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.

# posted by  Woodstock : 3:51 PM

 

Hi Blogger,
You have a great Flower blog here.
I wanted to share with you and everybody reading this comment an amazing opportunity. Maybe you have heard about free forced matrix before but trust me, I have studied many other free forced matrix thats available on the net, none can compares with this one.
You have to study my free forced matrix site to understand what I mean.
I am 100% sure of this opportunity that I will pay your initial membership so you can try it out for FREE! You have nothing to lose.
Best regards

# posted by  power forced matrix : 12:32 PM

 

Hi Blogger,
You have a great Flower blog here.
I wanted to share with you and everybody reading this comment an amazing opportunity. Maybe you have heard about power forced matrix before but trust me, I have studied many other power forced matrix thats available on the net, none can compares with this one.
You have to study my power forced matrix site to understand what I mean.
I am 100% sure of this opportunity that I will pay your initial membership so you can try it out for FREE! You have nothing to lose.
Best regards

# posted by  power forced matrix : 4:04 AM

 

Post a Comment

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.

# posted by  Anonymous : 2:32 PM

 

Hi Blogger,
You have a great Recollect blog here.
I wanted to share with you and everybody reading this comment an amazing opportunity. Maybe you have heard about power forced matrix before but trust me, I have studied many other power forced matrix thats available on the net, none can compares with this one.
You have to study my power forced matrix site to understand what I mean.
I am 100% sure of this opportunity that I will pay your initial membership so you can try it out for FREE! You have nothing to loose.
Best regards

# posted by  power forced matrix : 1:17 AM

 

Hi Blogger,
You have a great Recollect blog here.
I wanted to share with you an amazing opportunity. Maybe you have heard about free forced matrix before but trust me, I have studied many other free forced matrix thats available on the net, none can compares with this one.
You have to study my free forced matrix site to understand what I mean.
I am so sure of this opportunity that I will pay your initial membership so you can try it out for FREE!
Best regards

# posted by  free forced matrix : 1:25 PM

 

Post a Comment

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

 

Post a Comment

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

 

Post a Comment

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

 

Post a Comment

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

 

Post a Comment

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

 

Post a Comment

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

 

Post a Comment

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

 

Post a Comment

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.

# posted by  dream dictionary : 8:58 AM

 

Post a Comment

Sunday, May 11  

Silent

Everything’s gone jarringly silent.

silent: adjective 1. Making no sound or noise. 2. Temporarily unable or unwilling to speak, as from shock or fear. 3. Not voiced or expressed.

Vic doesn’t know what to make of the cotton batting that seems to have swaddled everything noisy in her life.

She keeps her phone beside her no matter what part of her apartment she happens to be sitting in. Looks at it frequently, marveling at its mute glow. She even picks it up a few times and gives it a weak shake.

Vics greatest fear as a child (besides spiders) was that the world could easily forget about her. That she would be in her room so long, so quiet, so silent, that everyone and everything would finally stop minding her. Which, at first, she might enjoy. Until the panic sets in. It isn’t nice to be forgotten about.

The few times Vic has taken drugs or had far too much to drink, she has always felt fine until she started hearing the silences between sounds or got caught alone in the expanse of thumping silence in her bed. That’s what always makes her sick at the end. Take, for example, the time she took E with her girlfriend.

She and Belle had been out for supper one night. Vic was feeling quiet. Uncommunicative. In frustration, Belle suggested that they take some E together because, she said, it would help them connect. (Vic always had a hard time connecting emotionally with the women she slept with). Vic agreed because she wanted to try it. Just a little bit of it. And Belle knew someone who could get it for them.

They each bit down on their tiny white pills, crumbing half into their mouths and swallowing with water. They waited. Everything was normal. Vic kissed Belle right there in the crowded club because she felt it was important to set the stage for a positive experience. She said "I'm so happy that we're going to experience this together."

They waited longer. Everything still normal. Belle suggested they take the other half. Vic agreed. Two minutes later, the first half must have arrived, because Vic's head suddenly iced over, cracked open and blue flowers, pretty as god, tumbled out. She smiled at Bella who smiled at her back.

It was nice.

Until it wasn't nice anymore.

Soon Vic was getting weirded out by the strange cool trickling of sweat between her breasts. She does not like to be out of control. The music in the club seemed to get louder. Sharper. The lights greener, more intense. Vic felt like she was in a spotlight. But that nobody was watching. She felt very, ultimately alone.

Bella reached over and pulled Vic in close. She said "I think we were meant to meet. I believe you're meant for me. Do you think so too?"

Vic couldn't speak. She couldn't make her mouth move. She didn't want to hear what her voice might sound like. So instead, she murmered something, nothing really, and closed her eyes. She stayed there in Bella's throat for the next 5 hours, excepting drinks of water and one disastrous trip to the washroom. The music began shattering into bits. Where it started out on a continuous fluid beat, it began to break apart into separate notes. Thump. .... swing .... beat. ... trill.

The silences between the notes were agonizing. They felt like minute, private wells of loss to Vic and she shuddered everytime she fell into one.

Long digression aside, the point is that Vic hates silence. She hates having time to think too much. She requires control and interaction or she begins to worry that she doesn't actually exist.

Today, 2 days after William rushed off, Vic's apartment feels hollow. She is full of silent longing to hear the warble of her telephone just to assure her that she is still here.

Friday, May 9  

Easy

People call women who sleep with men under loose circumstances “easy”. What they mean is that the man hasn’t worked hard enough to get it, hasn’t a) spent enough money b) given enough up or c) made any commitments to their interest in ever getting it again. Therefore, the woman herself is “easy”. You never hear “too easy”. Just “easy” like amenability in itself is worthy of contempt.

Strange that the opposite of “difficult” still manages to be a pretty harsh condemnation in the lexicon of femininity. Either way, Vic’s always thought it was a bullshit insult. It's actually quite nice to be easy.

easy: adjective Requiring or indicating little effort, thought, or reflection.

When it comes down to it, Vic’s easy. She’s easy going, easy to get to know, definitely easy to convince.

So when William is still in her apartment when she gets home from work, it doesn’t take long before they get down to the sort of thing people get down to when they’ve been in love and are still grasping at some of that old warmth.

They do it hard. Which isn’t their usual style. William bites Vic’s shoulder as he pushes her onto the bed. Vic shoves him back, but opens her legs. He puts the strength of his hands onto her hips as he holds her down, pulling up on her ass as he forces himself into her.

She forgets for 15 minutes that she doesn’t want to get hurt by William again. But when it’s over, she remembers.

Directly afterward, as it always is during these reacquainting sessions of theirs, William leaps up from the bed and starts dressing. He has to go, busy day tomorrow, something, something. Vic doesn’t mind that he’s leaving. She wouldn’t like him to stay. But his speed juxtaposes itself against their past in technicolour and she can’t help but watch the old slowmotion movies that flick past her eyes...

She remembers the time William (just 21 and still golden) stood up in front of their bed, her juices still on him and waggled his cock from side to side. He turned his hips quickly so it swatted his hip bones. And he laughed like he was 5 years old. She laughed too. She looked at him standing there nude and said “You’re fucking crazy. I can’t get enough of you.” He cocked his eyebrow, came back to the bed and said “I’ll never stop giving it to you.”

He had nowhere to go except to her. Nowhere he’d wanted to go. And she was the same. Easy.

Wednesday, May 7  

Age

Vic turned 29 a month ago. Sometimes, when her feet hurt from walking or when she thinks about the distance between then and now, she feels much older. She doesn't feel like she looks 29, whatever 29 is supposed to look like, but she worries that her insides may have aged without her knowledge. That one day, she will wake up and age will have leaked out of her, crept up on her, ontop of her. She cares only because she knows she won't be able to get away with shit anymore when that day comes.

age: noun 1. A particular time notable for its distinctive characteristics 2. A long time verb 1. To grow old 2. To bring or come to full development.

It's been 4 days since she's seen Jon. She is surprised that she doesn't miss him more than she does. But she realizes he was just a pair of hands in the end. That other pairs of hands are still available to her if she doesn't decide to call his back.

But it is on this 4th day of his being gone and her being easy about it (and therefore a very vulnerable day since everyone knows that going without sex after having nearly drowned in it for weeks is not an easy stage), it's on this 4th, dry, libidinously dead day that William calls.

At 2:30 in the morning, her cell phone rings. Twice. The first time, she is barely brought out of sleep. The second time, she reaches over to the bedside table and presses "answer". She hasn't heard William's voice this rough and wet in over a year. He does not use this voice when they pretend to be friends and have lunch together at the restaurant in Little Italy.

"I feel like I need to sleep beside you," he says. And so it begins again. They enter the age of him wanting her back. As opposed to her wanting him back. It comes and goes, like fashion. It's retro chic. And you want it the way you secretly want to wear flared jeans and cord jackets but don't like to admit it.

"Why?" Vic asks carefully. She does not want to have sex. With anyone really except Jon, but most especially not with William because it never ends well.

"Not for sex," he assures her quickly. "I feel lonely for you. I just want to be beside you. I won’t keep you up. I still have the key you gave me for the cats when you went away."

She pauses and then, knowing she shouldn’t, she tells him it’s okay if he wants to let himself in.

An hour later, the outside door opens and William is suddenly there in the dark. He undresses and slips into bed beside her. He whispers to her sleep ear, "I wish we could just have gotten married."

Vic notes that a lot of the men she's met, dated, fucked in the last year have used the word 'marriage'. She wonders why that is. It must be that they’re aging. Her included.

"Where was that offer 2 years ago?" she replies sleepily and drifts back into unconsciousness. She dreams about Jon and wakes up holding Williams hand.

When she lifts herself quietly out of bed to get ready for work, she inspects William's perfect blond hair. His pale, freckled skin. His guitar calloused hands. And she nearly doubles over with the pain it causes her.

She feels her age. She feels it bad.

Tuesday, May 6  

Sensitive

Vic and Jon, the aptly named (considering where their first encounter took place) owner of Vic's dedicated obsession, are in post-coital entanglement when he announces jokingly that he thinks Vic should start going to the gym again. As he says this, he lustily grabs her ass and weighs it in his hand. Vic hasn't gone to the gym since they started their "great affair", electing instead to focus her exercise elsewhere. Namely, in her keigels.

Vic sits up and pulls a sweaty sheet around her admittedly slackened tummy and says "what's that supposed to mean?" in a rather shrill, even to herself, voice.

"It's not supposed to mean anything," Jon says as he reaches for the sheet but Vic clutches it around herself tighter and says "You think I'm fat." This is a regrettable thing to say for any woman since it's the exact thing women are known for saying and nobody wants to be known for what women are known for.

Jon says she's too sensitive.

When he leaves, Vic tells him she'll call him and then doesn't. She's angry. More so than is really called for.

sensitive: adjective 1. capable of being stimulated or excited by external agents (as light, gravity, or contact) 2. highly responsive or susceptible 3. delicately aware of the attitudes and feelings of others 4. excessively or abnormally susceptible.

Vic is perversely sensitive. She hates more than anything else to be criticized. Not because she believes she shouldn't be, but rather because she believes every word of it.

She wants to call Jon but can't seem to find her way around the mental moat that now surrounds her and her tummy. She won't call him again until she feels resolved, lightened, above his reproach.

She's also stubborn.

Friday, April 11  

Patient

Patience is a virtue that Vic has never claimed to possess.

patient: adjective 1. bearing pains or trials calmly or without complaint 2. manifesting forbearance under provocation or strain 3. not hasty or impetuous 4. steadfast despite opposition, difficulty, or adversity 5. able or willing to bear.

Not one of the many, many definitions of the word fit with Vic's hasty, high-strung, preference for immediate gratification.

She goes out with some friends to a dark bar that used to be a goth hangout; once infested with scabby, ink haired drama queens, now replaced by (only statistically more palatable) young urban hipsters who sniff each others' business cards and flash money around. And when she goes out, she goes out meaning to, sorry to be so pointed and unladylike, to get some.

So it's a happily impulsive non-coincidence that she finds herself grappling sweatily with a guy named (he tells her after the fact) Jon in, pardon the obviousness, the john within an hour of her arrival.

John's most qualifying feature are his delicious hands. Vic holds masculine, defined hands in great, lusty regard. They rise up to cleanly muscular forearms that in turn disappear teasingly by way of hard biceps into his fashionably fit white shirt. Beyond this and now his name, Vic doesn't know much about Jon.

When they've taken the washroom grappling just about as far as washroom grabbling is allowed by public decency laws to go, she removes her tongue from his mouth, wipes her chin, rescinds his temporary access to her cleavage and says "I think you should call me. Here's my number."

She writes it in eyeliner on some toilet paper. Vic is all class.

Jon smiles at her and says "I knew I would meet the woman of my dreams tonight."

Vic doesn't know how to take this, but it implies an impatience that she can relate to. They make a date for the weekend and she goes back to her table, straightening her skirt.

Sunday, April 6  

Sex

Vic wakes up full of lust. The blinds have their legs spread laciviously, small tight spaces that drip with honeyed sun. It crawls into bed with her and kisses her awake. It feathers over her face, softs round her shoulders. She kicks the thick covers down to give it access to her naked ribs that slope to hip.

Even though it’s been 3 months, she remembers what it’s like to have sex. It’s like being tongue-bathed by sun.

sex noun 1. respectively female or male 2. sexually motivated phenomena or behavior

While in Vic’s sticky experience, sex of any kind is almost always tasty, it’s only ever mounted the peaks of gourmet with a few delicious partners. Whether the others were just unskilled or uninteresting or their spices just didn’t mesh, she doesn’t regret even the loveless fucks, the apathetic, the dried out, the stale. Even those she ate up with joy.

But to those that burst with juice under her bite, those whose skin were thick with butter, sparkling with sugar, who came to her, with her, inside her, on her with love and a hunger that equalled her own. To them she assigns a special remembrance on this sun-suckled morning.

She slips her hands between her legs and remembers them. Andrew with his pale, lithe body and sensitive neck, letting her create herself inside him every afternoon, morning and night for the months it lasted. Louise’s perfect breasts, her small hips moving faster, faster, lips bitten and red. Daniel’s strong hands, his way of turning her around, holding her down in posh hotel rooms, hair pulled tight.

She writes them each a letter on her body:

I miss your bodies like a methodone user misses heroin. When it ends, I can’t imagine that anything will feel quite the same as how it was when we fucked. And even when it does, it doesn’t erase you. I think about your cock and your thighs and your tongue and your hands -- how they were after all, just cock, thighs, tongue, hands. Things any number of people have and could put to good use inside me. But there’s that last element that was a part of us; that electric, that honey, that spice that made me feel my depths around you. Religiously wet, keyed to C, ready to take you on, in, over, always. The way we’d fuck deep, knocking at new doors inside this body I thought I knew so well. Places I’ve never even thought to get fucked before. And your hoarse whispers, I feel mute without your encouragement. And all those things we felt together, my fingers inside you, mouth around you, stiff nipples passing over each other and our skin-high skin over and over again like new every time. Every time as aroused and excited as the first time tasting like gin and the sweetness of fingers dipped behind underwear. And all the things we did in our perverted zeal to discover and molest each other in new ways. The bruises, the scrapes inflicted in a blind pant to get further and fuck faster, grip harder.

God, I miss all of you. We were such good lovers. We could have been world famous for our fucking.

When she turns over onto her side to catch her breath, she whispers, please, please send me another. I want more.

Thursday, April 3  

Pretend

When Vic was a kid, she was a big fan of games that started with a giddy "let's pretend..." She liked to be what she wasn't.

pretend: verb 1. to behave affectedly or insincerely. 2. to contrive and present as genuine.

There was the time she unbent a paper clip and wore it in her mouth for 2 weeks straight, telling all her classmates that she'd gotten a retainer. She wanted a retainer rather badly after Nadja, the most popular girl in her grade 6 class (though it's worth mentioning that she was popular for her huge bazooms rather than her braces) got braces.

There was the time she told her best friend that she actually wrote the song "I don't like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats. That pretend went quite well actually and lasted a surprising amount of time without anyone catching her out. Vic even got several members of the school choir together at recess to rehearse her already popular song. She thinks in the back of her mind she may have had an alternate recording in mind. Perhaps a world (or at least, city) tour. The grade sixers of Brookmill Public School singing I Don't Like Mondays by child/rock star/prodigy, vic wiseman.

Vic often thanks god that her pretends were never given serious attention by adults or those in the know. She was never called up for the fraud she was. Until junior highschool.

To get out of gym class one sunny afternoon, Vic told the school secretary that she had consumption. She'd just finished reading Anne of Avonlea or one of those later Annes in the series. The one where Anne actually dies of consumption, leaving Gilbert to raise their beautiful red headed children alone. Anyway, Vic was possessed with the beautiful tragedy of consumption -- not knowing that it was the old name for TB and definitely not something a junior highschool girl could walk around claiming to have.

Though that pretend was promptly pointed out by the secretary for the hoax it was, it still didn't stop her from loving pretend.

Today, Vic plays more adult version of "let's pretend." For example, go to a bar and play let's pretend we're a vastly interesting person with many, many redeeming qualities and boobs a size larger than they really are (thanks to the wonders of padded uplift). Vic detests the way she throws her head back and laughs like a breeding mare in heat whenever a potential-candidate-for-some-serious-shagging makes a joke in her general direction.

Tuesday, April 1  

Cheat

There are two kinds of cheating. There's the kind where you mean trickery and the kind where you mean adultery.

cheat: verb 1. to get money by deceitful trickery. 2. to be sexually unfaithful.

You can also use the word as a noun to call a person "a cheat". But that you'd reserve for someone who cheats a lot. Not an amateur cheater, a part-time huckster, a fairweather forger of truth.

Vic's only cheated once (outside small, annual fibs to the revenue and customs agency) so she doesn't think that counts as "a lot". Though it was of number 2 variety which weighs in somewhat heavy on the scale. She was never proud of it, but she believed in some way that she was programmed to cheat. Her father was a cheater. Or, at least, Vic's childhood sleuthing drew the conclusion that he did. Her dad missed dinners, had a distant look about him and didn't seem to recognize her mother when his eyes scanned over her. Her mother spent a lot of time with her head on the kitchen table, sobbing. Pretty easy to draw some weighty conclusions.

As they say (whoever they are), "once a cheater always a cheater", "can't change his cheatin' ways" and don't forget, "your cheatin' heart will tell on you."

Vic doesn't exactly dig country music, but she has to admit, they have an impressive handle on cheating.

This inscrutable evidence (gleaned almost entirely from Patsy Cline and Hank Williams inserts) points out that a cheater cannot be reformed. It's in the blood like alcoholism or a predeliction for heart disease. Both of which are also hereditary. Which meant Vic was destined to be a cheater too. By her reasoning, if she did happen to stray from the fidelous path it could only be blamed on her cheatin' genes.

She has to admit, she felt pretty badly about her one cheating episode, even before she knew she discovered her genetics excuse was a sham.

Vic cheated on William. (why do we say "cheated on" rather than "cheated against" since you're really not doing it ON the other person at all -- wouldn't be very secret that way at all)

It started when he did something that Vic didn't like. He invited his friend Allan to stay with them for a while, to invade their private place with his gym bags and his notebooks and his dark eyes always watching her move around the kitchen.

It middled when William kept not coming home at night, or coming home so drunk, he'd pass out on the bathroom floor.

It ended when Vic started watching Allan back. He saw his chance and pulled out all the seduction stops, going so far as to send potted lilies to her workplace. She never actually fucked Allan, it's true, but she did find herself with her pants undone, his fingers inside her and his tongue down her throat once. Maybe twice.

Call it what you want, that's still cheating in Vic's books. And she feels badly about it. Even when she sees William now, she's still plagued with secret guilt and long to scrawl "I cheated on you. I’m sorry." on a napkin and run out of the restaurant where they meet for lunch every month.

Later in her life, Vic found out that her father hadn't so much been a cheater as he'd just been apathetic. Which left her without much of an alibi.

Monday, March 31  

Fidelity

Vic believes in fidelity. She accepts the fact that it's a difficult principle to achieve and maintain. That's perhaps why she believes in it. If it were easy, she would probably think it was a sham.

fidelity: noun 1. Faithfulness or devotion to a person, obligations or duties. 2. Correspondence with fact or truth.

Vic goes to the video store down the street with the intention of renting Breakfast at Tiffany's because she's feeling very Audrey Hepburn with her hair pulled up into a twist. But on a whim she rents High Fidelity.

Now, she's seen this movie before and read the book at least twice. In fact, the copy she has, battered and tattered on her bookcase is the first edition from long before it came out with John Cusack on the cover. Before it was ever going to be a movie.

She and William bought it one afternoon when they were at the Chapters on Bloor. They both read it, her first, then him, and agreed that it was the best book they'd ever read. Not just for the british humour, but because they both felt strongly identified with the feeling of it. But clearly, they did not understand it’s meaning. Clearly.

Though perhaps they do now.

It's not actually about faithfulness. It's about knowing when it might better to call the game than to keep slapping around in the mud. And that's the secret, Vic figures. The cold, hard facts. If you will.

She likes the expression "cold, hard facts" because that's what facts are. Hard. Facts are very rarely easy to swallow. They're not cuddly or nice. Because accepting the facts is about correspondence with truth.

Vic would like to think she's capable of corresponding with the truth.

Dear truth, (she would like to write)

You really had me fooled. I thought you were big and bright and easy to find and the reason I couldn't see you was because you hadn't come along yet. So I kept moving, hauling ass all over creation trying for a glimpse so I'd know the right path to get on. Then I deked and ducked and turned back fast to see if you'd gotten behind me somehow. And you had. But I didn't see you there either.

Because the truth is, truth (and I’m just starting to put this one together) that you’re a sly bastard, slippery like a fish. You're not big or bright. You're not handsome and you're not attractive. You're small. You're cold. Like a little stone in my shoe. Cold and hard like the facts I've always liked so much.

I worry that you're not good for me. That you don’t have my best interest at heart. And it's true, truth (as if I need to tell you what's true and what's not), you probably don't. You probably have your own devilish plan in play and my part is to just sit here and let it happen. Not to struggle to much against it. Accept it. Strive for high fidelity with the truth.

I don't mean to say that I'm actually ready to do it though, truth. Not entirely ready to see you yet.Just kind of waving hello across the supermarket aisles of life. I get you, I think. And you get me. Or at least, you will in the end.

Vic

Thursday, March 27  

Attract

Vic does not think of herself as being particularly attractive. She's not upsetting to look at or anything, but when she calculates the relative weight of her physical characteristics, the sum does not (except on very good, over-exagerrated ego days) usually come out to anything sturdier than “okay looking”.

attract: verb 1. to pull to or draw toward oneself or itself 2. to draw by appeal to natural or excited interest, emotion, or aesthetic sense.

Still, Vic tends to attract people. People are inclined sometimes (though not at others, which is what prevents Vic from reevaluating her conclusions at the mirror) to stop what they’re doing and make passes at her. They have also, men mostly, made what Vic considers silly messes of themselves trying to please her once shess decided to accept a pass.

Take, for example, the tow-truck driver who arrives on her step this morning after she calls roadside assistance. Because she's an idiot driver who only comprehends the use of vehicles and has little interest in their inner science, Vic often leaves her lights on. Her car, this morning, is unresponsive.

Vic sighs her self-disgusted sigh and uses her mobile to telephone for help. The help that arrives is a tall, sexy package with some kind of Baltic accent. She can't help noticing. Ahem.

After he boosts her car, she makes a joke about how she should have taken auto-shop in highschool. She accidentally touches his arm while she laughs, forgetting how that makes people sometimes attracted to her when they wouldn't have been before.

If there's anything Vic knows about attraction, it's that we're (as humans, now) momentarily attracted to anyone who exhibits interest. It's some predetermined instinct that pushes us toward viable procreative options, presumably.

Anyway, she forgets that for a second, touches Baltic's arm and before she knows it, he is asking her out for coffee.

She says no, of course. After entertainingly briefly a dirty flash of him licking the inside of her thigh while she rests her foot on the steering wheel.

But she feels awfully attractive today because of it. Even though her face in the mirror says the same as usual.

Monday, March 24  

Eye

Vic has her granny's eyes. Mind you, her granny lives in northern Ontario and is still using her eyes to paint landscapes and dig vegetable gardens so maybe she has her great-granny's eyes instead. Her great granny died the month before Vic was born.

eye: noun 1. an organ of vision. 2. the most intensely active central part. verb 1. to look at attentively or carefully.

Rob comes over to her apartment and sits on her couch and says "I need you to come back. I need this."

He does not say "I need you" but rather "this" which is what puts Vic on the defensive. She's sat through this particular song and dance before. This is what gets her thinking, not about Rob, but about William. The one who came before. And that's always the more devastating.

Even as Rob is sitting two feet from her, two cushions away on the couch they fucked on over and over when things were still cool between them, even now, she isn't looking at him. She isn't really watching him pick a thread out of his denimed knee. She doesn't see his red blush creeping or notice his pain, assuming there is any. She is remembering someone else.

A year ago, almost now, she fell hard for the memory of William, her first love. And she'd called him late one night, sobbing with desire to have and to hold that much innocence again.

He'd answered the phone, guardedly, recognizing her number. He spoke to her like a lion would speak to it's tamer after one too many fire hoops. Fiercely, but with reserve. Vic pled her case. William said, "I can’t help you with this, Vic. You ruined me." And Vic knew that was true and wondered why she called knowing that. But still, she convinced him to come over and see her, see her sudden clutching need for himself. She remembered William as the easy to convince type.

And they sat on this couch too. He was just where Rob is now, but they were opposite.

His eyes were blue against his pale skin and she had to keep a careful distance between her eyes and his. She is glad his eyes weren't deep and brown because those kinds of eyes show too much emotion. Blue has a casual, surface way of making you feel just looked at, without being inspected.

Smoking unsteadily, she told William she wanted him to come back. That she needed this. Not him, this.

But he told her, as she is telling Rob now, that there are a hundred good reasons why they split. None of which, Vic has forgotten.

The way William drank, viciously, hurtfully. The way he worked late into the morning and made her lonely. The way he missed appointments and bought stupid things without asking her. The way he once flung a peppermill in her general direction, smashing it against the wall, scattering little black peppercorns across the hardwood floor leaving her with the unexpected reminder of that awful night whenever she moved the furniture around for the next year after he’d left.

Layered on top of all that, or maybe under it, are the good things though and that's what kept her fucked up over him for so, so, so long. The way he made her happy. The way they leaned against each other and felt friendly, safe and easy. The way they chose paint chips together and moved into 3 different apartments together. The way he always did the right thing in the end. The way he spoke to her the night they finally ended their relationship. He took her hands in his and led her to the bed. He said "No one will ever love you quite like this. I can't imagine it. Because it would tear them apart."

His eyes were full of tears and pain and she felt nothing, distant, separated already. She wanted to know why he was making her do this, why he had pushed her to this extreme. But she didn't ask him. She just closed her eyes and went to sleep, not waiting for the next day, but considering it over right then and there.

Trouble is, that it wasn't over then. It wasn't over for several years after. But it is over now.

She knows for sure, because Rob is on the verge of walking out, angry at her lack of response, and she doesn't care.

Vic suddenly feels beyond everything that went before. 10 years ago, 5, 1. She is beyond that kind of love, completely. She eyes it circumspectly.

Saturday, March 22  

Woman

Vic likes women well enough. But she knows better than to trust them.

woman: noun 1. female.

She thinks that the dictionary definition of the word woman is rather lacking. Surely it should include words like capricious, underhanded, conniving, bitchy, cruel, soppy, emotional, hard, cold, loyal, unfaithful, sexy, natural, siliconed, spiteful, angry, illusive, ellusive, catty, unknowable.

Sometimes, she doesn't like them very much at all. Especially when they're scowling at her or worse, ignoring her. She hates how they've always managed to make her feel somehow outside their tight groups. Not a part of them. Not the same.

She's spent half of her life wishing she could be more like them and half of it trying hard not to be.

When a young blonde woman on a bicylcle sneers at her while Vic walks through the park this afternoon, Vic wonders for the thousandth time what women see in her that they hate so much.

Or maybe the woman wasn't really sneering. Maybe she was just breathing enthusiastically, face distorted from the effort of riding her bike hard and long. That could be. But Vic knows women well enough to know not to trust them.

After all, she is one herself.

Friday, March 21  

Trouble

Vic has a heavy guilt complex. It is so ingrained that she suspects herself of being in trouble when in fact she hasn't done anything all, good or bad, in 48 hours so how could she be in trouble really?

trouble: noun 1. A condition or situation characterized by danger, distress or annoyance. 2. A cause of worry. 3. The condition of being in need of immediate assistance. verb 1. To cause anxious uneasiness.

She often asks people, who often reply in surprised reassurance, whether she has done anything to offend them recently. Usually she hasn't, but that doesn't dissuade her possibly paranoid notion that somewhere in the universe there is someone who is angry with her. She waits for doom. Not knowing from which angle it will approach.

Vic thinks its sad that she spends so many hours of her life under this swell of dread and wonders if it is the seedling of some greater mental erosion that is boring its roots into her. Her father's father had an unavoidable problem with paranoia and near the end of his life disgraced both himself and his family by refusing to come away from the kitchen wall which he listened through with a water glass, taking notes and muttering to himself. Vic wonders if she will end up like that, the grandfather she was named after (it bears mentioning).

She troubles herself for a while about the relative easiness of taking a heriditary swan dive compared the difficulty of brainscans, psychotherapy and anti-psychotics. But then, allowing herself to become paranoid about developing paranoia isn’t really the healthy, move-forward thing to do at this juncture, is it? No. So snap out of it, Vic. Up, off the couch. Clear the coffee table, put the dishes away. New day and all that. Go outside. Bring something edible that doesn't come in a Ben and Jerry's cardboard pint into the house and let's get on with our lives.

Vic leaves the house with confidence and renewed vigour. No one is secretly angry with her.

Heavy rain tumbles out of the sky quite suddenly, just at the moment Vic crosses the street toward the grocery store. It falls in strong, hard, thick lines and makes her think of the toads that fell in Magnolia.

Thursday, March 20  

Sick

Vic wakes up sick.

sick: adjective 1. Suffering from or affected with an illness. 2. Susceptible to or marked by preoccupation with unwholesome matters. 3. Out of patience with.

As described by the dictionary, there are 3 kinds of sick.

First, the kind other people feel sympathy for. Headaches, cancer, flu. Vic lies awake until 3 am under the tricking light of the street lamp outside her new bedroom window. She stares at her hands in the dark. Considers what she has left behind. And what she has left it for. Namely, to lie in bed alone and stare at her own hands.

In the morning, she feels ill. Too many cigarettes and not enough food the day before leave her body wretched and marked with the striations of a restless night. She telephones her workplace, a banking software unit, and tells them she won't be coming in. She's sick. If not by the first definition, then...

Second, the kind people look down on as perversion. Vic’s got that kind of sick too. Vic thinks strange things during sexual moments that would, if they ever saw the light of verbalization, peg her as sick in the second sense. Thinking this, however, fills her with sudden, morning-time dread that she may never get to actively practice this second kind of sickness again. While she brews a large cup of tea, she acknowledges that she feels potentially cut off from any possible sexual source, and, she further acknowledges, she doesn't like that idea. Vic is very sexually motivated, often making important life decisions based on this one aspect. It freaks her out that the last time she orgasmed in the presence of another human being was definitely, at this point, over 60 days ago.

She is also preoccupied with love, which in itself is an unwholesome perversion. At least, that’s how it feels on the fourth day after she fucked off and left Rob, who was no good in bed anyway (clearly since he'd failed to help her to orgasm in the last 54 days of their relationship), to pursue this lying in bed, staring at one's hands kind of life she seemed to be setting up with.

Finally, the third definition. Sick of the kind people expect you take charge of yourself. As in, sick of it. As in, had enough. As in, time to make a change.

She’s definitely done that. Vic feels this morning like she is standing on the harrowing edge of some peak she has lifted herself to. She hasn’t decided yet what to do now that she’s here. Sit in lotus position and "leonard cohen" what’s left of her 20’s away? Or leap down the perilous edge. Or walk, humbled, back the way she came.

Monday, March 17  

Home

Vic calls home early Monday morning and tells her mum that she’s finished with yet another potential father of grandchildren. She sobs the story into her cell phone while she drives to work and lets herself feel really and truly badly for the first time since the break up.

She says she’s moved out. Into a new apartment. Out of the relationship. Such as it was. 6 months of rootless scrambling and she has come out the other side feeling like a tree that tried to take root on a rocky slope.

home: noun 1. A building or shelter where one lives. adjective 1. Of, from, or within a country's own territory.

Her mum sighs and says "Oh, Vic. Do you want to come home for a while?"

Vic stumbles on the word "home" when her mother says it. She really doesn't think of that small city, that small place where cars are assembled and shipped, where IGA cashiers go home after their afternoon shift, where Tim Hortons' outnumber pharmacies, as home. Not anymore.

She wonders where her home is in that case. Where is the heart's own territory?

Is it where your things are stored? Where you sleep? Where you wash dishes and lay on the couch and stretch phone calls out over the afternoon? It might be where your love lives, but what if you don’t have one? What if you are too cold and clumsily compiled to produce the equation of love? Where is home then?

She concludes that home is just where she is. Even if it smells like someone else’s cooking and needs a proper paint job.

Sunday, March 16  

Pleasure

Vic has a distant, but amicable relationship with pleasure. She likes it, thinks pleasure is a nice person, but doesn't want to get too friendly with it.

pleasure: noun 1. a feeling of extreme gratification aroused by something. 2. unrestricted freedom to choose.

It has always made Vic a bit ashamed the way she can feel sad or sick or blank and still masturbate. There's no joy propelling her fingers, no fantasy, no actual arousal involved. But she can still get herself off. It's kind of shallow she thinks. Even the eventual orgasm is fast and cold-blooded.

She remembers once after ending some casual dating scenario that had gotten onto an uncomfortably less-casual path, lying in her bathtub watching the rain pelt against the dripping sunroof. She looked down at her body and felt a shudder of disgust. What good is it having a body when you can't decide what to do with it? When the heart it houses is behaving badly, rather like a naughty 3 year old crying for candy and then rubbing it into the carpet when you're not looking?

She looked down at her skin, rippling under the water and saw nothing but a waste. Even so, her fingers felt just as good as they ever did. It's all a bit cheap how pleasure still exists when you clearly don't deserve it.

She dried herself off feeling distant and like telling herself she had a great time, love to stay over but early meeting in the morning and all that. Sorry to rush off.

Amend

Vic is big on amends. As in making them.

amend: verb 1. to make right what is wrong. 2. to prepare a new version of. 3. to advance to a more desireable state.

Things which top her list of amendables: her relationship with her father, her self-centered way of believing that everyone's pain and suffering is somehow her fault, her disgusting smoking habit.

Usually, when Vic wants to make amends she tackles it first by writing. Not necessarily the most effective way of making amends. Especially if the person you're trying to make amends with isn't able to read what you've written. But it feels like a softer way to start so that's what she does. Always giving herself the easy way out.

In fact, she once started a novel in an attempt to make amends with everything and everyone around her but found that she was constantly amending what she'd written with the understanding that if it ever *were* read, she'd be ashamed of how much she'd actually let out. Besides, after 120 pages she'd lost all sympathy for the character "I" which she took to be a bad sign. If you can't side with yourself, who's going to side with you?

Vic often wonders if refering to herself in the third person might help with that because she always seems to have more sympathy for other people's truths and doesn't feel the need to amend them at all.