Artwork by Kali Mitres
These things, they’re unavoidable. If you get stuck, the only way out is through.
You were worried, you knew it was too late, that you were in too deep. You knew. He told you: what are you going to do—stop?
These things, they all blend together in time. You get older, and you meet more people. They all give you certain gifts that you’ll spend a lifetime trying to relive in the hands and hearts of others, but the only feeling you’ll ever relive is fresh loss, over and over again.
I had a pair of gloves that I never wore, ones my father had bought for me in the eighth grade on a father-daughter trip to Montreal. He bought them for me by force because I was so stubborn, I let my hands become a reddish-purple in the Canadian winter, because I was so stubborn, I froze them until they could not bend. I never wore the gloves after that trip because I met you, and found that when I held your hand as we walked, you would absent-mindedly slip mine in your pocket. This last Sunday, during a blizzard, I put the gloves my dad bought in my pocket, and I didn’t wear them because I was so stubborn. When I got home, I found that one had fallen out without my noticing. This troubles me to no end.
These things, they spin you around, they pick a loose thread in your favourite sweater, they spin you around, they make you dizzy, they spin you around, and you’re shivering, naked. You’re alone with all of the thread but none of the skills to remake the sweater that they once weaved together.
I noticed every day that went by with no words—I noticed as they piled up. I would keep a mental list of all that I wanted to catch you up on the next time we spoke, until that list would overlap on itself so many times over as to blur out into a gray slate; muddled. I speak to you now, and it’s as if I’m constantly rubbing a dry eraser against that list. You tell me we haven’t changed, at least not in our cores, but it doesn’t feel that way to me. I think you’re right; I just can’t accept it.
These things, they’ll raise questions about every tenet you think you held close.
You found me in the stacks of the library on a Tuesday evening. I was 15, you were double. You asked me, on what must’ve been a whim, if I had anything, anyone, that I would die for. Put my life on the line for. I thought long and hard. Too long and too hard to come up with an answer that I could say with confidence.
These things, they follow the changing seasons, they beckon you to make the ultimate decision; lay in the water through the night until you freeze under the stream, or skate over the icy surface.
I’ve taken to walking along the canal at night, playing the piano at odd hours, and lingering just a little too long with the crappy cafeteria coffee we used to have. For a little while, you would appear next to me in flashes of light, like cigarette burns (as they say in the industry, so I hear). Now, when you’re there, it’s a deliberate affair. Whenever you flicker in my vision, I can’t help but wonder if I ever do the same in yours. It’s just my luck that all of the images I’ve framed of you in my mind are in unavoidable places.
These things, when you’re still wading on the line in between the undercurrent and the frigid, fresh skies, will grant you moments of clarified vision. That is, only if you’re willing to dive down before you come back up for air.
It’s April, but not the one that you left me in. In the stale silence of your dingy kitchen, I tried to make myself coffee on your stove, but the gas wouldn’t give in. That was the kicker for me that day. I must’ve been curled up on your ceramic floor for just as long as you had been gone. My father found me there, the pot on the stove, the mug on the plastic-covered table. Your name spilled out of my mouth in a broken fashion, one amongst a lengthy list of others I’d lost to time and circumstance. He sat with me, first in silence, and then in relation. These things are cumulative, these things are interchangeable, these things are one and the same.
These things, they’ll swallow you whole, chew you up, and spit you out. You’ll come out disassembled, mangled, but you’ll never be so far gone as to not be able to put yourself back together again.
I received a call yesterday from a new friend who feels like anything but. She was searching for my wisdom on her work, but she was met only with my murky, half-baked thoughts. In between my senseless ramblings, I told her this: I’ve been fascinated lately—inspired—by people who have thrown away their entire lives for the purpose of chasing their all-consuming passions. People who can let go of everything that keeps them tied to the earthly plane.
These things, you can’t let them fool you into scrapping it all. The mangled bits. You were there for a reason then; you’re here for a reason now.
She told me this: Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think that’s what I mean… I searched it up. That was what she meant.
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