We dream up this trip in another lifetime and I pick you up at the airport, still somehow surprised that you are there. When I say I want to do something, I do everything in my power to make it happen. How many times have people said to me “I want to do that!” and not followed through. How many times have I done something alone, anyway?
Friend. How many times have our lives collided, unexpectedly and wonderfully? Our first lifetime together in punk houses and dirty alleys and bars, underaged, tits out on the patio, too young to know what we even desired. When we tell stories from that first era of kicked in doorways and shots mixed with period blood people look at us askance. “You’re lying,” they say. If anything, we’ve understated the stories from our teens, maybe only half believing them ourselves. I live for the excess and you do, too. I’d forgotten what it was like, the first few times I broke the ‘rules’ of life. I’d forgotten that the matching triskellion scars we bear are even odd, they’ve been parts of us for so long the pain and the courage has gone to distant seed.
Seventeen years later three of us are together again in Kelowna and my heart is so full of love it hurts. Sometimes my life is so lonely, all of us scattered and adventuring and changing and growing, but sometimes we get to come back together at a punk show and look at each other over our pints and smile knowingly. Sometimes we get to drive the Cool Bus through the night time streets of the city and then through a corridor of alleys to a new friend’s house, where the people are weird and beautiful and we fit right in. Sometimes we get to come home to each other and I know in my bones that I have made the most beautiful family and I feel divinely blessed.The punk houses have changed, now. They’re clean and the doors are all on the hinges. The roomates are fresh and don't know the stories we tell that have turned into legend. We talk about our credit scores instead of riots. We share collective sorrows and grief and absurdity and the new and healing me gets to come together with the younger me as a whole. It happened- I was there. I was a part of it. Thank you for reminding me of what I have forgotten is mine.
People comment that they love the way that the three of us talk together and we ponder over it until we figure it out- we love each other so much and are so comfortable together we can argue and correct each other and disagree without aggression or conflict. That kind of comfort is exceedingly rare. We have all known each other at our worst and lowest and we are better, now. Not perfect but better, all works of progress permanently. There is no judgment here. I am safe and happy in a way I am not often. Life seems full and has come around in a satisfying way. Much like my treeplanting friends we ebb and flow on our own paths and it is sad and hard sometimes when we are apart without knowing when we will come back together, lives lived sharp and true like poetry. The beauty comes from the absence and is necessary to make it so' and I love it and loathe it all at once.
We meet again in England, still babies, and we go out and drink whiskey on Denmark St, looking for a punk bar which we find down a steep stairwell. I am sixteen years old and have no ID. I’ve run here trying to live life to the absolute fullest, to experience every moment, to dive into it, to not die without regrets- that’s my biggest fear, dying and regretting not living. This is MY life to do with as I please, and I am keenly aware of this, seeking to suck the marrow from the very bone. This is the first time I’ve REALLY broken the unspoken conventions of life to do what I wanted, manifested an insane dream into reality. My family is disappointed I left school and are worried for my future.I left before people we knew started dying and got paid to ride horses through the English country side, explore London on my days off, live somewhere else. Here I have the space to be, away from the abuse, and be present for a moment. Is it so obscenely beautiful because of the escape, or youth, or was it really like that?
We create a moment, smoking Marlboros in the dark streets of London. We get shitshow drunk like we always used to when we were kids- seeking the beauty of the excess, we give into the Bachanalian desires of our lizard brains, although perhaps moderation is just another puritan convention we’ve decided to discard. A man is creeping on us and asks if I’m your girlfriend. You grab me and plant a possessive and protective kiss on my mouth and he turns away, disappointed. I’m not my confident self, yet, not until after Hearst, and you are my savior. I wonder why you’re here with little ol’ me and my social anxiety, not yet knowing what I will become. You depart at Paddington Station and I carry on to catch my train back to Epsom and the horse farm.
You have gone out into the world and lived and traveled and done so muchand are home again and we reconnect over a beer. I'm actually quite envious of the long term travel, the living, the new experiences and culture I fear I have missed out on. Toronto is years behind me now and I am workingthrough my baggage and trying to become who I deserve to be. You are the first person who believes me and takes my side when I finally realize the mistreatment and mental torment I suffered in our first lifetime, at the hands of somebody who was a part of that group. I was ostracized and lived in a disassociated daze. You remind me I was there and a part of things and that I lay as much claim to my memories of this time as anybody else who was there. You remind me of the beauty we had in white punk houses where friends nicknamed Dirty Face sucked drinks off the filthy floor and people got stabbed with forks at parties (allegedly) and punks with Mohawks wore their girlfriends used tampons as a necklace for months. You remember and understand and know I’m not making it up or exaggerating it. What a God damn time and a beautiful life we have had so far. You give me back those years that I forgot I owned, although it takes me until Kelowna, cracking ice cubes out of a tray in the kitchen and communicating with you without fear of reprisal, that I integrate them into my new self. What I lost comes rushing back in and rejoins me and I am united and whole.
You, my friend, are the first person I have tricked into coming on a prolonged roadtrip in the Cool Bus. I've been trying since I got it. Mom and I bop around Vancouver Island for a bit at Christmas, that miserable grey winter. I take her to my favorite place on Denman Island, a provincial park right on the ocean, empty in the winter except for us. We bring Chinese food from Oyster Bay and spend our Christmas in my world that I have manifested and created. I have a post season roadtrip from Williams Lake to the Okanagan with another planter I’ve fallen in love with that I can’t have. This is my curse. But the memory of singing along the entire way and spitting cherry pits out the window and being manically free after the grind of the season is unforgettable. Much of our Playlist, friend, comes from that roadtrip. But most of my bus life has been a monastic existence of self reflection and lonely ocean and woods and I am ready to rejoin the world.
I have woven you into my new life, drawing the threads together. Treeplanting and my bus solitude make a satisfying full circle with Guelph as you embark on this journey with me. I’ve craved the company so badly, to turn to someone and say, look at that. To experience the wonder and joy and hardship together, to see and be seen. From Edmonton I take you to one of my favorite spots at Abraham Lake where I’ve been free camping with a view of the mountains and the lake, stunning in the background but lonely and empty without a friend. You are just happy to be in beautiful places and that much, I can offer.
I didnt mean to write this much backstory that had nothing to do with out travels together, but it deserved to get written down too.
Thanks for being you and letting me exist, imperfectly but loved.
To be continued.