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.