I don't recognize these buildings now,
nor the faces of the people who stare dolefully out the windows. There's no sense of belonging, here - just the dissociated millennial three floors up, and the distant stare of the boy who's lost his mother. I'm a creature of habit. Of habitat. And I'm here. I feel at home anywhere, it's my gift. To sink into the soft grass in a park halfway 'round the world, and lull myself to sleep with the syncopation of a foreign language. Your mother tongue whispers sweet nothings through my ears, and I run my fingers through blades of grass and over vowels like velvet, every bit aware of the sensations that arouse when words wrap so effortlessly: there is an eroticism in familiar words spoken miles from my address. I don't have a backstory, but I see the world through hardcovers and bookmarks; I can balance on my tropes. I use books like maps, to ground me in reality to locate the truth to navigate my own story. I wake up next to strangers in the golden hour in tangles of cotton and glass. I feel at home anywhere, it's my curse. This is not my story: there is no beginning, no middle. I've come into the plot at the end - I'm not familiar with the characters. I'm under the impression that this is where I ought to be, though it feels wrong. These hands are not my hands. These fingers curled around the arms of a stranger can't be mine. I'm a creature of habit. Of habitat. Of habit. I recognize the reflection in the windows, but not these buildings. This is not my story. This is not my story.
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WHERE: Crossfield, AB
WHEN: March 1, 2017 Lately I have been looking for validation in all of the wrong places. I look to you for a place to store my sorrows.
"My shelves are all filled up" I say. "I am surrounded with clutter, worries up to the ceiling, and a desk stacked high with the trappings of a disorganized mind." To the window, I'll point and scream: "every time there is a breeze, my thoughts are scattered here and there! They're trapped behind the oven, and look, over here! Look! Underneath the couch, and on the dining table, in the cupboards and in the drawers! Even here, on the stairs - I've tripped myself up no less than three times today!" And you look at me, open eyes and open arms, only to say that you haven't any more room for sorrows, only me. And just like that, you brush aside your own feelings, and tuck your fears neatly into labelled bins - each with their own place, and you hold me, and me alone, closely in the space that's left. Over there, the open window, the wind over our skin blowing my hair away from my eyes. Thinking a little bit about:
I relish in the untouched spaces
between North and South that somehow signify what it means to be in love. I couldn't look at your hands,
or in your eyes, or through the frost covering the window. I could only think about the dark, where I am most at home where I get by just fine, alone. You say things, they brush past and tumble onto the floor, beneath our chairs, into the corners of the room. I hear them clickity-clack against the floor, that hollow, aluminium sound. I hear them, rhythmic, but I do not know what you're talking about and I don't think that I want to. There were times, not long ago, where I would have collected these words and held them tightly to my chest. I would bathe in opinion and sink into you like syrup. I could have spit honey and dissolved teeth, making decisions with lips first. Machines get damaged by stickiness. They rust and they whirr and they revolt with friction. Gears speak too, they demand lubrication. They reject each sugar-coated words, they attract bugs. Patience is short but my memory's shorter - it lathered itself in promises. No manufactured dreamscapes here, only planned obsolenscence. WHERE: Calgary, Alberta
WHY: Look at this dog! When you dog-sit, 35% of the role is feeding, 45% is walking and 20% is photographing cuteness. |
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