traversing through the land of the mind

elina-astra: Meaning and morality of One’s life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self expansion by experimenting and by living dangerously. Life consists of an infinite number of possibilities and the healthy person explores as many of them as posible. Religions that teach pity, self-contempt, humility, self-restraint and guilt are incorrect. The good life is ever changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative and risky.  Friedrich Nietzsche (via gnostix1)

You moved on with your life with an ease that offended me, despite your whisperings: I am not responsible for your emotions. You are the only one responsible for your emotions. My life, on the other hand, took a quiet hiatus.  Three weeks, four months, seven hours, two and a half years.  Was it worth it to count the time?  Reaching my heavy arm up from the bare brocade mattress to gouge tiny little ticks into the top of my desk, marking a heart in a tree — marking how long it’s been — how far I’ve come from you.  The heart ticks tell me that I’ve been moving backward all along.  Seven empty bottles of wine underneath my writing desk, nestled private and safe beneath the ikea-made facade of intellectuals.  I am safe here with this cigarette-stained mattress, with my  scraped up ikea-desk, with my master’s in skepticism, with my heady backward movement that theorizes a forward moving and doting body that might emerge from the mattress, someday, with a passion that is directed. Moving toward someone must have made it all the easier.No need for a time to breathe when she is breathing fire down your neck. That night, my 8,400th night, when you had filled your room with birthday balloons, you stood up on the wet roof, peering out at the stars above the dark and whimsical houses of your neighbors, and told me that I had it all, that this was your opportunity to really be a man, and not a boy.   I wasn’t sure what you meant by that then, and I’m still not sure.  But I do remember how, after the first time in the tangled dusty rose sheets, you told me: You make love like a woman. We stood shivering on your rooftop that night in late January, sheltered by a fairy-tale enclave of sequoia trees that kept our half-naked bodies holding bottles of spiritous potions protected from the cops circling through this gritty neighborhood of east van.   I can really be a man, now.  You are everything I’ve ever wanted. As we smoked cigarettes beneath the blushing bed sheets you’d tell me stories about what your ex subjected you to for the past four years.  You had done your best to shock me with these stories, to make her look like a thoughtless wino, scorning you with inebriating anger and lush mayhem.   I told you She’ll have a hold on you for a long time. And you disagreed, said But all of my memories of her are bad ones. I nodded, blowing smoke, said Those ones have the strongest hold. Two months later, upon her release from rehab, you were flew away with her to montreal.  A whirlwind of passion that electrocutes me back to life: the storm before the calm.  I lie down to sleep and the quiet sadness sinks in.  The kind of quiet that buzzes just above the threshold of hearing, whispering reminders.  How the men she’d thought she’d love and slowly undressed herself for and told the darkest stories from her childhood to and daydreamed on the island — the men who told her that they loved her in the most inopportune ways, the men who’d proclaimed her unique habitation in the depths of their soul, in the lightest parts of their heart — these men were onto the next fleeting chapter of their lives.  A page turns, flinging masses of tiny people down from the corners of the pages and onto the hardwood floor.  A chapter closes, and all those little people who were central once, who controlled the conflict of the plot with an arbitrary word, who half-consciously decided whether there’d be resolution before the denouement, are no longer named, no longer recognizable, barely standing in the arcane realms of recall.  

there’s no longer an interest in men who might be my suitors, men who might want to listen to my story, men who might be no different from me.  a bolt of sharp existential nausea strikes me in the gut when i see a touque, a plaid shirt, a well-tailored pant leg, a fixie.   every lucid dream i have at night is interjected with stark text panels, godardian editing, martin luther king acquainting me. ‘we can all be great, because we can serve.‘    i get off of work at five o’clock.  find myself on the corner of main and e. hastings, digging for my cardigan because it’s just not summer yet.  where are you headed to?,  i’m asked by a client from the drop-in.  my bleeding heart says, ‘that way, to maclean’s’.  and we walk.   do you need an escort to the bookstore?  this is a dangerous neighborhood, you know!  and i laugh.  and he asks why?  why did you laugh?  and i tell him that i’m not sure.  it’s outside my control.  i tell him that i’m not sure why i’ve never felt afraid down here.  he hasn’t eaten a thing all day; just the glass of juice i gave him earlier to take with his meds.  i call the madhouse and am told that there’s no meals left.  quite tragic, really: you missed fresh smoked salmon and asparagus in barely ripe lemon butter.   against my better judgment, i take the escort out for some dinner at the deli in nester’s.  sixteen minutes of hungry indecision, wide-eyed, asking if he can have a  strawberry kiwi juice to go with his meal.  i’m explaining paninis and calzones and flax rolls and lemon chicken to a man thirty-two years my senior, lowered down to his knees by the tapping of a freshly-loaded debit card wand upon the crown of his head.  in BMO we trust. i’m a prairie boy, he tells me.  i profess: i’m a prairie girl!  the queen’s ‘fun’ city, born and raised.  he tells me that he studied english at the university of regina.  where i am an alumni.  for me to imagine this body walking through the halls of Ad Hum, where i walked through as a panicked and perfectionist undergrad, is enough to make me hear voices, see the little people.  he studied english, and he fell into alcoholism.  and now he’s here.  but the story can’t be so simple, can it?  he was only seventeen, fresh off a rolling straw donut from small town saeah skaeh chew wan.  i learn that he’s been in and out of the downtown eastside for twenty-two years.  how does his schizophrenia fit into this story?  the menacing voices he wakes up to, and falls asleep with?  where does epilepsy fit?  or the valid notion of self-medicating that doctors erase from their diagrams in the same manner that city planners highlight the ‘eastern downtown’ region and right-click ‘delete’!?  re-branding the eastern part of a city and the ways in which illnesses are alleviated is simple if you’re dealing with maps and diagrams.  but not when it is haunting eyes framed with crow’s feet, bewitching toothless smiles, decrepit bodies hunched over and soliciting mercy.   i’m unable to escape the most stirring smile i’ve ever seen on the face of this tall elf-like man who screamed at me in rage four months ago in the cloistered medication room, prompting me to stand up and exit the space in defense. he apologized the next day: ‘i get very impatient when i’m waiting to take my meds’.  i wanted to cry out of fear, then, and now i want to cry out of mourning for this planet and what us humans have done to each other and what our god would say when he saw this weathered man’s cherubic smile and he saw what this tall elf-man would do when he got back to his SRO to drown out all those hellish voices.   what did i do to be brought into this moment, face to face with the most evocative and affecting smile that the cosmos has ever seen on the body of a man who has never felt peace?  what does god want me to do with this immense ocean of pain that i feel pulse over me every morning when i wake up and reflect on every beautiful and complicated human being i’ve fallen in metaphysical love with, despite the scripts telling me ‘boundaries!’ and ‘standards!’ and ‘appearances!’ and ‘class!’. he waits at the bus-stop with me even though we both know full well that this is gastown and nobody needs an escort in gastown.  i get home to my soviet-style nest and curl up between these orange-colored walls plastered with Man Ray and Dali and Spilliaert and La Boheme and a CN rail photograph that looks like a landscape painting of my home.  who knew i’d ever feel this alone?  not lonely, just alone.  happy, bittersweet, alone.  a rich chocolate bar of vanilla  & smoke and a bottle of red is all i have beside my bed as i fall into the netherland of gorgeous schizophrenic men and narcissistic men and borderline men and bipolar men and chronically depressed men and sociopathic men and paranoid men and quadriplegic men and obsessive-compulsive men and manic men and raging men and lonely men, all of whom i know i will always long for and whom i know will never ever float up and out of my memory bank.   and then i’m in the netherland of my past: six years ago.  i stretch out my arm to touch the satiny screen only to see it move below me, underneath me, beyond me.  ha, i think.  as if i could run back into this hazy memory-screen to have the people who loved me with every green fiber of their soul love me again, in that same way.  to run back into the hazy memory-screen to see myself beaming, to see myself leading, to see myself worshiping, to see myself being loved for who i seemed to be, then.   i fall to the bed in dire defeat, when a little man on my pillowcase whispers, you’re stronger now.  you’re stronger now that you’ve left this hazy pink screen to float into the real world, now that you’ve handed clean crack pipes to weary french canadians and mosy’d through rigorous graduate work in the arts and held weathered hands at art galleries with men older than your father and tattooed your thighs with pagan scripts and pierced your heart with a metaphysical earring-gun, that i left underneath your pillow that night.  sure, they said they’d love you forever.  and they did.  for their forever.  for your forever.  but it’s not forever, anymore.  it’s right now.  and you better get up off of this bed.  you better serve.