October 2009
8 posts
I wanted to ask you
It was like we were slowly just depositing little tiny bits of feelings in to each other, like we were both garbage bins that the other walked past on the way to work. Maybe they were even facing each other on opposite sides of the road. And every day, one little bus ticket was put in there. But eventually, if somehow you could separate all the bus tickets that you had put inside the bin and put...
Unravelled
Dear Mrs Livingstone,
I am writing to you to express my deepest and most sincere apologies in regards to your son, Liam, whom I was very close to and spent a lot of time with. Obviously not as close to him as you were, or anywhere near as much time as you spent with him, but enough, you know, to feel like we had some sort of connection and that I could judge him to be a wonderful person. And by...
Recurring dream
I have this recurring dream that you come to me and you are crying, as if everything in the world has pressed down on you and around you like a squeezing hand so hard that you are leaking tears. You look at me with big, shining eyes and your wet face is salty like you have just been thrown out of the ocean. I ask you what is the matter, naturally, and you can do nothing but choke your voice down...
Ways I have learnt about loss
The first and last time
In my memory, it is all teal and off-white, ugly paintings and the smell of disinfectant. It was a stupidly sunny day, and I had come to visit her, because she was dying. We all knew it, so it was only decent to come and see her, before we couldn’t anymore. Seeing my grandmother had always been a chore, at least according to my mother.
At her apartment, which was about a...
Unremarkable
It could have been any party, really, but it was this one and we were going to go to it, not for any reason in particular but because it was a Saturday and there was a party. And we were going. With beer. It doesn’t really matter who we are, we’re just some people going to a party, any party really, we weren’t together for any reason, just that we were all going to the same party.
It was any...
Smoke
Our grandfather’s father smoked himself to death. Each morning he’d wake up, plod towards the bathroom, splash his face with water and his chest with cologne. He’d keep his packet of cigarettes in the cabinet, and before he shaved, before the rays of sunlight hit the brass edges of the mirror in such a way that it illuminated his face like some shining angelic light, he would light a cigarette.
...
Back Seat Driving
The days are heavy. Sleep comes easily, drowning me each night, exhausted without reason. I do not dream – but for you, I labour over dreams, constructing them like epic novels, struggling to find the perfect scenes. Sleep comes easily, but my dream work is drawn out and tiresome. Sleep itself suffocates me, and I wake up an insomniac’s double.
*
You lock eyes with yourself in the mirror while...
Ways I go home
My mother calls me and asks me if I’d like to take care of their house when she and my father take a vacation in the colourful part of spring. It would be a great help, she says, and the birds do need to be fed. I can’t trust just anyone, she says.
My apartment is tired and lonely and I am keen to be tired and lonely in my childhood house, so arrangements are made. There is nothing much in my...
