I’m largely cynical about the goodness of people, which is why it’s so confounding that I think you’re better than you are. Scratch that, I know you’re better than you are. You can’t change people, this is true, but sometimes it shines through, soft and golden and yielding and internally I triumph. “I knew it!” At the slightest sign of conflict or danger or any kind of emotional turbulence it’s quickly repealed, though. That’s how we’ve landed here. “Who else knows?” you ask me. What exactly the fuck is your angle with that particular question. It sends me reeling. This is a thing that happens, surely we both know that. What is the bare minimum of human decency here? It’s something well above the bar of “Who else knows?” and this is the terminal sentence that really makes me doubt the veracity of anything I ever felt from you that was more than nothing.
”I’m just as bad,” I tell Jacqui, when we’re talking about pill popping and cocaine and binge drinking and being a fuck up. “You’re NOT,” she says, exasperated. “You are ONLY this bad when you two are together.” This may be true. I keep a lid on it most of the time. First meeting in years, I am the one drunk, I am the one who does not give a fuck about the girlfriend, I am the one who is ruthlessly seeking what the body needs. “Let me enable your downward spiral,” I message you after you say you’ve been dumped. This isn’t really what a good friend would do, and I’m sorry.
We’ve wallowed around rock bottom together before, blackout, sad, suicidal, insane, cheating, desperate for any kind of human connection. I’m at a better place than this now and I think you are too. Now I’m doing this for fun, not to blank out everything else that’s happening. I text you from a birthday party I’m obligated to attend, post falling down an entire flight of stairs in your house. “I’m so horny I’m suicidal.” Before I leave your house, I groan. “I have to go do real people things.” From the Uber, I take a selfie and send it, my face visibly wild eyed and screwy. “I’d rate your coherency about a 6/10,” you send back. Oh, good. We’re enabling and goading each other on and it’s addictive, the back and forth rapid-fire stupidity of it all. The furtive meeting later, skulking around in the driveway shadows, curtains drawn.
In my request for a sober chat, something I actually think was relatively mature and sane of me, and not at all crazy or self indulgent, you first blow me off and then say you’re only sober-ish during the day at work. Surely that can’t be true, I respond, even as I am in the midst of day drinking g&t’s and taking percs for my back. I need to know what you remember saying, although you’ve said it many times on different nights in various stages of fuck up-ed-ness.
“You’re not crazy,” you said to me, unprompted. I knew what we were both here for, this time, although it’s the electric connection and easiness in each other’s company and the pure, stupid, illogical joy I find in your cartoon character existence that keeps us coming back to each other, rubber bands snapping back into place. And everything I always suspected, you confirm. Maybe you’re just telling me what I want to hear, which seems unlikely, because I haven’t fished or asked or prompted. This confessional comes over a cigarette in the night with blow and tall cans and there’s no love here, until you bring it in.
The timing isn’t right. It’s never right. It was always you. It always should have been you. I love you. Stay for a while. Let’s do real people things. I wanna go out for breakfast. I wanna cook you breakfast. How do you take your coffee. Write for the magazine. Meet my mom.
This of course is all bullshit.
There are no messages to mix up here, until later you say, you’d get back together with your ex if she came back, although, by your own admission, she isn’t very nice to you. I have no leg to stand on here. I never do. I’m inserting myself where I don’t fit. I’m a visitor passing through who had no intention of staying but the beauty of my life is that I can change it at my will, at the drop of a hat. My life is scattered across the world, but part of it is here. “You can’t stay only for me.” And I never would, but of course, its part of it. I know there’s the potential for a full and happy life here for me, with just the barest whisper of desolate blue-grey ocean and unpeopled rainforest and long formless days alone in the back of my mind. There’s my best friend and the market and the rivers and photography and writing and just, god damn, Guelph has a lot going on for it, but you’re all tangled up in all of it and there’s just no separating the two. It would ruin me if I stayed.
I am soft, soft, soft and my better characteristic is that I’m a lover. I want to do nice things for someone. I want to remember how you take your coffee and bring it to you at work. I want to love you but you still won’t let me. I never asked for the late night, twinkle light confessional with a funky guitar soundtrack, through a haze of cigarette smoke and your hand on the small of my back. You volunteered it, or more likely, dangled it like a carrot in front of a stupid, stupid donkey, because you know me so well, you know this is what will work.
”I don’t know where we’ve landed after this.” After a not-at-all-sober conversation, things are less clear than ever. Should I stay or should I go now. I opt to go. I will give you this- it is always me who is leaving, but I am always willing to put it all on the line to try. “Let’s fucking send it, bud.” Let’s just date. Who gives a shit. The timing will always be wrong unless you make the universe your bitch and run with it and move heaven and earth to make it work. Unless, of course, you simply don’t want to. And that’s fine too.
Maybe I’m the only one who operates this way, with a strange, uncharacteristic optimism. I just want to once again return to those confessionals and remind you that I did not fucking ask for this to happen. I thought I knew exactly what was happening and I was as in charge of the situation as I ever am of anything. So, here’s your breakup rap, I hope someday you’ll let someone love you. More or less the same old song and dance. Wife this hot mess, I’m elusive as the loch ness monster. No risk no reward, or something. Blahblahblah.
Who else in the world can I sit and have a 6 hour conversation ranging from the meter of rap and poetry to plot continuity to political correctness to old school punk and stand up comedy, passing the phone back and forth to trade off on Spotify tracks and chain smoking? Nobody. This is a space I can only exist in when you’re present. There’s one morning on MacDonell
when I wake up and I know I am in trouble. The hoodvent from Vienna’s starts cranking out pancake smells and grease and noise, and a single shaft of sunlight pierces through the blinds and lights up your face on the pillow and I’m struggling with my shoes, trying to make a runner before daylight comes and this happens- trying to get away before it turns real- and you’re sleeping with your mouth open and your hair splayed over the pillows and that single ray of sunlight turns everything into soft gold and before I know it, something in me is demanding that I yield to that gold, and I know that I love you, and I know that I’m not supposed to, so, heart beating furiously in my chest, missing underwear and socks, I leave as quickly as possible, filled up with this butter-soft gold and carrying it through my day, almost embarrassed.
I can’t sit and wait to be devastated so I leave.
Let’s talk about bad timing.
What comes next is bad timing.
I am single, homeless and seasonally unemployed.
And the most pressing thing you have to say to me is “Who else knows.” ALL you had to say was “Are you ok?” So when I worry if it's fair of me to send this, I try to remember it wasn't fair that I had to spend a week alone in absolute agony without so much as an “Are you ok?” Driving myself 300km to deal with it wasn't fair. It wasn't fair that you changed the rules of the game. What is fair.
You’re onstage at karaoke and you are the most confident person who has taken the stage. You pump a first in the air at the drop and shimmy and shake and sing and my fucking heart hurts because you’re so ridiculous and so lovely and you just absolutely have no fucks to give. Carry that energy into everything else in life. And get your fucking driver’s license.