immortal jellyfish

thsi is a test.

I put on a front when it comes to discussing the things that have happened in my life that have hurt me.  For a long time- the only thing that would have made that list is my mother.  But sadly, now there are other things that have taken pieces of me away.  Ryan for one.  Actually the only other one that is still on Earth.

Everyone gets hurt.  Well those that are brave enough to put themselves in positions to get hurt.  It’s apart of the gamble.  I don’t like gambling anymore.  Because when you lose the hand, it isn’t ever a windfall it’s just the small pieces that break off.  It’s the erosion of your heart.  You can never see it happening, but just when it’s too late to turn back, the pieces are no longer there.

I’m not good or comfortable at being a submissive person.  Not in my day to day life.  I’m a bad follower and an even worse sheep.  But Ryan managed without saying anything that he would somehow flip our roles, with his badge and Mountie hat- he became the only person that has ever managed to put me on the floor to step on.  Actually he didn’t even step on me, because that would assume guts, he stepped over me like a sweater that wasn’t good enough to be on a hanger.

In those moments, when he picked his foot up higher to not step on me is when the pieces began to fall.  It wasn’t like a rock slide, there was no flash of terror or danger.  This danger grew and built to a peak that was more forceful than any natural disaster.  It’s force was because I was led to believe that it was all done out of love.

There are very few moments in ones life that changes them.  Change.  I’ve had about 4 in my entire life.  The theme of all my changing days was loss.  Not always death, but the loss of someone in my life.  3 men, 1 woman.  The biggest result of all of those things is that without my knowledge, I casually leaned into my closest, pulled out my oldest runner and tied the laces. People always talk about what an accomplishment The Boston Marathon is to complete.  Those runners don’t have anything on me.  I’ve been running for a while now.

My ego tells me, that if I leave someone then it will take away the obvious result of them leaving me.  So I run.  Uphills, downhills, around the city.  It doesn’t matter as long as I keep moving.  I run with my hands in my pockets, I carry all of my pieces with me at all times out of fear that I will be robbed again.

But the trouble is that I’m tired.  Increasingly so.  I need to stop running- plus my shoes are warn and they don’t offer me any support or comfort.  People have told me that they would be willing to run with me, but that would just tie me down.  I’m not interested in running with anyone else.  People who chose running as their sport over group sports is because we don’t always know how to play with others.

unknown

Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen

My grandparents were in love with the ocean and each other…

Richard and Dorothy Lowery are my grandparents and their love story is something that has always inspired me. They met in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England while my grandfather was studying to become a Naval Architect, and my grandmother was studying to be his best friend.

Soon after my grandpa graduated, they started their odyssey living in dozens of cities before settling in Montreal and then their final port of call, Vancouver. My grandpa would follow the work, and my grandma would follow him. (She was a dancer although would never admit to it except if she was tap-dancing with me after dinner on the linoleum of our kitchen).

In the early 1940’s my grandparents settled in Singapore, they were there for 5 years before the war broke out, and they had no choice but to flee. They moved to Melbourne, Australia while my grandmother was pregnant with my mom.

My grandmother was quite the seamstress, and while my grandparents didn’t have a lot of money after leaving their home in Singapore so suddenly when my mother was born, my grandmother went to work on her Christening gown, she made it out of the linen found in my grandpas blueprints, I wore the same dress years later at my own Christening.

After being in Australia for 18 months, Canada’s opportunities were too good to ignore. They traveled by ship to Montreal, with my mother as a toddler because my grandpa always thought, why travel any other way than by sea.

He became the Vice-President and Chief Technical Officer, of Canada Steamship Lines, and proved himself as a very talented architect. Because they had spent so much time in Singapore they learned the Malay language, whenever you would hear them speak Malay you would know they were either bickering or telling each other sweet nothings that weren’t meant for other peoples ears.

They fell in love on the ocean. Their romance was encompassing like the sea, it was all around us. Whenever my grandfather would finish with a ships construction, it was always my grandma who would smash the bottle of champagne over her hull. It is said that the person who launched a ship becomes that ships ‘God Mother’ with their spirit always protecting the ship.

He eventually re-designed Lighthouses that are still in use in Tadoussac Quebec, they have a very unique hour glass design. The design was eventually commemorated on a Canadian Stamp.

When I was eight, it was my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary. My grandparents felt like they had already celebrated in their everyday lives, so instead they send my parents and I on a once in a lifetime trip. We retraced their steps to the cities where they fell in love. We started in Hong Kong, then on to Thailand and finally Singapore. It was an amazing time, and hard to believe that my grandparents lived in all of these places.

My grandmother passed away when I was 12, very soon after my grandfather developed Alzheimer’s. I don’t think that my grandpa had any desire to live without his wife, his lighthouse. Even after her death, she knew how to guide him home, as he passed away eight years later.

I wrote this piece the morning after a boyfriend left to go into the RCMP.  Our relationship was destructive, but we loved each other hard.  This is where I was in my own silence.

Sometimes silence is more powerful than words or noises. The lack of distraction, that moment when you allow yourself to process, think and react.
It’s interesting that something as non-exsistent as silence, the fact that it’s a void, can carry so much power.

I think that men do alot more things in silence than women. Friendships between men seem so different than the friendships that women experience. If a man gets his heart broken, he doesn’t go to his friends and talk about it, and cry about it, instead he processes the heavy stuff in silence. That would be hard for me too do. Or hard for me to be I guess.

Sometimes when I am thinking about something very specific and I start to cry, it’s that kind of crying that gets done in silence that is the powerful stuff. Just the tears falling and not saying a word. I think that it’s those moments that your soul becomes altered or affected. But the most powerful part about those experiences is not the expression of emotion, but the silence that you do it in.

Between two people that are in love it’s in the silence between them that they become theives. A stolen glance, that silent recognition of I see you for who you are and I love you because of that.

Even in silence, there can be a symphony. When two people embrace eachother, it may seem silent, but to those two people, the noise, the sound of heart beat says more than any sonnet could.
Two people kissing, silence, no talking, but in that comes the unintentional noise that love sometimes makes.
Sometimes people crave silence and sometimes people run from it. I do both. That morning when Ryan was leaving, after the alarm went off, it was silent, just him and me and in that moment, I think that’s when my body completely processed what was about to happen to him and also to me. I remember I didn’t want him to say anything, because at that point I really was made of very thin glass, and I knew that if he broke the silence, I too would shatter. He pulled me into him, as if we were of the same skin. He enveloped me, I felt held. Every part of me did. And I did the only thing I could think to do, I got on top of him, somehow forcing him to stay. I remember that moment, as clear as the glass that I was made of that day. At that exact moment, in silence I surrendered, and slowly and silently the tears started falling. And I began to shatter. But unlike glass it didn’t make a sound when I hit.
I went from craving the silence, to wanting something to distract me. That moment of me standing and watching him to go through the airport doors, it wasn’t just sad because he was walking into the mind and surroundings of someone else. Still him, but evolved. But because he was becoming that person that all those months ago said to me, “If you love me this much now, I can’t imagine how much you will love me then”. I was upset in my silence because the man I loved was leaving, but also the man I knew was gone.

Even that inevitable evolution was done in silence. Such strong things and changes to be done in silence. I felt in that moment as his vision left my eye that my pain and sadness was palpable. I could taste it, I could touch it. Something weighing on my heart and mind at that moment, and I knew that if I didn’t allow myself to feel it then, I would be in a world of trouble for the next 6 months. So I felt it, every part of me felt it. I went home and took his quilt, wrapped it around me like scotch tape on glass.

I sat in silence and felt it at all. That as well altered my soul.

Silence maybe isn’t as silent as we thought. Because in it we find great strength.

“ The truly scary thing isn’t death in the blue afternoon, but the bright white morning of recovery; that’s what freaks us so, keeps us all out here (stoned, impervious) on the perimeter of our nightless night. Didn’t you know? It’s love, love most of all, that scares us sick-it’s most of all your concern that sends us scurrying back into the arms of sweet morphia”

‘Heroin, a love story’ (Arena Magazine 1997)

“What happens if you start to stop? What happens when you wake from some decade long siesta some snow white snooze( a dream of perfect pitch, tomb temperature) and find that you haven’t learnt Lesson One of the things that make others human? Haven’t cultivated the adult graces that enable undrugged peers to sculpt out the friezes of family, friendship, career, haven’t learnt to see yourself as an “I” capable of long term temporal projection? All you have learned to do is… Go against the grain, give in to the grain.