Archives for 2008

I accidentally took the bus to Sunnybrook Hospital the other day. It’d been several weeks since I’d been there last, when my mother had asked me to go with my father in case the meds made him too drowsy to drive home. So I went with him though I hadn’t driven in months. That was his first visit to Sunnybrook in about a year, his appointments having taken place at other hospitals in the city. When we got there, my father somehow recognised the parking lot attendant as the same man who’d been there the last time he’d parked here. After leaving the car in the underground lot my father went to say hello, while I waited for him at the hospital entrance. Later, while we waited for the test results and I fell asleep in the waiting room, he bought the man coffee and donuts.

It’s a late summer morning, not quite noon. The bus is mostly empty and not many more people get on here. I hadn’t expected the route to be so circuitous, have already made three transfers to get this far. The loosely planned morning I’d plotted out is beginning to fall to pieces and I begin to feel tired. With an hour and a half to go still, I already know I’m going to be late for a class I’d rather not attend anyway. This morning I’m headed to Glendon. I’ve never been before and am as yet unprepared for how lavishly green York’s second campus will be, how extravagantly peaceful. For now, rolling through the hospital grounds, all I note through the bus windows are varying shades of grey. Metal everywhere, reflected over in the glass and in the mirrors. In the wheelchairs and the pavement. Even the cars, machines that generally make superficial sense to me, seem to dissolve into naked exoskeletons.

Both my parents were in their thirties when my mother had me, their first child. The fact of their ages meant shifting things to me growing up. It has come to mean very specific things to me these last few months, three years. Continue reading this entry »

We shake hands and exchange names. “So that explains the f,” he says.
“Oh.” For some reason embarrassed, I put my hand up and slip it back under my shirt. “I didn’t know it was showing.”

That first Eid at Queen’s the four of them got together and when I escaped to Toronto that weekend, gave me the chain and pendant.

I lost it once. I’d taken it off one night and then forgotten about it. It would be weeks before I would put my fingers up to my throat and feel its absence, weeks after that before I’d do my bed and find it entangled in my sheets. I’ve never taken it off since and it’s become like skin in its permanence, rinsed in soap and shampoo like the rest of my body. Mornings I wake up and bleary-eyed in front of the bathroom mirror bring it back to the front, because it invariably twists around to the back of my neck during the night. It’s the only of piece of jewelry I’ve ever owned for any extended period of time. Everything else eventually slides off, rolls away.

I wondered recently if whether I’d ever take it off and why. It isn’t sentimentalism that makes me keep it on. The five of us have grown too far apart for it be a marker of something undying. Four boys and a girl, all of us grown so different from what we used to be and from each other, our friendships now marked more by distance than anything else. We see each other at weddings and at funerals where our conversations are a curious combination of formality and familiarity. It’s that it’s become a habit, something that requires effort to justify removing. A familiar groove around my neck, cool only where the f lies flat against the skin over my sternum.
It’s like a name that your mind has latched onto. Long after the person whose name it is ceases to mean anything to you, long after your memories of him have faded into transparent pieces of harmless nostalgia, still his name resurfaces, inexplicably – like an expletive, almost. A word whose meaning is irrelevant, just the sound of it in your head anchors things for a moment.

It’s grown tarnished, the silver chain darker than it once was and the edges of the pendant a shadowy grey. I wouldn’t buy something like this for myself now, but I’ll polish it tonight and remember to put it on before leaving tomorrow.

There’s a boy, he’s new here, who’s replaced the man who used to perform at Pape. A white kid, about my age, maybe a few years younger, with blonde hair cropped close to his scalp and a cleanshaven and quiet, very quiet face. He’s dressed in a nondescript white sweater and dark, baggy jeans. He plays an electric guitar and he plays it like it’s a violin. I’ve only seen him twice now. The first night, I walked by him and then every step got slower, with the people going home spilling around me, until I had to stop just around the corner, where I knew he couldn’t see me, though it also struck me that he played like he didn’t care who stopped to listen or if anyone even did, seated on his stool, bent over his guitar, eyes on the grimy floor.

I turned back after a few moments, dropped some change in his open case, and walked back out to the buses without looking at him. He has a face that isn’t just quiet, but almost sullen, that in its silence turns in only on itself, an absolute reserve, unbroken. He doesn’t sing as he plays, for which I’m grateful, because that first night I remembered again how much I love the guitar, the way the strings from a lone guitar played well and slowly can hold you, how that solitary sound can slide under your diaphragm and determine the rhythm of your breath.

And he plays it like it’s a violin – a part of me doubles back to note that I probably don’t know what I’m talking about when I say that, because as much as I love music, I love it uncritically and mercurially, by turns guided by prejudice and by whim. Occasionally even by guilt and embarrassment. So I couldn’t tell you, really, what distinguishes a man’s playing a violin from his playing a guitar, since I’ve never paid close enough attention. Except the thing is that I also never thought an electric guitar could sound the way that boy made it sing. It made my breath catch a while in that dark subway. I would have liked to have heard it again today.

I love music. I think if it weren’t for the fact that so much of my self is already invested in words and I possess limited heartspace, I’d love music more consciously, more coherently. I make it sound like work, I know, when music for most people is something you do for fun, easily and without self-consciousness. It’s true that I make everything out to require more effort than anything ever really does, but however much I do love music, I don’t think I give it the attention it’s due.

After his appointment, my father goes grocery shopping. He buys every conceivable fruit in the store and when he gets home I take them out of their bags and put them all away. Oranges and tangerines and grapefruits jostle for space in the fridge drawer with apples, empires and granny smiths and red delicious. There are pears and guavas. A papaya, its slick green skin shrouded in clinging plastic, somehow finds space too. And bananas, of course. They’re a staple in my father’s shopping. I place them in the wire holder on top of the microwave. He used to bring home plantains, but only he and my mother would eat them, so he fell out of the habit. There’s even a whole pineapple, which my sister carefully slices, her dark head bent intently over the spikes. The scent stings and for a moment I am transported to a damp kitchen in Colombo, to those crowded mornings, the way those days slid under my skin, seem lodged here beyond familiarity.
Strange that this many years later the memories still resurface like this, in all the wrong ways, for all the wrong reasons.

And then it’s all done, there are no more fruits to be put away. The plums and the peaches and the apricots, the orange juice and the ginger ale, the hefty green watermelon, everything neatly stored in their correct placeholders. This excess of colour, these strange ways of speaking.

I had an essay due last week. You’ve heard this story before. I began it the day it was due.
I was sorely tempted to begin it like so:

In light of international food crises and soaring death tolls worldwide, writing academic essays seems like an unforgivable exercise in triviality, a wilful ducking of reality.

Shameless smugness at the ready for immediate and terrible deployment? Check.

I would have blithely continued in that vein of holier-than-thou irritation, except that that would have required I write fifteen pages of original content. My inveterate laziness, not to mention the laws of both physics and physiology, prevented me from accomplishing that in a single evening, which is as much time as I told myself I had (having already received a month’s extension). So, though it caused me tangible pain in the regions of my head and my heart, I revisited a paper I’d submitted the week prior for another class and revised it for length considerations.
And by revise I mean I recycled it so heavily that I prayed this didn’t constitute plagiarism, prayed harder that I didn’t get caught.
Given that I began said revision half an hour after midnight, the paper is still late.
Sorry, was that a spoiler?

It fucks with your head, staying in school for too long. Or maybe it wouldn’t, if the stuff you’re studying didn’t seem to always be about you. It’s incredibly stupid to go about school the way I have, like every single thing matters, like your entire ethical existence hinges on every word you encounter.
Of course, having said that, there is a part of me that if given the chance to redo the last few years of readwriting, wouldn’t do it any other way. Philosophy and critical theory are hugely destabilising things to immerse yourself in. But I don’t know which came first, my fear of stagnation or my having read these texts, and the question of chronology is trivial anyway. In the end, all that matters is that I am a bit crazy and school hasn’t helped.

Masochism: a way of life, wherein you wilfully decide to waste years and years of your youth in poorly ventilated rooms with fellow social misfits. Continue reading this entry »

“Are you mad?”
Always a trickier question than it looks. “I doubt it.”

- Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas. Hodder and Stoughton: London, 2004. 50.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

- ee cummings

I’m nearing the end of the second year I’ve spent in this bedroom, beginning my third summer here. As a room, it doesn’t have much going for it. I don’t have a bed, or curtains, or a closet. The one poster I had up last summer has long since been removed, leaving the walls naked where they’re not obscured by bookshelves and the solitary calendar. One wall boasts a shoddy paint job, the last marks of an unnecessarily complicated and ultimately useless adventure in pulling apart concrete.
It’s not a pretty room by any means. It’s a room that works, an empty space to be. A table, a bookshelf spilling papers, and an open window that keeps me outside. It doesn’t boast whatever it is people call character, or maybe it does.
 

When I got home today, the whites of my eyes the colour of my skin, the first thing I saw was the cross, a dark rust-coloured etching in a corner directly opposite the door to my room. Continue reading this entry »

What sickens me is how dependent she is on him, how her need for his approval is the circumference and the centre of her self-knowledge. The hold that he has on her, even though he is magnanimous, is so absolute that watching her, because he is magnanimous, I feel a thick weight settle in the base of my stomach. Her dependence is so total, his image so firmly entrenched within her being, that I know how impenetrably alien it would sound to tell her that she does in fact exist outside him. He needs her too, yes, would find himself unanchored without her, but she is not the locus from which his every conception of himself departs and returns.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe her absence would ruin him more than any of us suspect, but he doesn’t he live with that fear now. She, on the other hand, lives not only with him but also with the constant dread of his absence.

What terrifies me is that their love is no less real for that. Continue reading this entry »

It’s a strange experience, reading a book and feeling like I’m reading someone else’s life. Usually I find myself in many of the books I read – not in all of them and not even in all of the ones that strike me hardest, but generally I read myself into books and read myself out of them, find my own experiences in their words and find also that the words articulate my own experiences in unfamiliar ways. So it’s basically all about me, this act of reading, as I look for ways to rethink my life. The range of the books I feel this way about – from Zadie Smith’s White Teeth to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa – indicate just how vague, however visceral, those connections are.

But this is the first time – that I can remember, so I may be wrong – that I’m reading a book and feeling like I’m reading a friend’s life and not my own. Continue reading this entry »