dust had killed, I never did.  I slept for the rest of the month with the light on by my bed, because I had read that cockroaches didn’t like light. I didn’t want them crawling on me when I slept.

--

My family wanted me to come back to the West Coast for Thanksgiving this year, but in the time leading up to it I had to work evenings and weekends and I was too tired to make the trip. Clara asked me over for Thanksgiving dinner with her, her husband, and her parents.  I went, and only the smallest part of me felt like I shouldn’t be intruding on someone else’s family dinner.   I thought about that first time as I walked over from the subway.  It still feels like I’m walking to the safest place in the city.

okay, cupid.

Over the summer I had decided to try online dating. “Decided” = Casey sat me down in front of a computer one night after we had been drinking and talked me through writing a profile (“You have to say at least one nice thing about yourself. Laura. A nice thing. You’ve already talked about how messy your apartment is, you have to take that out.”) and then took over the computer and picked photos from my facebook to upload.

I texted Karen the next day and told her that a bunch of spambots were messaging me.

“Those are real people,” she said. “Jesus, Laura.”  But then she told me to add a code word to my profile and ask people to say it so that I’d know they had actually read it.

So I did, and there were still a bunch of messages except now they also had my codeword.

“They aren’t spambots,” I said.

“I TOLD YOU.”

“It’s really weird.”

--

Casey said that I should find people I liked to message, but I felt really weird looking at other people because it reminded me that other people could look at me.

--

I went on one date.

It was fine except that he was so! upset! that the last girl he’d been on a date with had had an abortion at 28 (but he was pro choice) and he had a shit job that he hated and angst angst angst until he drank himself horny and wanted to sit beside me and put his hand on my leg and make out in public a lot.

I told Casey about it the next weekend while we were making nachos with sweet potato, black beans and corn.

“It was like his mouth was a beak and he opened it really wide and inside there was another beak that was his tongue.  I think I got one of his boogers in my mouth.  It was the worst kiss I’ve ever had.”

“It’s funny that your worst kiss was now, and not like when you were a teenager.”

“He was thirty,” I said unhappily.   I didn’t have any terrible kisses when I was a teenager, not even when I was nineteen and newly single and made out with more people than I can count now.  All week long I kept accidentally remembering what it felt like to kiss him and grossing myself out.

--

On Friday I went to Marshall’s over lunch. A man was standing in the line up area, but further back from the cashiers. I waited behind him, but he said to go ahead.

Shortly after that, he came up behind me, so before it was my turn to go to a cashier, I said, “You were here before me, do you want to go?”

He said, “No, no, you go.”

“I’m just returning one thing. I’ll be quick.”

I returned the blazer (which I liked, but felt slightly tight in the forearms of all places) and headed to my car.  He must have been quick too, because he followed me out of the store and called for me.

I was stuck with one foot in my car when I realized he was talking to me, so I got out again.

“You were so nice,” he said.

“I felt bad, I didn’t mean to budge.”

“Are you taken?” he asked, but I didn’t know what he was asking at first.  “Are you taken?”

“Haha, I’m just heading back to work,” I said.  When I don’t know what someone is saying, I usually just say what I’m planning on doing next, because it’s a reasonably safe bet.

“Are you taken?  Can I call you?”

I gave him my number, but when he texted on Friday night, I didn’t text back. And when he called on Saturday night, I ignored it.

I was skyping with my little brother G, and he said that I needed to text back and say I wasn’t interested, but I just didn’t want to.

Over brunch on Saturday, I asked Casey.  She said, “If you’d sounded at all interested when you told me this story, I would have said to go for it. But you were just like, ‘He followed me into the parking lot. He was wearing sweatpants.’”

“There wasn’t anything to be excited about,” I said.  “We didn’t even talk about anything.  When I was in the steam room at the pool last week, this buck naked woman started talking to me.  I know more about her than I do about him.”

She harsh tanlines from a very small bathing suit, and said that it was so good to be sweating out the sins of the prosecco last night.  We talked about the buildings we lived in and the area and the gym.  I finally left the steam room when she put on gloves and started exfoliating herself.  

“You don’t owe strangers kindness,” Casey said.   “You just have to be polite, and even then -- not always.”

“Yeah, politeness, not kindness.  Though I think I had to be kind to that woman in the steam room.  That was an intimate situation.”

Casey gave me a look.

“I guess she might have made some people uncomfortable,” I allowed.

--

That evening I went to Sunday dinner at Karen’s house, and polled her as well.

“No,” she said.  “You’re fine to ignore him.”

“It’s funny because it happened like 12 hours after you and I had the conversation about how I thought I wanted to start dating again.”

“You’re psychic,” she said. “But you don’t have to date a guy wearing sweatpants.”

“I love how everyone how knows me is like, ‘You’re not going to be into someone wearing sweatpants.”  I laughed.

“You would be like, ‘What’s happening? Why is this soft cotton talking to me?’”

“The soft cotton is talking to me!”

--

When I was driving to work today, Creep came on the radio.  I remembered being seventeen, driving back from the potholes at six in the morning with Andre, who was my first boyfriend and longest relationship. He was delivering pizza that summer, and he had worked the late shift. He came to my house once he was done, at four am, and woke me up so that we could go skinny dipping in the potholes before the sun rose.   The water was too cold, so we just went in and out, then had sex on a towel by the shore. On the way back to the car, I was still naked and wrapped in that towel.  We passed a man who was out for a jog, and he looked at us in a way that made me think it wasn’t the first time he had seen us that morning.

I remember sitting next to Andre in the car and listening to him sing, You’re so fucking special. I wish I was special.  The year we graduated high school. Andre had won the award for music theatre, and I had won the award for band. My hair was short then, and his was long - almost down to his shoulders: longer than mine.

I could still hear his voice this morning, even though I was half a country away, driving alone in my own car.  He lives in Japan now and I never think about him anymore but sometimes I miss how it felt to be attracted to someone.

i've got a mental image of the way you used to look at me

Over the August long weekend, I went back to the West Coast.  I’ve got two brothers: G (25) who lives in Vancouver, and J (23) who lives in Seattle.  I stayed in G’s appartment in Vancouver for the first weekend, and J came up as well.

I nearly passed out waiting for J’s train from Seattle to get in the first night, because it was past 3:30 am my time.  When he finally got in, he said hello and then almost immediately got into a long discussion with G about whether or not The Castle, by Kafka, was a “big spray of words.” And something or another about a waterfall of language.

It’s weird to be related to people, because theoretically that means for sure that they’re not space aliens. I went to bed.

"I got a roomba," J said they next morning: finally common ground.

"I lost my roomba," I said.

"Oh my god, Laura, what?"

"It went out on it's scheduled clean and it never came back."

They both stared at me, baffled.

"I really thought I would happen upon it, but I haven't."

"Did you leave the door open?"

"No, it was while I was at work."

"How could it be lost?  It has to be on the floor somewhere."

"I really don't know. I spent like five days squirming around on my belly like a snake trying to find it."

When I got home after the trip, I went hunting for it again.  It turned out it was behind the clothing storage boxes under my bed, strangled in a yellow and white belt and choked by fake green grass from the terrarium crafting.

That afternoon, G pulled out his guitar and the two of them started doing a Waxahatchee cover jam session.

The deck door was open and I was there in the room listening to the song but I could also imagine being on a neighbhour's deck and hearing the strains of it, or walking on the sidewalk in front of the building and hearing it from fourteen storeys up.

After they finished, I said, "When I was listening to it, it was like we were in a movie and -- "

"The ugly girl takes off her glasses and she's pretty," J said.

G laughed.

"Oh my god," I said.  "Never mind, I didn't like the song anyway."

"G has trouble with compliments," J said.  "I just have to help him sometimes."

"No, you have a problem with G getting complimented.  He loves them."

"Anyway there was one part of the song that you did wrong,"  J said and then starts giving G pointers.

Eventually they switched over to Modest Mouse. This will never end this will never end this will never end.

 

--

I went back to Victoria, spent a few days with my parents, and then all of us went in to Seattle.

I had no picture in my head of what Seattle would look like, which is kind of random. When I want to New York, it felt so familiar because the places have been in so many movies and TV shows.  Seattle is gorgeous, though. I’ve been polling everyone to see if they had a mental picture of Seattle, and no one had much to say except rainy, but when I was there it was perfect and sunny.

--

I saw no one but family when I went back to the west coast.  I hung out with my married friends, who also grew up on the Island, on the weekend after I got back.

 

“Did you hear about John and Jane?” Elizabeth asked.

I was friends with John from junior high onward, and sort of peripherally friends with Jane (who I’d also gone to Jr. High with), because she was also friends with John. She always seemed to be upset about something, whined a lot but was also One Of The Guys and went camping and followed… some sport, I had so little interest, I can’t even remember now. Maybe basketball. Probably hockey as well.

John said that I was like the good parts of having a girlfriend and she was like the bad parts, and I thought maybe that meant one day he was going to want to date me, but actually it meant that after five years of swearing up and down that he didn’t like Jane and would never like her and would never date her, he did.

“Are they engaged?” I asked.  John had texted me after he realized I was on the Island from my Instagram pictures, but I was already back in Toronto.

“Yeah,” Elizabeth said.

“Of course,” I said. When I saw them at Christmas, Jane had been going on and on about how everyone expected John to propose over the holidays but he had said he was going to get new tires for his Jeep instead of buying a ring.

“It’s for safety,” he had said.  They were living together, and I was sitting inside their living room for the first time.

“His mom wants him to propose,” Jane had said. “His aunt said, ‘It’s time to shit or get off the pot.’”

“I don’t know why you like that,” John had said. “It’s implying that you’re crap.”

I texted John the next day, after Jane put the announcement of the engagement up on Facebook: I saw Jane’s status on Facebook. Congrats!

He said: Thanks Laura - it’s so people know were in a serious relationship now.

I wrote back: Lol.  As if they didn’t already know.

Got a west coast heart and an east coast mentality.  Baby, let's push our limits.