Wednesday, September 27  

View

The trick to describing any window’s particular view is, I think, to capture the essence of the room you’re looking out of. You have to start from the inside since that, supposedly, is where the reader’s mind-eye will be standing before they cast it out the room’s window to take in the view belonging to it. In my way of looking at things, the window belongs to the room, the view to the window. Others, more philosophically, might try to argue that the room belongs to the window, and the window to the view. But I prefer to keep things simple and see them as the builders intended rather than as god or Descartes might like best.

view noun. : 1. extent or range of vision : 2 : the act of seeing or examining. 3 a mode or manner of looking at or regarding something 4. the foreseeable future .

Anyway, describe the room first. It’s the “living room”.

That’s a good place to start a description since most people have living rooms and will gain an immediate understanding of what a room called that probably contains. They will picture a television, a couch, a coffee table, stereo system, cds, movies the owner has already seen in the cinema or on rented tapes but has purchased anyway, never to be viewed again like trophies of past movie watching or trophies of past movie understanding depending on the intellectual highbrow-ed-ness of the collection.

And all that would be a fairly good start as far as assumptions go. This room, does in fact, have all those elements in place. And since they’re not, as far as I’m concerned, what makes a living room a living room anyway, I’m not going to debate, defend the uniqueness of, or go into detail about any of these things.

This particular living room is what it is because of what it feels like to stand around inside it. Which I do quite a lot. I also sit inside it, but surprisingly, not really as often as I stand. The feeling you get when you stand around in this room is that there’s a lot of space in it. The ceilings are surprisingly high with white moldings all around the edges. The moldings have a gray tinge to them now because of the grime that comes in through the windows during the summer. But, wait, no window talk, I promised! We’re not there yet.

This building was originally a shipping warehouse. The street it’s positioned on, Queen, used be quite close to the water though the city has since laid landfill 4 city blocks out into Lake Ontario to give itself more room to breathe. Since this building’s no longer very close to the water, it’s hard to imagine the barrels of whatever and the boxes of something and the bails of whatnot that might have been kept piled up in this room once upon a time. But I’m happy that it was a storage place and not a residence since that keeps the ghosts to a minimum.

The very high ceiling has a large industrial-style fan hanging from it. It isn’t authentic, I put I there myself after I bought it at Home Depot the summer I moved in. But it looks kind of authentic. And it has a pleasant way of shifting the air around the high-ceilinged room and making things feel very loose.

The walls are a soft brown colour. Tan maybe or Taupe if you’re happier in more expensive sounding surroundings. It’s a colour that reminds me of someone’s sheets. But it didn’t at the time that I painted it. I didn’t know him then. The room has gained this sexual flavour since I met him and slept in his soft bed.

The furniture in this wide, airy, soft brown room, is placed on odd angles and has a lot of cat hair on it. I brush it off every day, but it reappears. (this isn’t a mystery, there are cats) There is no furniture in front of the window because that is this room’s best feature and what I like to stand around looking out of for long stretches of time.

If you stand in the street and look up, you’ll think, “Hmm, windows aren’t very big. Look at the neighbour’s windows! Much nicer.” And you’ll be absolutely right, the neighbour’s windows are much nicer. However, I’ve had the opportunity to stand in front of my neighbour’s windows too and I can tell you, they’re not quite as interesting. Bigger, yes. But the couch is in the way and they don’t have the EXACT same view, which to me makes all the difference.

Anyway, these windows don’t seem small when you’re standing in front of them on the inside. They seem to take up most of the north facing living room wall and you’ll forget all slitherings of neighbour-jealousy once you’re looking out them from this position. There are three cream coloured curtains hanging in front of this window. Two pulled to the side and one tied in the middle. All the curtains could do with a wash. There’s your frame.

Now, the window itself. This is what you’ll be looking out of. Like your lens to the view and it is, itself, an important thing to describe. The glass is spotty with grime. That’s what happens when you live downtown anywhere. There is mesh in two quarters of the lower half (where parts of the window slide across to let air in) to prevent cats from falling out and down the 3 stories to the street. That happened previously so the mesh is really very practical.

Once, I took some pictures of the view using a low quality camera. They came out surprisingly well. In one, you could plainly see that you’re looking through the upclose black crisscrossings of mesh. In the other, the mesh was just a slight blur. The smallest visual disturbance. And that’s how it is when you use your eyes too. Depending on how you focus, you either see mesh, or you see street. While I wouldn’t discourage anyone from viewing the world in more than one way, to save time, I’ll only describe the street.

Queen Street isn’t a very wide street despite the fact that it’s a major thruway spanning the downtown core. It’s got 4 lanes, two jammed with parked cars. This particular view is of one small slice of Queen Street West, Toronto’s grubby, artsy, bohemian playground. The glittering piercing on a flat-stomached goddess of cool. This section is crawling with hairstyles, mangy dogs without leads, fake laughter and buckets of tulips out front of chinese-owned convenience stores. There’s a lot to look at if you like to look at people. Especially from the safe, third floor distance of a living room window. This is the only place I’ve ever lived where I can watch out the window and without fail, see someone I know. It’s like living in a small town, only the beauty is that it’s not a small town so seeing people you know is pretty unlikely even though it happens every time.

You can look directly into the apartments of the people who live across the street. I try not to, but if they’ve got lights on and it’s getting dark, it’s hard to avoid. I once watched a woman come out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her and rifle through her dresser drawers, choose her clothes and pull her panties on underneath the towel. She took the rest of her clothes to another room to get dressed. I didn’t feel guilty about watching because I’m pretty sure she knew she could be seen and that’s why she didn’t drop the towel. And besides, I’ll bet people watch me all the time and fair’s fair. That’s what I figure.

The people on the second floor to my view’s right watch television all the time and I feel concerned for their sex lives. I’ve never seen them (well, I’ve seen their feet) but I feel sure that they’re lesbians and are suffering from “lesbian bed-death”. That’s the name for what happens when two women share a life. They forget to fuck. Happens all the time. Women are like that. If there’s no man in the picture to remind them how fun it is, they invariably fall out of the habit.

The boy whose room is on the second floor in the middle of my view, one over from the TV couple, he has a big mural on his window of a crazy cartoon boy face. It says “Casual Casual”. I don’t know what that means. His father’s a guitarist. I know that because he leaves his windows open when he plays. I suspect the boy’s father of being high a lot and a pretty bad Dad in general. A few times, at night, I’ve seen the boy moving around his room with his arms stretched out like an airplane. I hope to myself that the boy has secret dreams of becoming a pilot. I’d like the boy to have secret dreams for some reason.

There used to be an old man who lived on the third floor where the towel woman lives now. He sat at his window all day, smoking cigarettes and flicking the ashes into a yellow coffee cup. He got booted out I guess when the landlords decided to renovate that apartment and make it fancy. All part of the welcoming of the internet generation to the neighbourhood. The young couples who have enough money to afford the high rent in this run down block. Cool tax. I’m one of them though, so I try not to despise them too much just because I was one of the first interlopers. That doesn’t make me any more deserving of an apartment here than them. I’ll bet an old guy used to live in this living room, flicking his ashes out the window where I’m standing now.

Anyway, a small part of me is glad that old guy has been replaced with the towel woman. He got in trouble with the police once when my neighbour, Carly, figured out that he was shining floodlights into her apartment so he could watch her at night.

Working left to right, on the ground level, there are stores and shops.

Delphic is a clothing store. Skater style but with heavy price tags. I’ve been in there a few times and it’s usually empty. Someone’s rich father must be paying the rent because I never see anyone go in or out except the two ultra hipsters who hang around behind the counter.
Beside Delphic, you’ve got Coupe Bizarre. This place is a magnet for the city’s weirdest people, and not-so-weird people who have weirdness aspirations. It’s a hairstyling place with fun-fur on the walls and stylists who seem coked up and pretentiously casual. Casual, Casual. From this living room window, you can see the people sitting in the waiting area. Watch them pretend to read magazines. They usually look kind of nervous and I don’t blame them. The few times I’ve had my haircut there, I’ve been glad I live so close by because I can go directly home and fix what they’ve done.

Next, there’s a new store with no name and some very uninteresting items for sale like yellow vases. I haven’t investigated this well enough to say what the hell it is.

Then the Stephen Bulger Photography Gallery. Big and white. Sometimes he’ll put someone’s work right in the front window and I can consider it from the comfort of my own living room.
Beside that, McBurnie and Cutler Booksellers. It’s a dusty second hand bookstore. The counter guy has long blonde hair in a ponytail and he stands out front to smoke a lot. He often looks up to my window when I’m standing there looking out, and he sometimes nods at me. I used to imagine wearily that he probably thinks he’s the person I’m meant to spend the rest of my life with only I can’t see it because of the ponytail and the slightly creepy nodding. I stopped buying books there because of that uncomfortable suspicion.

The Red Tea Box is a Japanese bakery/tea shop/restaurant that I’ve never been inside of. It had a stellar review in one of Toronto’s hipster weeklies and it’s been overrun with our city’s “elite” ever since. I hate the elite and I refuse to go where they go, even if it is right across the street. I’m not much interested in tea anyway.

Then there’s a jeweller. Then there’s an empty space that I wish I could buy and open my own sex shop or coffee house in but I will never have the money for that kind of adventure. Then there’s the Toronto Dominion Bank.

The sidewalks, as I said, are littered with people and dogs. Especially when the sun’s out. It’s raining today so there aren’t as many people or as many dogs. The sidewalk is a depressing, lonely gray. The sky’s a depressing lonely gray too. Everything’s wet.

On days like this, the view fills you up with a sense of hollowness. You might be inclined to pull the gray chenille blanket from the couch and wrap it around your shoulders. Shiver under the cold that seeps through the glass. You might be prone to thinking about all the less-gray places you might live one day. Greece, maybe. California. Italy. You stand there, bare feet on the wooden floors, and you think outside the view. You think of the streets you grew up on, the snowmen you’ve built, the ice rinks you’ve skated, the cold, cold, cold that’s just a part of being Canadian. You think about the children you’ll have one day and wonder if they’ll grow up to look at this view too or if they’ll have the lucky inheritance of some bold move you made before you were too old to get yourself a new view.

You can’t live here forever, you think to yourself. There’s not a blanket in the world big enough to keep you warm when it’s raining and crap out like this. Just when you’re thinking all that, a bright red and white streetcar rolls past. It clangs and blares and shudders across the view, obscuring everything else for a second or two. At least you’ve got streetcars, which break up the grayness a bit.

I think this view might be different if it isn’t yours. You might like it more or less depending on how permanent it feels to you.

Wednesday, August 10  

Flower

Vic's mother’s garden smelled of lilacs. Sweet and heavy; cloying purple. The smell of summer coming, of bare feet and splinters in her thumbs from teaching herself to do handstands on the back porch.

Her mother hated the lilac bushes that grew on the border of her garden but the roots were in the neighbours’ yard and so, not her domain. In the early summer mornings, she’d walk the perimeter of her garden like an ensign, patrolling for any evidence of lilac infiltration through the iron fencing, trying to push it back, kill it off, cut the buds away. She said the smell was enough to make her sick.

flower noun. 1. The reproductive structure of some seed-bearing plants having showy or colorful parts verb. 1. To develop naturally or fully; mature.

Vic remembers her out there one morning in spring, jacket pulled over her head to protect her hair from the rain, feet squelching carefully in the mud around her English roses and bleeding hearts. She had a pair of sewing shears in one hand and she was sticking them through the iron bars, snipping away the lilac blooms that had opened over night, letting them fall to the ground on the other side of the fence.

Vic went out later and worked her thin arms through the fence to rescue the fallen blooms. She shook the mud off and put them in a juice glass; kept them tucked out of sight in her bedroom; reveled in the obscene sweetness.

***

Another day, in autumn when lilacs were no longer a concern, Vic's mother was kneeling in the dirt preparing her rosebushes for winter. The chill was closing in but it was sunny and still hot under the sun. A small trickle of sweat ran between her breasts as she worked, tugged, grappled with dead stalks and tied back the vicious brown stems. She stopped every few minutes and pressed the back of her hand against her sternum to absorb it.

She saw Vic watching her and patted the ground beside her, wanting Vic to help.

Her fingernails were black with dirt – she didn’t believe in gardening gloves – and a piece of her black hair had gotten free from the scarf she’d tied it back with. Vic reached her hand, small clean fingernails, up to push her hair off her face. She turned her face, smiling, green eyed, and pulled off a lush pink bloom that drooped, nearly dead, from the bush she was tying back. She tucked it behind Vic's ear and smoothed her braids down with her dirty hands. In her rusted lilt she said, “It’s important for a girl to have a favourite flower. She’ll know a man loves her when he brings her them in winter, no matter what they cost.”

She patted Vic's cheek and went back to her roses, no doubt imagining her daughter, all grown and lovely, admired by many men who would bring her pink roses in sentimental courtship.

***

Vic's mother’s favourite flowers were the roses, of course. She especially liked pink ones, scentless and pretty, soft to touch, meaning admiration.

Her father brought her mother 3 dozens of those roses the day he asked her to marry him. Vic has always wondered, if he hadn’t brought the roses, would she have accepted?

Pink roses are easy to find in the winter. You can buy them at any flower shop.

***

Though probably not matching her mother’s vision of Vic as a woman, courted by serious well-intentioned young men, Vic has been given flowers on several occasions. Different kinds of flowers from different kinds of men. Usually, the flowers they send reflect something about the men that they are, or the woman they want to believe she is.

One sent white lilies. They smelled beautiful, were as pretty as his eyes. And they stained Vic's skin with their deep orange stamen, just like he would mark her body with his teeth during their enthusiastic lovemaking.

Another sent daisies that smelled acidic and unwholesome (a little like pee) and completely at odds with their innocent look. He had a wife and a small son and the daisies came with a note saying he would call again when he was finally free, when things would be different.

There’ve been vases full of irises, dark and brooding; bouquets of alstra flashy and lacking substance or staying power, even once a bird of paradise that could not be interpreted, a gawdy enigma.

And, of course, the roses. The dozens and dozens of them, all the colours of the rainbow, each bundle received pleasantly with a grateful kiss and the right amount of exclaim and you-shouldn’t-haves.

***

Jon's roses are pink. There are many of them. The small card that comes with them, cradled quietly by fern inside the long box, borne by the smiling delivery man who strode proudly up the path this morning, reads simply “Love John." Is it a sentiment, a statement or an instruction, she wonders.

She has put the card away in the silverware drawer and the roses in a vase on the kitchen table where he'll see them when he gets home from work.

***

Vic's favourite flowers are lilacs.

She doesn't like roses, except that they remind her of her mother. Their bobbing heads and traditional statements are the sort of thing Vic associates with saccharine sentimentalism, the kind that means nothing but looks nice.

She's noticed that women almost always like roses best. She suspects that’s because women like codes. They enjoy being able to make mountains out of minor things. Roses can be interpreted more officially than any other flower because each colour has already been assigned a meaning by rose enthusiasts, or by Hallmark. Into their roses, these women can read their lover’s intent. “If he sends red roses, that means true love.” “He sent a purple rose. I think I should forgive him.”

Vic, unlike most women, doesn't want someone’s true love or apologies lying around for everyone to interpret and touch and envy.

***

Lilacs are impossible to find in the winter. They smell strong and sweet and they can’t be bought in the store.

They don’t mean anything except what they mean to Vic.

Comments:

I've never really favored roses, for just the reason you mention.

Thank you for the lovely post. I'm glad you've had the time, again, to write here.

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Tuesday, May 3  

Recollect

It's a strange, nearly universal truth that the past will begin reappearing indiscriminately upon entering the third decade of one's life. Nobody can know why this is, only that it's a documented fact. Everybody experiences this weird thing. Pop culture even references it (see High Fidelity, mov).

Perhaps it's the greater lifecycle reminding us of how far we've come. Or how far we haven't come, in some cases.

recollect verb 1. To recall to mind. 2. To remember something.

Vic's past is foisting itself upon her at every turn. In some instances, it's been a happy delight to hear from old loves, old friends, old business acquaintances out of the blue. A small surprise gift in her inbox. In other instances, her past has a way of making her feel underdressed at her own party; shabby and embarrassed.

Her forced recollections began with Terry, a highschool (can't call it love) 'object of very temporary fascination'. Having entered his thirties, with a son and a divorce in his suit jacket pocket, Terry googled Vic, found her email address and "got in touch."

This is what they always call it: "getting in touch" – like it's a friendly innocent thing that doesn't stir up uncomfortable old memories and force the recipient to recollect them, their younger self (why anyone would want their younger self recollected to start with, Vic can't fathom – she'd rather her younger self were put to bed early without supper).

Anyway, there was some delight on Vic's part to hear from Terry (perhaps because he was the first to reappear in what has since become a tiresome bill full of reappearing acts) and so they got together for a glass of wine in a dark, after-work trader's bar on Bay Street. They bantered about old times, which made her feel a bit like a victim of the Matrix considering the environment, and he very quickly got around to trying to kiss her.

Now, this was before Jon and Graycie, at a time when, normally, Vic have been quite open to snogging an old flame and then ignoring his phone calls for the following week. But frankly, the shock of that face coming at hers, with its new lines, new smiles, future grudges… made her silently hysterical with discomfort. She excused herself quickly afterward and they didn't talk very much afterward.

Recently, there have been a spate of new "getting in touch"es. Each sounding distressingly similar to the last.

Generally speaking, they are men who have hit their thirties. They've "found" her online. They've decided to email her. Some, proclaiming an evangelical need to apologize to her for former assholishness -- most of which she can't even recall being upset about. Some, simply seeking a sense of connection with their past.

One goes so far as to say that he has decided (decided!) to have her in his life again. He is seeking enrichment. At this, Vic stifles her snort and replies with chilly politeness that she really can't muster any interest in adding value to someone's life who, if recollection serves, fucked her 19 year old self a few times, told his friends, made her life hell momentarily, then never called again.

A response like that typically puts an end to it. Ironically, they don't like to have the actual articles of the past brought up to them. Still, Vic feels she's doing them a favour of sorts, reminding them, politely and no hard feelings mind you, what a shit they were. Maybe they won't be so eager to go looking up every conquest in their diary, transparently checking to see f she might have grown up to be the one that got away.

What a fucking waste of time for everybody involved. Still, you have to be polite don't you?

So Vic continues to recollect, collect again, these old memories at the rate she is required to by other people's demand to be known in the present for what they were in the past. But here… a message for the next person from her past who has googled her, found this and is toying with the idea of sending her a personal email:

Just leave it, will you? You're probably a better person now and you don't need to prove it to me. I don't give a monkey's butt.

Comments:

I loved that entry. Men often have trouble understanding that while the movie of their life is not inherently worth three hours of anyone else's time.

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Friday, April 8  

Power

Outside a brief childhood episode of believing that she had the supernatural powers of Wonder Woman and that at puberty these powers would blossom, unexpectedly revealing themselves and transforming her instantly into a Linda Carter look alike, sexy exercise suit and all – beyond that short lived belief, Vic doesn’t think of herself as a person who holds any particular power.

power noun 1. The ability or capacity to perform or act effectively. 2. Forcefulness; effectiveness 3. statistics The probability of rejecting the null hypothesis where it is false.

A compliment she recently received has made her wonder whether she does, in fact, have power that she’s not aware of. Someone tells her that she is a “strong and powerful person” which clashes so completely with her self-perception that it really gives her pause for thought.

Is she? Can a person get powerful, empowered, powered up, without knowing about it themselves? Is it possible that she’s walking around all charged with some kind of electrical current (you can see she’s not quite over the “signal” phobia yet) that she doesn’t feel herself?

Of course, there are different types of power:

Job power. Of which, she may have some little bit but it’s by title only and, therefore, pretty useless. She’s meant to be the leader of a small team at her workplace. Vic’s idea of leading usually comes down to canceling meetings that she’s set herself and acknowledging (if not always following) the unspoken rule that leaders have to arrive earlier and leave later than their reports.

Social power. Definitely none. Vic is a shy, transmutable sort of person. The type who would definitely cave to peer pressure. A real go-alonger.

Physical power. Obviously, no. The last time Vic’s bicep was anything approaching “sinewy” isn’t clear in recent memory. Her arms flap in a dishearteningly hereditary Scottish way.

But then, she supposes, there are more ephemeral sorts of power, aren’t there? Effectiveness, forthrightness, organization, empathy. She does have a tendency to cry when she hears about someone else having a really bad time with things. Perhaps not a traditional definition of power.

It could be, she surmises, that her power is more “statistical”. If there is one thing Vic can be counted on to do, that’s to reject a null hypothesis.

(she’s not even sure that’s true, since she doesn’t really know about math either way, but she likes the sound of it)

Vic decides to explore her power to reject what is false.

Taking stock, she commits to beginning her rounds of powerful rejections with her job. She decides, here and now, to find new work. Perhaps something with less power implied in the title and requiring more play from her newfound statistical powers.

Comments:

See, but the power Vic has is the kind that makes people fall in lust/love/serious like (and sometimes the flipside of those coins) with her. She holds a large space in many people's thoughts...a power not to be trifled with. She is not invisible, that's for sure.

# posted by  Anonymous : 3:59 PM

 

Hm. Another vote for power. How weird. Makes me feel like someone who's got hotel reservations in multiple cities at once. V.

# posted by  R : 9:40 AM

 

Power is one of those emphemeral things that can manifest itself in so many ways. Those who think it's simply physical (strength or money) are missing the bulk of the point. Power can be the strength to do what needs to be done; it can be the ability to turn heads; it can be the ability to stay silent when all a friend needs is company. If you're thinking about it at all it probably means you have it in one form or another.

# posted by  Woodstock : 1:45 PM

 

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Tuesday, March 15  

Signal

Vic’s birthday is a thing she rarely celebrates unless forced to do so by the covert efforts of insistent friends. She’s not reluctant about her age. She just thinks we’ve got it backward when it comes to who did the bigger, braver thing in the delivery room. Vic thinks that mothers should be celebrated on the birthdays of their children.

At the moment she turns 31 (on a birthday which she has not celebrated except by the eating of cake), she is in her daughter’s darkened bedroom keeping watch as the little form under the blanket settles back to sleep. Vic is worrying, as she has been for the past few days, about signals.

Signal noun 1. An indicator, such as a gesture or coloured light, that serves as a means of communication. 2. Something that incites action 3. An impulse or a fluctuating electric quantity, such as voltage, current, or electric field strength, whose variations represent coded information.

Signals, specifically the vast number of them pulsing through the air and, by necessity, through the very space our physical selves are occupying at any time, first appear on Vic’s “things to be concerned about” list when she drives into her underground parking without losing the radio signal in her car. As she rounds the levels, circling deeper into the earth, putting more concrete between herself and the outside world, she begins to wonder at the strength of the signal that must be delivering the retro-80s pop music from across town down to her car radio.

When she puts the concern together with the idea that signals of this strength are probably gliding through her body at a regular rate of millions per second, she gets mildly sweaty-palmed with distress.

How are we affected by all these signals, frequencies, transmissions that slice into our physical structures? Is there anywhere in the world that a body could be free of these whipping, hurtling signals?

This thought turns over in her head for several days. When she confides her concern to Jon, he gives her the cockeye and says “I wouldn’t go around telling people that you feel signals.”

She rolls her eyes at him, signalling “it’s no big deal”. Still, she worries.

Wednesday, March 2  

You

You are the reason, the why, the (remember) when. You’re thought of all the time, even though you might not know it. She holds you, hot against her heart, rubbing the image of you with her mind’s thumb. Polishing you. Keeping you alive.

Like you were just yesterday. Even when you’re today.

You pron. 1. The person being addressed.

Vic has a host of "yous", the people who changed her, made her hurt, hollowed her or made her happy. She loves all of them, differently, but purely. Without reason.

You are her heart, outside herself. Run off to live a life all its own. You are doughy legs, wide eyes, crazy hair. Cookie smeared on your face. You are her greatest love.

You are the unexpected grail of years of blind pursuit. You are tall, tall, taller than trees. You are softhearted and basic, but not simple. She realizes after living with you a year, that you were the one fate promised. This fact astounds her. You are him.

You are the one she thought she’d end up with.

You are her friend. Her most trusted. You are the only phone call she’ll answer without hesitation.

You are the uneven rock overlooking the atlantic on which she built her leaning house. You’re also the shifting sea that laps at her foundations. She thought of you as her exit strategy, that one day she’d just go ahead and fall in. You have many faces. She has kissed every one.

You, she’s afraid of. When she drives by you on the street, her veins seem to open too wide and she gets dizzy with fear. You are a very uncomfortable situation. A hard wooden plank for a bad back. She would rather forget you, but never will.

Comments:

You have a knack for writing in a way that is both vivid and unsettling in the best sense of the word.

Or perhaps it's just this post, the reaction to the second person pronoun, that makes it so much more personal.

Either way, thank you.

# posted by  Woodstock : 11:52 AM

 

That's what I loved about the word. It's so personal because we all have a you, many even. And we all *are* a you at the same time. It's vague and real and malleable, that word.

# posted by  R : 8:42 AM

 

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Friday, February 18  

Steam

Jon buys Vic a valentine’s gift. They have between them a rule that presents on this day must be of a “small but intimate” nature. He doesn’t follow this rule to its very letter when he gives her a credit card shaped certificate for a luxury spa. His man’s handwriting across the envelope reads “because you deserve some time to think.”

steam n 1. The vapour phase of water. 2. Power; energy.

Vic calls the spa immediately to set an appointment, selecting a two hour long massage. The cheery receptionist at the spa informs her that their relaxing “water therapies” are complimentary with her services so she should bring her swimsuit and plan to arrive an hour early.

On the day of her appointment, Vic arrives at the spa and is shown to the women’s changeroom where she is given a luxurious bathrobe (has anything ever felt so good as a expensive white terry robe?), a locker and a towel. She undresses, hangs her clothes neatly on the hooks and slips her bikini on with minimal shyness considering the audience of at least 10 other women. She holds her body less privately now that she’s had a child. Oddly, she is also more body-confident now than in younger years, aware as she is of the contrast between her pregnant and non-pregnant self.

She slips into the spa flipflops and opens the door marked “Water Therapies”.

Immediately, she is reminded of the women’s bathhouses she used to visit when she was single. Large expanses of Romanesque tile, white walls, deep aqua pools of water, some churning with heat, others cool and still. In those bathhouses, every chair, every pool was dotted with women in various stages of a sexual game. Those were different days.

She sighs inwardly at the memories of a girl who feels like 45 selves ago and hangs her robe outside the steamroom door.

The glass door is opaque with steam and when she opens it, a whoosh of humid air washes over her face. Vic has always loved the feel of wet air. The way it licks your skin, clings and drips, makes you languorous and aware.

Inside the steamroom it is nearly dark. Lit only by a few potlights near the floor, her eyes take a moment to adjust. She finds the tiled benches, hops up onto one and relaxes her back against the hot, wet wall. Breathes.

She looks through the steam and realizes that one of the walls in the room is also glass. Like the door, it is steamed and dripping. Faint shapes move beyond it, illuminated slightly by the floor lights. Two women are on the other side in what must be another steam room. Vic can hear their muffled conversation and feels the distinct thrill of being private in a public space.

It surprises her 30 year old, “I’m a mother now and thoughts like these are not appropriate” self to find this idea lingering around in her mind, dashing behind synapses, peeping sneakily around her cortex:

“If there were another woman in here, would I be able to stop myself from flirting with her? If I flirted with her, would she sense the same dark privacy and flirt back? Would I sit with her in the farthest corner and would I let my fingers linger over her leg? Would I kiss her? Would I kneel down in this steam, part her knees with my tongue and summon my more devilish self, hoping like hell that nobody came in?”

The glass door whooshes open and another woman enters. Vic blushes (thank god it’s so dark) and rushes out past her, saying “That’s enough steam for me,” as she goes.

Comments:

Mmmmmm, you just melted me......

# posted by  Dharma : 11:18 PM

 

Potential is a wonderful thing, is it not? I love the way you can take a small musing, a little vignette, and make it so vivid. Thanks, once again, for taking the time to share with us.

Cheers!

# posted by  Woodstock : 3:14 PM

 

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Wednesday, February 16  

Exhaustion

Despite her usual aggressively determined energy to undertake, to do, to fix, to complete, Vic seems to have hit some lower level of tiredness recently that makes it impossible for her to achieve anything more adventurous than getting out of bed and back into it at night. Whatever she may accomplish during the work day is thanks only to the compliance of routine, her clients and her coworkers.

exhaustion n. 1. The state of being exhausted; extreme fatigue.

Vic’s visit to the energy basement isn’t entirely physical. Though Graycie is unhappily cutting some teeth just now -- which has meant several nights over of hourly waking, walking through to the nursery, patting, shushing and stumbling back to her own bed with her eyes still closed. Still, Vic has been physically exhausted before and has managed to deal with it, continue on, keep it up and soldier through. (bless a good cliché)

This time, there’s something all-encompassing about the exhaustedness she’s feeling. Something large as life. An ennui, if you want to be French about it, that leaves everything quite pale and uninteresting looking.

First, the honest truth is that she is failing at her job. Her job that she used to do with one typing finger and an extreme drive to accomplish. Suddenly, banking software doesn’t seem so all-fired important to Vic’s life-schematics, other than, of course, from an end-user point of view (where would we be without online banking after all?).

She is tired of her grumpy coworkers, especially now that she is as grumpy as them. She finds the antics of her management-style-deficient boss to be less funny now that she used to. When she (the boss) announces a company-wide ban on internet use (personal and professional, mind you) on Fridays, Vic has a hard time laughing. Instead, she tears off her glasses (which she only uses at work, it’s ruining her eyes too!), slams her forehead into her desk and almost cries with the sheer exhaustion of dealing with stupidness of this calibre. She takes none of the joy she once would have in pointing out to her boss that they are an internet company and banning the use of their number one product is beyond the most retarded, ridiculous, pointless piece of bullshit accidental management she’s ever heard of.

Finally, her enthusiasm for personal endeavours have been put to bed by recent rounds of bad luck with technology (bad hosting, hijacked bandwidth, no access to her personal banking for several days, oh the irony). It is with dreary drop-shoulders that she considers never ever taking on a personal project ever again.

Only that would leave her with nothing more interesting to do at work, but work. Which is an exhausting thought on it’s own.

Comments:

gosh vic,

that SUCKS!

knowwhatimean, jellybean?

sal

# posted by  sal : 12:13 AM

 

Oh, m'dear, how I do feel for you. Management deficiencies nearly drove me to a nervous breakdown. Just remember, keep breathing, the technology will sort itself out, and eventually management's bad decisions will come back and bite it square in the ass (and not in that "ooh, that feels good but it shouldn't but it does" sort of way, either ;-)

Cheers,
Woodstock

# posted by  Woodstock : 9:25 AM

 

I pray for a good ass biting daily.

# posted by  R : 10:01 AM

 

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Tuesday, January 25  

Queer

Vic wakes up in the middle of the night feeling queer.

queer adj. 1. Deviating from the expected or normal. 2. Odd or unconventional. 3. Of a questionable nature or character. 4. Fake; counterfeit.5. Offensive Slang Homosexual.

Clearly, the dictionary has not caught up with the latest trend in self/sexual categorization. Queer is a good thing now. Nothing offensive about it.

Vic's been referring to herself as "queer" for years. Since she tried so seriously to be straight with William, found herself supernaturally inclined to grope women in dark danceclub corners, left William for one of them, then left her for another, and another, and another (ad nauseam for all parties involved) then ended up sleeping with boys again anyway. Stumped by her own inability to make up her mind, she settled on Queer as a sort of no-man's (but not really) land between her noisly clamouring sexual drives.

With Graycie on her hip, which could be thought evidence to the contrary by the unknowing public, Vic sometimes forgets that she is queer. She lives straight, thinks straight, talks straight. But she does not dream straight, it seems.

She wakes up from a dream that she is dressed like a teenaged boy. She is shorter than she really is, but that's probably neither here nor there. In the dream, she is avidly attracted to another woman who is dressed like a boy. They rub and press against each other in a concealed area of a public place. Vic is conscious (in her subconcious) of feeling like a man who is sleeping with a man, which excites her beyond description, even while knowing she is actually woman with a her hand pressing into a woman, tongue in her mouth and pantingly aroused by her.

Just when you think you know yourself, your dreams have a way of keeping things interesting.

Comments:

It must me the moon phase or something: I woke up at 4:45 terrified from a dream where I was going to marry Peter Jennings but have to leave my girlfriend and the neighborhood I love in exchange for a jetset, VIP party life. I felt like crying when I woke up.

Woodstock

# posted by  Anonymous : 3:06 PM

 

Greetings Blogger it's rather cold here today, but summer is comming to our part of the world soon. I was looking for the latest most up to date information on dream dictionary and I landed on your page. Although Queer is not an exact match I can see why I ended up here while looking for dream dictionary Great stuff thanks for the read.....now where did I put that surf board !

# posted by  dream symbol : 1:55 PM

 

Greetings Blogger it's rather cold here today, but summer is comming to our part of the world soon. I was looking for the latest most up to date information on innocent dream and I landed on your page. Although Queer is not an exact match I can see why I ended up here while looking for innocent dream Great stuff thanks for the read.....now where did I put that surf board !

# posted by  dream symbol : 11:49 AM

 

Hi there Bloggergee there must be millions of blogs out there. I was looking for dreamstuff when i came across your blog. while Queerwasn't excatly what i was looking for I enjoyed the read. So I'll carry on looking for dreamsites

# posted by  dream dictionary : 2:42 PM

 

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Thursday, January 20  

Secret

Although Vic cannot keep other people’s secrets, she is a medieval fortress replete with crocodile moat, iron enforced gating, archery turrets and the thick, hanging cobwebs of silence when it comes to keeping her own.

secret noun 1 Something kept hidden from others or known only to oneself or to a few. 2. Something that remains beyond understanding or explanation; a mystery. 3. Method or formula on which success is based.

At different stages of her life, different things have become secret. The doors of her personal tower open and shut, old secrets ambling past like recently released prisoners on the first stroll away from the gates, having served their time, suddenly free. For whatever reason and sometimes for none, the secret becomes “okay to say” and she lets it go.

When she was younger, the small secret evils of youth (small drinks snuck from the liquor cabinet, covert smoking, rubbing up against boys in parking lots) were the guarded prisoners of her heart. When she became an adult, she released all those secrets into the world, emptying the barracks. She spoke freely about them as though it had not been her who had done those things. She was past punishment.

In their place, other secrets piled through the gates. Whipped and beaten regularly, these secrets know they’re in for a cruel sentence.

Of the many secrets she keeps buried in and patted down in her soul there are one or two that persistently rise the surface, demanding to be acknowledged. These secrets are also the ones she loves best.

Comments:

Secrets...what an interesting, and charged topic for today. I wonder if some unknown force guided whatever method you use to choose your word to this one in particular.

I find them fascinating, secrets, for unlike most things, they have the ability to retain their power even when spoken.

Cheers,
Woodstock ;-)

# posted by  Anonymous : 6:58 PM

 

"Secret" was chosen through a weird string of possible words. I was thinking "cold" as it's 20 below and the homeless folk in the underpass on my way to work got me wondering what real cold is like. Then I skipped to "heart" thinking I'd compare cold and warm ones. Then I locked onto "secret" since that's what my heart is full of. And I drove the rest of the way to work happily poking and prodding old memories.

Still feel for the homeless though.

# posted by  R : 8:47 AM

 

pssst... trixie!

where are ya? i didn't break it, did i?

there i go... develop a quasi-addiction and then it disappears.

*pouting*

sal

# posted by  sal : 4:44 PM

 

Sorry Sal. The Hercurve.com interruption brought to you courtesy of my very bad hosting company. And also my holiday in the Bahamas. Back now and hard at work, rebuilding. Treat yourself to some forum methodone and keep checking back.

# posted by  R : 7:57 AM

 

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Friday, January 14  

Work

Vic sits in her overlit, screen-glare, dry-mouth, coffee-breath, walls-that-don’t-reach-the-ceiling office and dreams about some circumstance that would allow her not to work. Ever again.

work noun 1. Physical or mental effort or activity directed toward the production or accomplishment of something. 2. A job; employment: 3. Something that has been produced or accomplished through the effort, activity, or agency of a person or thing.

Human beings aren’t meant to sit at a desk all day, crossing and uncrossing their legs to avoid loss of limbs due to non-use. Vic finds her first day back at work stressful and beleaguering. Her shoulders ache from sitting through meetings and wading through 6 months of unimportant emails that have filtered through to her during her maternity leave.

Many of the recent ones say "Welcome Back Vic!" These are more depressing than the emails with subject lines guaranteeing a "slimmer, sleeker shape in only 30 days". Certainly more personally disturbing that those exclaiming "Increase your manhood!" and "Stay hard longer!"

She is back at work. And, to her, that is much sadder than love handles or short, flaccid penises.

Some people enjoy working. They define themselves by the job they do. They come in early, they stay until the streetlights come on outside the window and the highways have cleared of rush hour traffic. Vic is normally one of those adding to the crush of evacuees on the highway. She’d rather sit in traffic, not at work, than wait at work until the roads are cleared. She considers her job a waste of her personal time, a hardship. Traffic is a minor inconvenience.

Today, it begins snowing in earnest. Vic turns her chair to watch it come down, imagines standing with Grace at the window, enjoying vicariously the new wonder of white stuff billowing around the sky. A sharp look from her boss yanks her back.

"No work to do?" he asks pointedly.

"Plenty." she answers, knowing that she left her most important work behind this morning. Her finest work to date.

Friday, January 7  

Fight

You wouldn't think Vic a fighter to look at her. She's what you might call "non-threatening" with her shy demeanour and quick, if uncertain, smiles. Usually, fighters owe their fiesty nature to a surplus of confidence. A thing which Vic has never had much of to start with.

fight verb 1. To attempt to harm or gain power over an adversary by blows or with weapons. 2. To engage in a quarrel; argue. 3. To strive vigorously and resolutely.

Vic and Jon don't fight very often but when they do it is always about sex. Even when it's about the groceries, it's really about sex. How little they're having, who wants it less/more, who's jerking off to what and what that must mean for their relationship.

It's a battle that both are weary of fighting and yet, it wages on, battalions always at the ready, front lines moving forward once a week or more depending on the validity of Vic's excuses.

When Vic fights, she doesn't say things she'll regret. She's thankful at least for that little bit of self-restraint. Because she wouldn't like to have to apologize after these fights. That would be like giving in. Jon also refuses to apologize. He believes he's in the right to want sex and Vic is in the wrong to avoid it. Which, of course, by typical relational rules would be absolutely correct.

But still. But still.

Vic maintains her quiet outrage like a covert bonfire under the subway bridge. She fights against herself. Sometimes, she wants sex quite a lot -- shaves her legs, gets things ready -- but when the moment comes, she feels as though to fuck Jon would be to let him win the battle. And she just can't, as conquering general, allow that to happen.

It's stupid really.

Thursday, December 30  

Pain

Women understand pain. They have conversed with it, canoodled with it, accepted it into their family. They are more familiar with it than men. This is, of course, a generalization. It doesn't take into account those men Vic has known who suffer through life with various diseases, congenital defects or dead mothers.

pain noun 1. An unpleasant sensation occurring in varying degrees of severity as a consequence of injury, disease, or emotional disorder. 2. Suffering or distress. 3. A source of annoyance; a nuisance.

Despite what she wrote in her highschool journal the day after she'd had sex for the first time (dear diary, I am a woman now) Vic knows that she did not truly join the ranks of women until she experienced absolute pain.

Birthing was like passage into a secret society. She bought her way in with stifled screams and sweat. Her body split itself open like an overripe peach and in that moment she knew finally what it really means to be a woman.

Does it matter that Vic is not brave in the face of pain? No matter how familiar, she is still scared of it and when it comes, whimpers like a child, clutching her ouch and searching concerned faces for the one who can kiss it better.

Vic wakes at 4am with what feels like a knife twisting in her lower abdomen. She turns over, sits, stands, tries to find a less painful place. When she can't, she panics and kneels on the floor. Jon comes over and strokes her hair, whispers Feel better, baby.

Later, after telling the story of her recent pain over and over to nurses, doctors and ultrasound technicians, she realizes that the pain has gone. They tell her there's nothing wrong. Suddenly, that feels true. Vic goes back home feeling sheepish but, like all women, still entitled to her pain.

Wednesday, December 22  

Older

In some ways, Vic is still waiting to be "older".

old(er) adv 1. Having lived or existed for a relatively long time; far advanced in years or life. 2. Having or exhibiting the physical characteristics of age. 3. Having or exhibiting the wisdom of age; mature 4. Exhibiting the effects of time or long use; worn: an old coat.

When Vic was very young, she admired a set of ruby earrings and matching ring that her mother had stowed away in her jewellery chest. She found them tucked into a small white ring box beside the little container that held her baby teeth (her mother assured her that the Tooth Fairy had a deal with parents to return all teeth collected so the parents could cherish them forever and keep them stashed in a little box). Vic took the ruby earrings out of the box one day and with the ring loosely balanced around her big thumb, she asked her mother why she never wore them. Her mother replied "Because your great granny left them for you. They'll be yours to wear when you're older."

The word "older" had a deep, intriguing note. Older. How delicious.

Of course, Vic, being just a little girl, didn't altogether respect the word and decided the very next week that she was older enough and wore the ring to school, planning to put it back before her mother could know. As was bound to happen, Vic lost the ring, stressed about it for weeks and finally opted to say nothing at the time and hope that when it all came out she would be older enough to handle the consequences.

As if giving her a second chance, the year Vic turned 15 (half a lifetime ago) her parents gave her a very expensive ring. It was heavy and valuable, much too good for a teenager. The message implied seem to be "keep this safe so you'll have it when you're older." The present was, in a way, the responsibility of safeguarding a precious thing.

Schooled by her earlier disaster, Vic took this responsibility quite seriously. She put the ring away into her own jewellery chest and never, ever wore it. Over the years, she has moved her jewellery chest across provinces, into different apartments, new bedrooms, new lives.

She thinks of it for the first time in a long time today. The thought emerges like a recovered memory. She thinks of going to the jewellery chest and taking out the ring. Maybe putting it on. She is, after all, older now.

Still, she holds off a little. Ruminating over all the possible meanings of the word "older". Just to be sure.

Sunday, December 19  

Alone

Being alone has become a treat, an exhileration. It has the sweetness of sudden freedom.

alone adj 1 Being apart from others; solitary. 2. Being without anyone or anything else; only. 3. Considered separately from all others of the same class. 4. Being without equal; unique.

On a day that Jon stays home from work, Vic is allowed to venture out alone to run some holiday errands. Not "allowed" like she's the family pet and has rules about out and in -- but "allowed" as in, circumstance allows her. So you understand.

She wakes early, much earlier than she needs, and dresses in the dim morning light of their bedroom. Jon smiles sleepily from the bed, half watching her dress through eyelids barely open. He doesn't need to see clearly. He knows her body well enough by now to visulize without seeing. Like groping through a familiar hallway in a blackout, he can see her bending and reaching for hooks behind her back without sight.

She kisses him goodbye and goes to wrap a warm scarf around her neck. She digs her gloves out from the bottom of the stroller she normally leaves the house pushing.

As she leaves the apartment, strollerless, she makes sure to close the door gently behind her. Grace sleeps softly and a sharp noise would awaken her, which would awaken Jon and force him to start the day earlier than he wants, which would make Vic feel badly and like she really shouldn't be going out alone, which she doesn't want to feel.

All she wants to feel today is the swift excitement of walking quickly through the December cold. Her ears numbing even beneath her hat. Her chapped lips on the rim of an expensive, too-much-froth latte. Her lungs full of breath that explodes from her in great white clouds as she goes.

The 10 minutes it takes to walk to the Eaton Centre are her first 10 minutes alone since she gave birth. Or since she became pregnant really, since her body was shared with Grace for that time, her constant companion even then.

Vic cherishes her time alone with a level of intensity and awareness of small detail that is singular and uncomplex.

Wednesday, December 15  

Ordinary

The day Vic gave birth to the little bundle of wriggling limbs that immediately asserted a stronger authority over her than any living being had been capable of previously, hurtling into existence not just a small person but a whole life situation so out of the ordinary that anyone would have laughed to think it a year before, was the day Vic transitioned into an ordinary person.

ordinary: adj 1.Commonly encountered; usual. 2.Of no exceptional ability, degree, or quality; average. 3.Of inferior quality; second-rate. 4.Having immediate rather than delegated jurisdiction, as a judge.

To become ordinary is to be found acceptable and right by the general populace. No matter what strangeness Vic may have harboured before becoming ordinary, she joined a greater clique (indeed became a favoured member as her belly grew) of the commonly shared experience. She enjoyed the benefits of her new station, became more confident and outgoing, assured of her place in the ordinary world.

Of course there were, and still are, pangs of doubt when she surveys the growing ordinariness around her. Her apartment becoming cluttered with miniature furniture in primary colours. Her skin beginning to show age, starting around her eyes to look older in that way specially reserved for mothers. Her sex life stalling, now quiet and remote as her fatigue battles Jon's desire for rights to her sleepy body.

It is painful to become ordinary. It is sad. But, at the same time, it is a great relief.

The authoritative bundle of limbs is named Grace with a nod to whatever stroke of fate, luck, destiny, what have you, that brought her into being. At five months old, Vic is able to see beyond the little body and toward the person she is becoming. Grace becomes Vic's daily project, most interesting play thing, most loved possession (while, yes, we know children aren't possessions at all). Grace shows Vic that ordinary is not just the world's median. It is also a place of extremes.

Tuesday, December 14  

Phase

Life progresses through a series of phases. Some, you talk about. Some, you don't. Some, you forget to mention not because they are insignificant or trifling but because they are huge, vast, inexplicable gawps of time and happenings that can't possibly be mentioned unless you really plan on doing a lot of talking and explaining and sum-upping. Which, typically, you don't have the time to do when you're in the midst of that kind of phase.

phase: noun 1. A distinct stage of development. 2. A temporary manner, attitude, or pattern of behavior: just a passing phase. 3. An aspect; a part: every phase of the operation.

In as concise a way as possible, let's just travel ahead a full year since Vic last had anything to say about her life. Let's not get hung up on the details. Let's all acknowledge that this phase we have just traveled through was significant and in some ways surprising and most definitely of the first definition rather than the second. Let's agree to forgo our desire for sense, logic and explanations. Let's accept that nature cannot be read aloud.

Vic got pregnant, decided that the child was exactly the right thing at exactly the right time, and to everyone's surprise, announced that she would have her baby, Jonathan and all.

Let's just move on.

Comments:

This post has been removed by a blog administrator.

# posted by  R : 2:20 PM

 

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Monday, August 4  

Sweat

Vic’s former lover and now friend (Ann) calls her early Sunday morning and says "Let’s spend all afternoon eating chips and loafing on the sofa and then go to the gym." It is 37 degrees celcius and climbing.

sweat: verb 1. To excrete moisture through the pores of the skin 2. To exert one’s mental or physical powers to the point of exhaustion.

Vic likes Ann and she’s been very satisfied by the steady friendship that has developed between them. Though she feels she doesn’t deserve Ann’s friendship (having broken her heart viciously, not once but in fact twice which is utterly inexcusable) she is certainly glad of it. Ann is smart and witty and well put together, sort of like Vic but in a more lesbian way. Plus, she is devoted to the gym and occasionally remembers to drag Vic along, keeping her healthy by association.

The chip eating goes well. Couch loafing clocks in just as expected. They discuss the renewal of Vic's lustful relationship with Jon. Ann cocks her eyebrow discouragingly but doesn't say anything when Vic admits that she brought Jon back to erase William, just as William was brought (or allowed, anyway) back to erase Jon. But because she's not the kind of friend who tries to solve your problems, rather listens and remembers (and may point patterns out in the future when you try to pretend you never did or said such a stupidly obvious thing) -- becase she's that kind of friend, Ann doesn't ask Vic if she thinks it's a good idea to use men to make herself feel better. She just gives the look and pulls a strand of hair out of Vic's mouth before turning back to the tv and popping the last full chip in her mouth.

Vic already knows what Ann thinks anyway. But she comforts herself with the thought that Ann couldn't possibly understand. Women are just different. You don't have to erase them. You break up with them, you hold them while they cry, duck if they throw something and then you get back to the business of being their friend. It's easy. No sweat.

With men, you don't get to be friends afterward. Not real friends. The best you can manage is furtive lunches that purport to be "catch ups" but are really just opportunities to keep track of each other, to know if, when, another person has officially taken your place in their lives so at least you can stop sweating the gross, heavy, INEVITABILITY of it.

Wednesday, July 23  

Body

Vic has always thought of bodies as secret. Expanses of skin, connective tissues, bone and ligament that are carefully attended to in the privacy of one’s own home, but not talked about. Covered and revealed only in parts, when appropriate.

Vic has to hide her enthusiastic fascination in situations where these great secrets are revealed reluctantly and out of necessity. Locker rooms especially. She is glad in moments like these that she is not male, is not equipped with an appendage that could signal the exact level of her fascination to anyone who cared to see.

body: noun 1. the main part 2. a measurable whole 3. a number of persons who have come together.

Vic has a physiology textbook sitting on her coffee table. She often pulls it onto her lap and gawps openly at the crafty little organ systems and structures that people take such pains to hide under clothing. She knows from this amateur study that the dictionary definition isn’t quite right.

The body is not just "the main part" of us, revealing as that statement might be since Vic would rather agree that it is, after all, the most important part. But no, the body is more specifically the integumentary, endocrine, lymphatic, nervous, muscle, skeletal, cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, reproductive, and urinary systems all working together to form one highly interesting compound.

It’s Vic’s consuming interest in the body and its systems that leads to her spend an entire weekend touching and rubbing the body of a stranger named Gregory. Allowing Gregory to touch and rub hers.

She arrives at 9am on Saturday morning to attend the course in Introductory Technique for Massage Therapy. She is required to take this class before she will be permitted to give the school 20,000 dollars and embark on a new career as an RMT. She’s changed her mind about wanting to become an RMT at all however, thinking she’ll probably just keep on working at the software company since nobody expects her pay dues on that (get a loan and live on pasta for 2 years) again. Changed mind aside, she still takes the course. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to handle people’s secrets openly and she’s not about to miss out just because she’s career-lazy.

The ethics of this situation do not concern her. She’s not lecherous. Just fascinated.

She is partnered off by the instructor with the tall, muscled and presumably gay (though this theory is challenged by the pale band of flesh on his wedding ring finger which she notices when she gets to rub his palms later) Gregory. They’re both quite tall so they won’t have to adjust the massage table when they switch positions, one nude on the table, one playing greased up therapist.

Vic offers to play therapist first so she pulls the privacy curtains around the table and gives Gregory a moment to undress and get between the clean, white sheets. While he arranges himself, she stands and watches the first live demo. The instructor teaches her green therapists-to-be to drape a body so only the area about to be worked on is revealed. This allows the patient to feel as though they still have some secrets.

For the rest of the morning, Vic pulls the white top sheet into delicate, discrete folds over Gregory’s various body parts. Once she’s tucked the sheet around the body part, creating a tight border which, the instructor admonishes, is not to be transgressed by therapeutic fingers, she moves aside and applies a small pool of oil to her palms.

Then, she approaches the body part that lays revealed and vulnerable. She stands quietly over it for a moment, examining it swiftly for areas of swelling, abrasion or knots in the musculature, then she places her warm, wet palms on the skin and sweeps across in the direction of the heart.

After that, it’s all just the practice of specific manual techniques which Vic doesn’t find very interesting at all. It’s the revelation of skin, the examination and the first effluerage that really excite her.

It is the abdomen, Vic discovers, that is the most revealing of all. When she covers Gregory’s chest with a white towel and carefully pulls the sheet back to the waistline, she blushes visibly. Not because the small expanse of abdominal flesh is arousing to her in particular, but because she is suddenly aware of just how vulnerable it is to her hands. Our guts are housed here. The dorsal/ventral cavity is the keeper of our most secret of all secrets. Behind this weak curtain of epithelial tissue, sits the great Oz, dictating the function of our entire body. This is the real deal, the holy of holys, the one place you do not want to show a stranger.

And there Vic is, hands hovering in descent over top it.

When she touches Gregory’s body like this, she feels as though she is touching the whole world. She is touching herself and everyone she has ever known. She kneads abdominal skin with a timed, circular stroke, closes her eyes and thinks that the body's secret has finally been revealed to her.

Later, when she lies naked under draped sheets and Gregory’s large hands make their way toward her abdomen, she watches his face for a sign of revelation.

Vic is disappointed to note that he does not look at all mystical or emotionally affected. Rather, this expanse of skin and bone and ligament named Gregory which had revealed major secrets (not only its own but the secrets of the world) to her just an hour before, looks stiff and embarrassed to be touching her belly.

She observes that he does not see her abdomen as the curtain of Oz. He sees it as most of her lovers have seen it, just the skin between her breasts and her cunt.

Friday, July 18  

Cave

Vic remembers reading once that caves symbolize female genitalia. That to dream of a cave is to desire sex or, in a woman’s case, readmittance to the womb. She supposes if the woman is queer then it might still be about sex anyway.

cave: noun 1. a natural underground chamber, verb 2. to explore caves, 3. to cease to resist.

Vic has never been inside an actual cave. She’s gone down into the Sudbury mines, but that’s not proper caving. On a family trip to England, she got spooked in a dark hole called Wooky Hollow, but that wasn’t a cave either. Just a tourist attraction built into the side of a hill.

After 3 months, Vic caves and calls Jonathan. She doesn’t think about it, analyze it or talk herself out of it. She comes in from the backyard, wipes her hand across her sweaty upper lip and puts the phone to her ear.

When he answers she says, “Do you still want me?”

Tuesday, May 27  

Control

Vic is hugely into control. The way a teenager might be into skate punk. With that much devotion and that same strict adherence to every aspect of its style so that it infects her fashion, her speech, her emotions, her dreams and her wants.

control: noun 1. The right and power to command, decide, rule or judge. verb 1. To exercise authority or influence over.

The difficulty with the dictionary definition of control (and indeed the reality of it) is that it relies on the person/emotion/desire being controlled to comply with one’s command, to recognize one’s authority over itself, to agree complicitly to be ruled.

While Vic has enjoyed much success in the control of inanimate objects (her alphabetized cd and book collections, her very clean bathroom), she hasn’t done all that well with people. Herself or others.

The reality is that when it comes to personal relationships, Vic much prefers to be controlled than to be the controller. She assumes the passive position like it’s her birthright.

If someone tries to push her up to the top, she gets stubborn and unhappy. She’ll do it for a time, take charge, make things happen, decide what needs doing, but she won’t enjoy it and she’ll lose all interest in the person who’s put her in that uncomfortable position.

Weakness is a quality much despised by Vic in anyone but herself. But then so is too much strength. Typically, she wants to control the exact level of controlling she’s likely to receive from anyone.

William was awfully weak and it led to Vic having to take care of everything most of the time. Rob had no weakness about him at all and she that would make him perfect until she realized that no weakness at all isn’t very interesting and it’s hard to fall in love with someone who’s cold like a cement barricade.

What she needs, she decides, is diluted mastery. Someone who can lead her into love with a firm grip on the back of her neck.

Sunday, May 25  

Change

Vic is not afraid of change. She's addicted to it. She changes fast and hard into new lives, new versions of herself with the one-fingered ease of a driver who knows the stretch of highway between their lover's house and their own in the dark of any night.

change: verb 1. to alter; to make different; to cause to pass from one state to another 2. to alter by substituting something else 3. to give and take reciprocally; to exchange.

Vic walks home in the dark. She's not afraid of Toronto and it is not afraid of her. They coexist without noticing each other much of the time.

She turns down the alley that leads to her apartment and walks with the ease of a cat, thumbs looped into her pockets, whispering a line of poetry to herself over and over. It came into her head for no reason and it won't go away.

Come live with me and be my love and we shall all the pleasures prove.

She can't remember who wrote it or where she read it or when. But she rolls it over her tongue like it's a new lover's nipple.

The change in her pocket makes quiet time. The sound of change in a pocket always reminds her of her father.

Vic has changed again. She doesn't want William she realizes. She wants his ghost. And that is both more difficult and more easy to live with. Come live with me.

She doesn't wonder why he doesn't call again after their brutal fucking. He floated in and left, quiet like a ghost and he's had as much impact. He's only left a sense of disbelief, a vague longing but nothing she can touch. And be my love.

It's changed her, but for once not left her hollow.

To whom will Vic have to prove her change? To the old women in their back gardens who watch her amble by in the dark? She's just a younger version of themselves to them. To William? He's a small moment already passed by. To herself? She's the most critical audience of all.

Because she's already seen a hundred changes and seen them all change again. She has turned leaves as often as matresses and coats. She walks backward a few steps like a model on a catwalk, turning back again and squinting sexily at her own shadow.

And we shall all the pleasures prove, baby. Just wait.

Wednesday, May 14  

Fate

Vic believes in Fate, though it does worry her somewhat that she hasn’t heard from it yet. It's difficult to keep on believe in a thing when it sullenly lags behind you.

fate: noun 1. That which is inevitably destined. 2. A predestined tragic end.

Seems that by dictionary definition, Fate doesn't swing both ways. Fate is tragic, case closed. But Vic labours under the blind belief that the real tragedy would be for it not to appear at all. She confuses it, perhaps, with destiny.

This revelation aside, Vic holds firm (perhaps out of stubborn, mule-headed optimism, something she’s really never been accused of before) to the idea that there’s something in store for her that has yet to be revealed. Something good, if she dare be that bold.

She is thinking about fate tonight because she dreamed the face of her soulmate last night. In a kind of lucid dream, she met someone her sleep self acknowledged as her truest love (and she thinks truest as opposed to true since she does feel there can be levels of truth even in this very exact science of predestination). She grimaces slightly at the girlishness of her own subconscious, but what can you do?

In this dream, Vic swims in a pitch dark pool of water. She holds a flashlight in her right hand as she turns and twists like a dolphin, admiring the shape of her legs in the dim underwater glow. When she surfaces, she finds that she is in an underground cave. The pool of water she floats in is surrounded by smooth rocks. There are steps to ease her way out.

She climbs out of the water, goosebumps rising on her naked skin. At the top of the steps, there is an opening in the cave wall. She follows the path out and finds herself on a catwalk that is washed over and over by large, unsteadying waves. At the top of the metal catwalk, there is a door. She opens it.

Inside, the walls are the colour of non-dairy creamer. Flat beige. This is a clinic of some kind. A place of healing. She isn’t there to be healed. She is there to meet someone who works there.

When she looks into his eyes, in her dream, she recognizes immediately that he is… he is. She doesn’t know the words for what he is. He's not William, that's certain. He is dark haired with glints of gray, but he's still young. He is wearing a wine coloured shirt. He is fair skinned. He is arms around her and lips on hers. He is the one she didn’t realize she was looking for underwater. Just knowing he's been waiting here in a flat beige room heals her right up even though she wasn't sick.

She touches his face and tries to remember him, hard. She says "I want to remember your face tomorrow when I wake up. I want to remember that you’re who I’m looking for so I can stop messing about."

The next morning, this morning, Vic can’t remember his face quite exactly, only his hair and his smell and her limbs numb with fate. It’s nearly painful.

Is it a signal, she wonders idly, or just some patch-work of images and smells and tastes of the day before.

Vic believes in fate. Though she is worried she has just heard from it and its language isn’t one she knows.

Comments:

Hi Blogger it never ceases to amaze me how creative people are, especailly the young ones, gives me hope for the future. Anyway I was looking for information on dream dictionary and landed on your page. I was looking more for dream dictionary so Fate wasn't an exact match but I enjoyed reading your posts. Take Care. I'll bookmark your blog for future.

# posted by  dream guide : 9:24 PM

 

Greetings from Down Under, no not Australia, NZ the real downunder! Hi Blogger I was surfing blogs (as you do) looking for dream dictionary information when I came across your site. While Fate wasn't an exact match I enjoyed reading your posts. Thanks for the read, I'll visit again some time. take care.