My Grand Derangement

An Epistemological Transfiguration Following a Period of Divine Isolation and a Great Fuck in April

One thing I miss about smoking is the man who works at the gas station convenience store. I don’t know if it’s correct to describe myself as lonely so much as alone. I’m fine with it, I think.

Still, being alone changes a person even if it’s entirely self-imposed. Mundane connections intensify. For example, I’m obsessed with this woman named Kathy. She’s worked at the Sobeys in Fredericton since 2009 (according to her nametag) and has a very specific way of bagging groceries that she imposes on all the other cashiers.

At the heart of her methodology is a near-fanatical belief that the optimal way to bag is to fit as many items into as few bags as possible.

For myself, there are flaws in her doctrine. My bag has sometimes broken on the way to the car from the store or, later, from the car to the house or, after that, from the upstairs of the house to my basement apartment...my dog, Buttercup, zooming around the living room with my salamis in her mouth.

One time I took a risk. Halfway through the bagging of my first bag, I lifted a second bag from the cart and presented it to Kathy.

“Here’s another one so that one doesn’t get too full,” I suggested.

“No,” she said, “still plenty of room in this one.”

Beyond this, Kathy is really pushy about me signing up for the Scene card. I have issues with authority that make me needlessly hostile to criticism or direction. I have mommy-issues that extend to any boomer woman trying to tell me what to do. Kathy is a boomer woman with frizzy copper hair and a face that permanently pouts. She reminds me of a high school librarian.

This one day, Kathy went through the steps of signing me up for the Scene card without my asking. She said all I had to do was go to the website which she’d circled for me on the receipt. She also outlined how much money I would save and the days I could get 10% off with my student card.

“With groceries these days, you can’t afford not to!” The concern in her eyebrows was perfect—likely honed through years of raising children, I imagined. Some people have a way about them, you can tell they’ve always been responsible for someone younger and stupider.

I am resistant to these kinds of people. It’s a rancor that shakes my nerves. This other woman, Judith, a frequent reading-attender, the type to have a pleasant back-and-forth with a Kathy, once asked me during a Q&A why I needed to have so many swear words in my writing. Afterwards she cornered me in the lobby and corrected my French pronunciations. I had to write an email to event organizers explaining that, due to what I can only describe as trauma and severe mental illness, I was scared that if Judith cornered me and attempted to advise me again I might black out and punch her in the face.

Someone must’ve had a talk with Judith because after that she always kept her distance and was very careful about being polite.

I never signed up for the Scene card.

Though, I left the receipt with Kathy’s instructions, as well as the card itself (and the little Sobeys-envelope it came in) on the table at the centre of my apartment. Every single day I thought about logging into the website to claim my discounts and every single day I decided not to.

Each time I did groceries, the universe seemed to usher me to Kathy. She would ask if I remembered to sign up for my Scene card and I would tell her no. Her well-meaning reminders soon turned to disappointment that bordered on a broken heart.

She was taking care of me. Why was I so closed off to her nurturing? She only wanted to help—to protect me, a young woman in pursuit of an education, a working-class comrade with dreams of transcendence, from the cruelty of the corporation for whom she’d surrendered fifteen of her prime bagging years.

It was both a risk and an act of radical ally-ship, and yet, every day, I refused.

Kathy became a figure that permeated my thoughts. Even the days in-between, the days when I didn’t need groceries and was deep in study, I thought of her, eyeballed the Scene card on my table, turned the memory her concerned eyebrows around and around in my head like a set of dice in a bet that has the power to make or destroy me.

Today Kathy can’t bring herself to look at me. They installed a self-checkout so I can avoid further interpersonal connections.

Sometimes I still find myself in conversation though.

Like on a quiet afternoon when I’m alone checking out, being observed by Gail, and I tell her how when they built the Sobeys in Fonthill, my hometown, my friends got fired for playing hockey with the bagels in the aisles after close.

When it’s busy, I’m forced to check out the old fashion way.

I go to Lucy on Valentine’s Day. I’m buying myself two bouquets of red roses. Unprovoked, I tell Lucy that I prefer to buy my own roses because then I can keep my bed to myself and in the long run I actually save money.

She laughs and says she doesn’t blame me—brags about her two divorces.

I tell her I’m actually using the flowers for my altar, my witchcraft, and wink at her.

This blows Lucy’s mind. I’m so grateful for the look on her face, you have no idea.

I’m not a witch really. I built an altar because after I left Niagara everyone started dying. I sensed a fluctuation in the energy in the late summer of 2022 and that’s when I applied for the PhD program at the University of New Brunswick. I needed a way out so I found one. Leaving for Fredericton, I told myself two lies:

1) That I would come back immediately.

2) That people would come with me.

The path was a rickety rope bridge between two worlds, the world of home and the world of the university. As soon as I arrived, the rope bridge collapsed into a chasm and all promise of return was nullified. I was trapped in New Brunswick.

There’s a cruel sense of humour in this event. Thinking back to myself in Niagara, listening to my grandfather’s stories in his Chiac accent, romanticizing my Acadian history, thinking I was going to learn about the Great Expulsion—only to find myself very much expelled.

In 2023, the Niagara Peninsula declared a State of Emergency for suicide and opioid overdose. During the first semester of my PhD, exactly one year after I’d sensed a shift in the energy of my hometown and submitted my application, what I can only describe as sudden and destabilizing nonsense started occurring. Then, just as suddenly, people I’d grown up with and loved died too young. As I wrote my papers, I tried to tell the dead they needed to wait on my couch until I was finished my work. However, at night, in the moments before sleep, the dead would come back to me and I would picture us as baby birds in a nest. One-by-one each tries to fly and falls instead.

“Hunting Songs” by Michael McGrath

The strain of this experience, of these years punctuated by suicides and overdoses and devastation and heartbreak and betrayal, prevented me from “putting myself out there” the way one might when starting a new program or moving to a new place. I should have been attending events, setting up meetings, building a community. Instead, I dove deeply inward.

I think because I couldn’t go back for the funerals and lived in a basement apartment, my brain did this switch where it was as if I was in the grave, I was haunting them, and they were all out there somewhere still living—me following them around instead.

The sensation of a stranger so much as brushing against me made me nauseous. I created a lonely little universe where nobody touched me. The Close Friends-Only stories on my Instagram was where I allowed myself to over-post and be raw in a career-ending way. It was a time where I needed to be openly wild and dark, unprofessionally so. 24-hour obligatory professionalism is a modern invention that is destroying authentic human connections. I haven’t researched this at all so I might be wrong. It’s just a feeling I have.

Back in 2020, I was almost murdered by my roommate and astrology came through for me in a real way. However, months later I moved in with my partner who hated everything woo woo. For a while, I was tormented by the dichotomy of my spiritual inclinations and my yearning to be desired. I could tell he found my knowledge of star signs profoundly unattractive and off putting so I tried to hide it from him—locking the door before checking my transits as if I were masturbating.

Now, five years later, the freedom of having little obligation to another person’s lust allowed me to pursue astrology in the annoying way I needed to. Maybe it wasn’t astrology exactly but a need for a spiritual language or practice. As a child, I was a devout Christian. Then I studied metaethics in university as a way of locating some objective lens that would protect the spiritual parts of myself from being manipulated or harmed.

I bought a coffee table from Value Village that became my altar, candles and incense from Dollarama, flowers from Sobeys (Hey Kathy! Gail! Lucy!), performed rituals with my Chani Nicholas app each week. My printing privileges at the university allowed me to print off pictures of my dead for free. Returning, sometimes weekly, when another died. Then I used a cork board to create a mosaic of their faces and placed it in the middle of my altar.

The candle and incense were selected based on which planet and sign was the dominant force in the sky that day. Offerings were made: coins, chocolates, stones, bowls of water. Sitting on the floor in front of the altar, lighting the candle and incense, I communed with the dead and I wrote.

Writing during this time became both a dance and a séance. What I produced was more musical. I wrote sprawled out on the carpet with specific music playing, as little electricity as possible, by hand mostly, its own kind of ritual. I imagine to my landlords upstairs it must’ve seemed like I was just a studious shut-in, an introvert. To those on my Close Friends-Only stories, I must’ve seemed psychiatrically desperate. However, in the little world I’d built for myself I was having full on conversations with the dead and they were inducing miraculous creative breakthroughs.

Except that not being with living people, in the material sense, caused me to develop a heightened sensitivity to other bodies, voices that spoke back. It came on as these twinkling sensations—I can only describe it as like sprinkles on whip cream. When my friends from other places phoned or I received a text message or after my professor took me to lunch to check in, I would be twinkly and sugary and overcome by an urge to fill them with stories.

To be clear, in those days of solitude there were people who I could’ve called: other poets like Rebecca and Ambrose for example. As soon as the whirlwind of traumatic events began, they were on my doorstep trying to help and asking what they could do and suggesting ways they could show up for me. I didn’t want to take too much. I didn’t know when the shit storm would stop. Their support wasn’t something I could return. I told myself I’d get in touch when I felt better but then I never did.

I was so alone. Not lonely. Alone. But, as in the situation with the Sobeys ladies, small routine interactions became imbued with an irresponsible level of meaning. It’s what the heart does. It’s why people struggle with absolute solitude.

Waking up to the woods of New Brunswick outside my bedroom window, there’s never a day I forget my intention of learning about The Great Expulsion. Intentions are funny. This is the education, my great expulsion, my grand derangement.

So much of my own mental health struggles, my pain and suffering, are rooted in coming to terms with my powerlessness over life. I have a big imagination. My dreams are vivid—I forget they’re dreams. Then life does something different and I’m humbled. It isn’t mine to decide. I’m learning to trust what life has to teach me. I’m learning to enjoy being a passenger and accept the resignation required of happiness. In suffering and devastation, there is also adventure. If it isn’t painful then you’re not changing. Maybe that’s not true. Speaking in absolutes is unwise unless you know everything.

I don’t know if the grief is linked to my health deteriorating. Two months after I moved out of Niagara for good, I started bleeding and never stopped—as if I’d been walking around with a knife between my legs that was abruptly ripped from my body. My head got fuzzy. I couldn’t think. My eyes were swollen and my engorged stomach throbbed. I bled so much and so fast that I couldn’t protect my underwear, my sheets, my pants. I averaged one-hundred-dollars a month on menstrual products and wondered for how long I could manage my symptoms—even just financially. Then, I started fainting—bringing my books to my car, walking upstairs to the front door. I couldn’t walk my dog or carry the heavy bag of groceries. Kathy was unopen to suggestion. The bag breaks and Buttercup, a singular burst of energy, takes off with the deli meats and cheeses.

There’s no class because I’m studying for my comprehensive exams.

Weeks pass.

Then I realize it’s been a month since I last saw another human being.

I try to think who I’ve physically touched.

There’s Kathy of course, as she hands me the grocery bag. I didn’t touch Gail or Lucy during our exchanges.

There’s the gas station.

I pop some naproxen and wait for a window of relative ease.

Then I go into the gas station and the people there remember my smokes. John Player Smooth King Size 25. [i]

The men at the convenience store are sweet on me, I can tell. We banter about the roads, the winter. I feel warmed by a rush of serotonin and linger a little too long, not wanting this exchange between us to end. The large man with the goatee loves when I joke with him. He remembers everything I say. I think he’d fuck me if I let him but he isn’t creepy and taking it there would ruin it.

This is the only human being I will have an in-person interaction with this month.

His face lights up when I walk in. His co-cashier smiles at him and then smiles at me knowingly. My whole body floods with joy in his company. I want to stay and have surface conversation forever. He doesn’t touch me but I’m aware of him touching my change and then me touching my change. I don’t know how I exist in his mysterious universe. Perhaps my vanity has caused me to misread the entire scenario and actually I remind him of a little sister, a favorite cousin, a chaotic aunt he admired as a child.

Maybe I’m just a customer. A passing nothing. He’s good at his job. I’m not lonely but alone— except, for theses few minutes that we’re together. We discuss the bags of glosettes getting smaller, the jittery moments of not knowing if your debit transaction will be approved, the price of gas and it is as if the tile floor, the drop ceiling, the grey panels over the cigarettes are the architecture of a snug pink cocoon.

Is this loneliness?

Is this the way capitalism can sometimes, temporarily and artificially, fill a hole?

When I was fifteen, I worked at a Mac’s Milk in Welland. A gas station convenience store exists at the intersection of all walks of life. I remember that summer, Snakes on a Plane ads were all over the radio and my go-to line was asking people if they were gonna see it. It was also the summer when Mark Karr confessed to murdering JonBenét Ramsey. When I asked people if they thought he really did it, they got weird so I stopped.

I remember my boss, a bubbly Guatemalan woman with a nerdy teenage son who played on his Gameboy behind the counter when we had a shift together. The young father who would get so bored he’d spend most his pay cheque on items for sale in the store just to pass the time. My friend Andréa who’d just moved to Welland from Colombia—we’d spend our shifts flirting with the boys who ran the gas station in the parking lot, checking them out from the window as we counted scratch cards, making up imaginary futures as their doting wives.

I don’t really remember the customers. Except for one woman who stayed to make sure I was okay when a man who was visibly high on meth wouldn’t leave. She had blonde hair and pretended to be looking at things. Eventually she apologized and said she needed to go to work. Other than terrifying encounters where I feared for my life, she’s the only one who stands out. I don’t even know what she was wearing. All of my memories of customers are tied to fear and discomfort. Never friendship.

When I leave, do I exist in the minds of the men who run this convenience store the way they live on for me? Luminous and romantic and omnipresent.

About a month ago, I decided to prepare for the end of my expulsion. My health had improved with the help of a naturopath and the surgery I needed could happen sooner if I returned to Ontario. A client hooked me up with a Victorian house in Thornbury, Ontario for the summer.

The expulsion was almost over—at least temporarily—I still don’t know if I have to return to Fredericton next year to teach or how I’ll survive after the summer without a place to live or a job. For a second year in a row, I wasn’t recommended for SSHRC despite scoring extremely high. I have a little saved up so I could maybe make a year work—a year to write but I would lose everything and would be back to having my entire existence held together by safety pins and masking tape. If I’d gotten the SSHRC I would’ve tried to buy a small house in the woods. How could that be possible now unless I return to Fredericton and teach?

My life attracts bizarre chaos. You’ll see as you get to know me. It’s some uncomfortable frequency I inhabit that works as a lightning rod for the severely ridiculous. Others find it funny but I don’t. Maybe abstractly. It’s a good story. I have too many stories already. I really hate the idea of leaving my fate to chance instead of having some kind of pillow to fall back on. Beyond this, I don’t have family besides those I’ve chosen and that’s different. You don’t want it to be but it is. Even if I love my chosen families.

In Fredericton, I struggled beyond the loneliness. People seemed cold. A specific form of stupidity always breeds in contextual insularity—and of course every context is somewhat insular but sometimes a place just won’t have you and it has nothing to do with you. It’s as simple as the direction the air moves, where plants grow, how the sun hits the water at a certain time of day. Individuals seem more important than they actually are. There are codes of conduct that evaporated from nothing and no one explains to you or even acknowledges explicitly. Sometimes a person who hates you will be crowned The Person of This Place and then you’re done. Good luck getting readings or making friends or being respected. Time to move on.

So that’s Fredericton.

Then again—I keep going back and forth about where to fault Fredericton and where to hold myself accountable. If there’s no space for you then you carve out your own space. Normally that’s what I would do but I was grieving and ill.

These expulsion years aligned with the opioid crisis in Niagara in such a way that the isolation welcomed my grief. I didn’t want to be around people. I wasn’t ready to make new friends. Being touched by someone, just touched, was enough to break my heart.

During that time I did bond with a poet. In blazers we were both cosplaying academics, hiding from our backgrounds and only discovered each other when our poems were about the same things. The overdoses and suicides had happened in his inner-circle in Nanaimo in 2018.

One year ago, on a dock on the Tabusintac river, he kissed me. My stomach jerked and I almost threw up. Instead I lay across from him, looking into his eyes.

Over those months of isolation, we texted back-and-forth until he stopped responding. I felt the creepiness of myself then. Our kiss, which had lasted less than a minute, was charged with significance. Without him, the thrill of his name in my phone and the process of composing my admittedly over-eager and altogether too long responses, the days could easily become marked as one silence passing into another silence.

If friends called from other places, I would try to keep them on the line as long as possible—3 hours, 4 hours. I didn’t want them to hang up and afterwards I would be zipping like a firefly. Then I would wake up in a panic that I’d co-opted the conversation, spoken too openly about my trauma, not asked enough questions. And, of course, this was all true. When you get used to being alone, it creates the conditions—lack of care for social cues, desperation and neediness, an over eagerness to share—that make you more likely to continue to be alone.

On TV shows, there was a cast of characters who consistently populated each other’s hours in charming and surprising ways. Is that what life is like for most people or are people generally more like me? Didn’t I used to have a life like that? Was I happy then?

Teaching in January was helpful. My hour-long classes made me feel more connected to myself as a corporeal entity. The stress of my comprehensive exam was unhelpful because it took away whatever time I had to commune with the dead.

I was even more alone.

It’s February. 17 months into my expulsion. 3 months before I can leave New Brunswick. I text the poet from Nanaimo who I had kissed for less than a minute last summer. I tell him I want to die because I do. I texted that I’m bleeding out and fucking up in all kinds of ways because I am. The doctors found an enlarged endometrial polyp, a tumor, and the waiting list for the specialist to remove it is months long. The poet phones and apologizes. He explains he’d been in a bad place when he stopped responding. Hours pass. Maybe four, maybe five...something excessive like that. He eventually ends the conversation because I don’t have the will but I spend the following days possessed by an epiphanic brightness—like how the saints describe holy ecstasies.

Days later I’m bleeding so much that I have to change my Knix every two hours. The poet is in the library. He texts he wants to visit me in my office as soon as he finishes his paper. Hours go by. I text him that I have to let Buttercup out but will be back. I drive home, change into another pair of Knix and return to the university, clutching the wall so I don’t pass out and wait, desperately alone, in my office for another three hours until he finally finishes. He appears in my office doorway. His hair is so much longer than the last time I saw him. I invite him to sit down and pretend to be expelling him. In the giggly period that follows, his face so sweet and boyish, my heart and my head are radiant beams of joyous light but my stomach is chewing on my uterus, and my eyes are all fuzzy and I have to fight off the urge to lie on the floor and sleep. Even an hour later, walking to the parking lot, I don’t want to ask him to stop and wait for me to catch my breath because maybe he’ll leave me there when all I want is to remain beside him. Being alone doesn’t scare me, I’m always alone, but something inside my body craves intimacy like a hot shower after a long shift. He hugs me goodbye. Later that night I try to touch every place he touched in a pattern—upper arms touched by lower arms, chest touched by chest, left hip on right hip, hands on back, forehead to shoulder...upper arms touched by lower arms, chest touched by chest, left hip...

He comes over to my apartment and examines my altar. I’m nervous but he isn’t creeped out. He’s lost a lot of people too. Death is in many ways what drew us to each other, even more so than class solidarity and poetry and Acadian history, though that’s a part of this as well. He says he’s thought about making his own altar but he doesn’t know where to start. I show him my Chani Nicholas astrology app and explain how I choose the cloth, the offerings, the incense each week. I elaborate that in many ways what I’m doing had nothing to do with astrology. Astrology is just the vessel, the language for that which is beyond language. He nods and seems to understand.

The plan is to go to the bar. Instead, he suggests, we could stay in and take MDMA.

Shortly thereafter we’re in my bed crying and saying I love you for the first time.

I can’t stop kissing his hands, his fingers, caressing his belly. The electricity that runs through all living things move from his fingertips to mine and back again, except it doesn’t feel regular or matter-of-fact at all. It’s extraordinary. Extraordinary, like moving out of province because of a bad feeling or, also, extraordinary like how the moment my life fell apart was exactly when Pluto changed signs and was sitting directly on my ascendant. What I feel expands far beyond the dull thud of the pulse choreographing his bloodstream, beyond the facts of his living body.

I am on drugs.

His touch is amplified the way the night is amplified for teenagers climbing out of bedroom windows in search of their first kiss. I don’t want to have sex with him. I want to eat him—ALL OF HIM. As in I want to give him one of those Alice in Wonderland pills and shrink him small enough to fit in my mouth.

“Julie I’m seeing someone.” This is said just like that. There are roses all around the room. I told Lucy they were for my witchcraft but they were also for this poet. As if anyone needs two bouquets of roses for a single altar, I was lying to both myself and Lucy.

The poet says that he’s more interested in this other woman than me. That they’re weird in the same way.

“I didn’t know you had a girlfriend.” I say.

“She’s not my girlfriend. It’s just, things were getting pretty hot and heavy so I figure I should say something.”

“I thought you were alone and depressed like me but this whole time you were dating around?”

“I wasn’t dating around. I went on a few dates.”

Still on drugs, I say “I can tell this is bad but I can’t feel it yet. Only love.”

I ask if I can kiss him again.

He sits up and announces he has to leave.

Then he takes off in his car.

My apartment is so quiet. The drugs sputter, stop, and, as if they were the engine on an airplane, my mind plummets into an oceanic darkness.

I post to my Close Friends-Only Instagram stories and writers from across the country form what I can only describe as the Canada Reads of suicide prevention.

Venus retrogrades.

It’s crucial I leave Fredericton as soon as possible or I’m going to kill myself.

An epic poem I wrote about the Niagara Falls is accepted at a conference at McGill University but that’s a month away. There’s one red tag vacation deal available for reading week. Within days I’m at a resort in the Dominican Republic. I quit smoking the day I left, recognizing my bond with the gas station convenience store cashier as illusory and even dangerous if I don’t figure a way to break free of my fantasy world. Also, I have a tumor in my uterus.

My vision for the trip was a place to reset my nervous system but the resort is more of a Spring Break vibe with Girls Just Want to Have Fun blasting on repeat. I find myself taking a chair and lugging it down the beach to a quiet area outside the resort limits. Here is where I realize how unwell I am. I am alone, again. The university is an ocean away. Nothing calls out to me but the rhythmic shush of the waves. Here, with nothing to distract my focus, the pain of my anxiety glares: a needling series of shocks ringing from my fingers to my elbows, my ankles to my knees and my stomach to my chest. When I finally meditate the pain into submission is when the cumulative grief pours in—one after another my dead, their faces, a memory so vivid and immediate it was almost as if I could call out their name and they would answer. As soon as one left, another person would emerge...with an apple, on a bicycle, sharpening a pencil in our senior kindergarten classroom.

This repeats.

Back in the hotel room, I put my pillow over my head to drown out the sound of Cindy Lauper. I’m crying. I force myself to go to the beach again—swim and then lie in the sunshine, guessing it will help but only if I make myself. One day, a woman I do not know positions her chair behind me on the outskirts. At first, I am confused why she’s there but then she takes her bathing suit off. Her tits are amazing. I know I shouldn’t be looking but I can’t stop, they’re phenomenal: oily and tanned, somehow both perky and sloppy, spectacular. I feel empowered and take off my bathing suit as well.

I don’t think she notices me until the following evening when I go downstairs for a night cap and she introduces herself to me as Emma from Germany, says she noticed me on the beach and touches my arm when she says this. Now that she’s so close to my face, I can see that her face is as beautiful as her tits. She invites me to join her and her bald German friend, Thorsten, for drinks. My response is maybe but I just need to go walk on the beach.

Down by the water everything is dark. The place on my arm that has been touched by Emma is humming. I return to her as if pulled by an invisible string, as if she’s a singing siren and by 3 am we’re naked in the ocean naming our traumas like they’re ice cream flavours. I think she’s some kind of gorgeous nymphomaniac because when we were at the club she hopped on the table and made love to the lights, then we were with these drips from Mississauga who were goo-gooing over her as she repeated “I like a dick in my pussy, a dick in my mouth, a dick in my ass—one dick everywhere! I like a dick in my pussy, a dick in my mouth...”

The men are gone now. Emma and I are alone together in the water. She tells me that one day last year she started bleeding and then found out there’s a less than 5% chance she can ever get pregnant. Ending up here is a part of that journey. In less than 6 months she’s been to this resort twice. All of her vacation days are gone. It’s almost her 33^rd birthday. She’s at peace with the death of the dream-baby she’s escorted since girlhood. She tells me I’m beautiful but she’s not interested in women. I tell her that watching her dance on the table, the way she seemed to understand her body in relation to the light, how others responded to her movements, I was certain she was supposed to be some kind of conduit for connection between people. She looks to me just like an angel of kindness. We huddle together on the beach. I’m cold and remember I haven’t any clothes on. I tell her nobody has held me like this for a long time. I explain to her the weirdness of not being touched, of being so alone. She doesn’t let me go then.

The next evening is my last. She spots me in line for dinner and insists we sit together. I tell her about the poet and wanting to kill myself. She tells me about her 20-year-old lover who can have sex for seven hours and also about her suicide attempts. We laugh over dinner. I add her to Instagram. We won’t see each other again but sometimes I watch her Instagram stories with gratitude. Returning to Canada I feel transformed.

Shortly thereafter I’m in Montreal where I’m staying at a nice hotel with a rooftop pool and presenting two suites of my multilingual long poem about the Niagara Falls[ii] at McGill, my alma mater. While there I see Jay and Tara, and my friend Phil, and my other friend Andrew, and reunite with Derek who was in the workshop when I started my still unfinished novel Little Girls.

So many people touch me. Platonically. We swim together in bathing suits. We hug drunkenly in the streets, repeating Omg I love you. My reading goes well. People are kind about it. I shake so many hands, so many hands in outfits. It matters now more than ever.

I wander around McGill with my friends (a different) Jay and Theresa playing remember remember as if no time has passed and indeed it feels as if it hasn’t. Except they have a ten-year-old now. A pending eviction and chemotherapy are on their mind. Time is finite and easily lost to grief. In my favourite photo of Theresa, she’s smoking with her chemo bag on a hill. I might’ve made that up but I don’t think so. I really do hope it exists beyond my imagination.

Returning to Fredericton, my attitude feels renewed. I want to enter into the world open to human connection and to actively seek connection for myself when Venus goes direct and there’s a beautiful pink full moon in Libra, April 12, two months after the MDMA-induced nightmare tornado.

There’re two things I decide to do:

1) I download Tinder.

2) I write the poet I kissed for less than one-minute last summer a long, handwritten letter.

Through Tinder I match with Taylor who is skinny, has dark brown hair and eyes, and is covered in tattoo doodles like Pete Davidson. He’s 27-years-old, 8 years younger than me, and just beneath 6’0, an entire foot taller than me.

In one photo, he’s wearing a black toque and the sunlight from an offscreen window is softening his face. I LOVE YOU MOM is stick-and-poked on his forearm. In another photo, he’s making a phone call from an old phone booth abandoned in a field. In a polaroid, he’s giving the peace sign in a NASA shirt. I don’t know who took the photo of him with Santa at the Regent Mall but I think I was actually there when the photo was taken. I remember seeing him and wishing I was brave enough to go alone and take a photo with Santa. To Taylor, I would’ve appeared as a woman in yoga pants, no makeup, trying to speed walk through the corridor without being accidentally touched because it feels too much—a smoldering outlet in need of repair.

Taylor’s texts are a single, long, stream-of-consciousness sentence.

But God I feel that I keep wondering if there will be anytime between freezing and burning up for an actual spring time but chances of that seem to be getting worse and worse

music shows, walks, constantly obscure little treats hunting lol idk I just fill time with a lot of random things I enjoy knowing if I choose to try something new I at least have a good chance of being g able to here lol

He explains he has dysgraphia but says he reads a lot. Mostly class warfare stuff—Tinder suspends my profile to verify my image after he tells me he’s reading The Selected Works of Karl Marx. This gives both of us pause.

He texts me from his job at the HVAC warehouse downtown. I ask if we can go on a date for the full pink moon in Libra. He’s enthusiastic. Taylor doesn’t drink so we decide to look at the moon with hot chocolate and call it a hot-choco-walk.

In the days leading up to my date with Taylor, I write a perfect letter to the poet. It isn’t to win him back or make up or anything. It’s to own my own version of the story and alleviate the parts where I think I was at fault. For example, he’s not responsible for me wanting to kill myself.

Also, I want to validate that our time together was meaningful—not because it was romantic but because we found each other while trying to survive the same thing. It’s the place Kathy was trying to protect me from through discounts and Judith was trying to assist me out of through unsolicited advice. How did I look to them during that time? Lonely? Alone? What could they tell just by looking at me?

I haven’t smoked in a month but need to refill on gas. It’s the day before my date with Taylor.

As I approach the convenience store doors, I wonder if entering will feel the same or different, now that winter has melted and my desperation has been somewhat alleviated.

The bell dings. The cashier with the goatee is smiling behind the counter. The other cashier glances to him and then me and then back to him knowingly. Except a woman calls out and I turn around, the door closing.

“Look,” she says.

There’s a yellow CAUTION WET FLOOR sign.

I examine the stick figure graphic of the man slipping.

“No,” says the woman who is some kind of business blond, like Romy and Michelle on the way to their high school reunion, “look.”

I crouch down and peer under the sign.

There’s a pigeon.

“I think it’s injured.” The woman says to me as if I can save it.

I look closer. The pigeon is brown. I don’t see anything wrong with it. Its expression is serene but stupid, pigeonly.

The woman bends sideways, “Yeah. See? She’s bleeding out.”

I blink and realize, from somewhere beneath her bottom feathers, there’s a stream of blood pouring out, down the sidewalk, almost biblically.

It hurts to see the bird like that. I shift back to her face. She’s a regal brown pigeon with a maternal air.

Then I know that it’s the man, the cashier, in the convenience store who put the sign there to protect her. I am so moved I can’t bring myself to enter the convenience store for fear of crying in front of them. I look around: a red car honks and almost collides with a blue truck. What am I doing here? What am I trying to return to? The wind is cold against my cheeks. Being alive is the only reason I feel this, I remind myself.

I pay for my gas by card so there’s no change for the cashier to touch. I don’t ask him about the pigeon. The ecstatic glow that had permeated the convenience store all year is gone now. He’s just a kind man in a goatee working a shift at a job. I’m just a woman who comes in sometimes.

Whatever I felt before has since transmogrified into a generalized admiration for what he did for the bird. Also, a gratitude that his kind spirit exists in this world. Perhaps what I’d sensed in him through our short interactions wasn’t entirely imagined, a biproduct of my madness, and in fact was a correct impression I’d gathered through my heightened sensitivity. The same as I had an impression the energy was shifting in Niagara or that I needed to leave Fredericton.

When I return to my car, I see a text from Taylor.

I wait to respond.

Dating in my 20s was often terrible. So many false starts.

I spend the day trying to talk myself out of meeting him.

If my heart breaks this time will it kill me? You only get one Canada Reads of suicide prevention a year. When it becomes an everyday thing, everyone bounces. I don’t want to lose friends or scare those I care about. Is it irresponsible to put myself in this situation considering how unwell I’ve been? If something goes wrong, will everyone I love leave me?

I do a ritual for the full pink moon in Libra—lighting rose incense for Venus, carving the sign for Venus into a candle before covering it in lavender essential oil and leaving it in the woods in my backyard where it can bask in the moonlight.

It’s raining the day of our hot-choco-walk. We decide to meet at an upscale pub for mocktails. Taylor’s there before me and runs out to meet me. He does that weird thing where he almost shakes my hand, almost hugs me, but isn’t sure. I hug him I think. We aren’t at a conference.

I can immediately tell something is wrong with him. He’s so nervous he puts too much of his weight on the table and almost spills his mocktail. I order a hot chocolate with whip cream and pull my own jar of sprinkles out of my purse. He thinks this is so cute. I had a feeling he would and that’s why I planned it like that hours earlier when I was stalking his public Facebook profile where he posted a photo from Scott Pilgrim vs. The World with the comment “This could be us if I weren’t horribly mentally ill.”

The rain stops. He pays the tab. We walk around Fredericton talking. His energy moves from his head and he seems more ill at ease as we navigate the walking bridge across the Saint John River. The rain starts again but we keep on walking. The pink moon is nowhere in sight but we both trust it’s there. He’s funny. Smartish but a little stupid. An idiot-savant, my favourite kind of person. Our backgrounds are similar but I didn’t give up on school and he makes more money than me.

I say goodbye to him when we reach my car and can feel him wanting to kiss me. I hug him instead. Then I watch him walking home beneath the lamplight in the pouring rain and pull over. He hops in and I drive him home. He wants to kiss me. I let him give me an awkward side-hug over the center console

The next day, I’m buzzing. There’s only a month left in Fredericton and I feel this urge to heal myself before I leave. Break the spell of my self-imposed isolation.

I text Taylor that I’m learning to read tarot but have never given a reading. Shortly thereafter, we’re seated on the floor beside a Himalayan salt lamp with a Celtic cross between us. He takes off his sweater. He’s wearing an oversized light pink t-shirt with a picture of Barbie and I’m torn between looking into his eyes or Barbie’s.

His eyes are almost black. The theme of his reading is balance vs. adventure.

“Do you want to know what I asked?” He asks.

I nod yes.

“I asked about my mental health.”

I comment on the themes of the cards and how they might pertain.

“I have borderline personality disorder,” he confesses. The awkwardness of our first date has left him. “Does that scare you?”

His gaze is direct, his posture straight. He possesses a confidence he hasn’t revealed to me until now.

“No.” I say.

He leans across the cards and kisses me. With only the Himalayan salt lamp everything is pink like candy. I’m aware Barbie is between us. The Celtic cross is between us with pictures of swords and cups and queens and wands. It feels silly and light, brilliant though—like a disco ball.

The whole room is pink now and then we become a flume of pink, a rosy aura the shape of him on top of me.

The next day I’ll text him about how I’ve only had sex with one man in my thirties and it ended with my bookshelf was smashed, my books under a tarp in the yard. I’ll detail the terms and conditions of my sudden and dramatic expulsion, how weird and alone I’ve been, explaining that now when anyone touches me it feels like fire. That I feel like a virgin.

He says

I’m sorry you had to be put through that L . That’s it’s own version of hell and I hope you never have to evee go through anything even comparable to all of that ever again. I’m not gonna try to push you into anything at all it’s very important to me that any interaction is based off you feeling comfortable and like it’s okay

Also of course like I said I wouldn’t try to rush/make you do anything and we really dont have to like im enjoying just getting to know you and talking to Hou

Lingering in the back of my mind is my fear he’ll do something so fucked up it sends me into a mental health spiral that will put too much pressure on the people I love to help me. I think of myself as the lightning rod for chaos. What is Taylor going to do to me? To what extent do I invite this chaos into my life? How am I responsible? Is borderline personality disorder a “deal breaker” for me? Isn’t it usually the people who lack the self-awareness required to seek out a diagnosis and rehabilitation who end up causing pain? Is it hypocritical for me to think this way?

One day, my life might become too much. Then I will be permanently alone. Not alone as in how I’ve been in Fredericton—closed off to new experiences because I’m grieving and physically ill—alone as in no one to text, no one to phone, no one to email.

Alone as in known only to myself.

An aloneness I deserve, that has been earned through my decisions.

Taylor comes over and the only spot big enough to play Scrabble is on the floor in front of my altar. He studies the faces but doesn’t ask for stories. It seems comforting to him that I built this.

There is a tuft of white in the middle of Taylor’s dark brown hair. I explain it’s a trauma mark. He says that makes sense because his ex-girlfriend dyed his hair blue and then killed herself. When the blue grew out, the spark of grey mysteriously appeared. There’s a tattoo on his hand that I say could be the two of swords. It’s the railroad nails they pulled from his best friend’s body.

I have a white streak that matches Taylor. He beams with excitement when I show him. It appeared the week my grandmother died, I lost a pregnancy, testified against my rapist and was dumped the night before I was cross examined. It was a period in my late 20s where I lost control of my reactions. I tell Taylor that people seemed magnetically drawn to poking me, starting fights, raising concerns, over-analyzing me during this time. My inability to show them grace—especially if I lashed out and told them to fuck off—is still held against me. It isn’t that I believe my mental health is an excuse to hurt others. It’s that the impetus to find something to leverage against me was already present in those who still to this day reduce me to who I was during that very narrow period of tremendous suffering.

This year my white streak became more pronounced. I feared going back to where I was in my late 20s. I could destroy what little I’ve rebuilt since then or validate the bad opinions of my enemies. So, I isolated. I disappeared. I hushed myself.

I name the deaths to Taylor very briefly. There’s more for both of us to say but we don’t say it. I feel closer to him now.

The university is insulated by a wealth that demands you quiet any details of your life that exist outside of its rigid, moneyed parameters. Writing communities are populated by those who prioritize the image of an artist rather than art itself. Where I’m from, I’m the kind of woman who needs to be taught a lesson the old-fashioned way. I don’t know the last time I felt free of the weight of obligatory performativity.

Is this why I chose to be alone?

Then I realize that in the last week with Taylor I haven’t felt that heaviness at all. If anything, I’ve felt light, like a feather lifted from a pillow and blown through an open window. He has this way of seeming like a total dork and then strikingly handsome. There’s nothing for him to hold over my head. I sense no malice in him, no desire to manipulate or torment. Not that he’s goofy. Maybe slightly. But just as quickly it shifts and I’m transfixed.

His beauty is almost disturbing: the stiffness in his jaw, how the point of his nose looks like it’s perfectly stenciled from the dip in in his lips, the intensity of his brown eyes radiating from the darkness on the other side of the lamplight.

He kisses me in front of the altar and becomes the second person I have sex with in my thirties.

The next day the poet texts me to say I have nothing to apologize for. He’s sorry he handled things so weirdly. Is he still important to me? The time and place of him feels farther away. Not unimportant. More like a downgraded hurricane. I still care about him but he won’t destroy me.

Taylor’s never seen the Salvador Dalí. The hidden treasure of New Brunswick. He takes the day off and we go to The Beaverbook Art Gallery. There are erotic sparks between us as we look at landscape paintings of Canada in 1800s winter. When he sees an opportunity, he hugs me from behind. We hold hands in various finger formations, wrap our arms around each other’s’ waists and take turns stealing kisses. A lot of our comments are not about the art itself but who would be who within the painting. The frazzled man in a suit is Taylor after a promotion he didn’t want. The bottom-heavy nude is me, obviously. Freud’s painting of the woman freaking out in bed while the man watches her from outside is us, either of us could be both the man and the woman.

Before we reach the Salvador Dalí exhibit, which is at the far corner of the gallery, in its own special area that’s easy to miss, I warn Taylor: “This is one of the most beautiful works of art I’ve ever seen in my life. It should be surrounded by people but it’s not because it’s in Fredericton and Fredericton came into it by accident and has fought to keep it, refusing to lend it out anywhere lest it be stolen somehow.”

Taylor thinks I’m being cute and interprets my little speech as an invitation to start making out with me.

“No, no, no,” I say and he stops but he’s smirking so adorably, “listen to me.”

“Okay.” He’s kind of giggling, running his fingers up and down my face, blinking at me flirtatiously.

“Look, you can only see this for the first time one time. I need you to take it seriously.”

“I am.”

“Promise?”

He squints and cocks his head, confused. “Promise...”

“Okay,” I take his hand, “deep breath.”

We both breathe deeply.

I ask “Are you ready?”

“I’m ready.”

I lead him around the corner.

On a plain white wall beneath basic yellow lighting is a 13 foot painting of Saint James on a horse reaching out to touch a crucified savior, a jasmine flower bursting out of the middle of the canvas, angels floating from the sky which seems to merge with a bay but the water appears to be casting shadows across the landscape so it’s unclear where the sky begins or ends and in the corner a woman is draped in a heavy white sheet like the Saint James just startled her from a bed and, in an unhinged state, she has reluctantly wandered into the painting to see what the commotion is about and, beyond all this, Saint James, Christ, the woman draped in sheets...are surrounded by an arching dome of metal with translucent windows so the structure itself seems a part of the landscape. This is Salvador Dalí’s Santiago El Grande.

Taylor and I are small in its presence.

This humbles us to perfect quiet.

Silence.

“Dear Christ,” he eventually says, followed by “Oh my God.”

It is a painting that overwhelms.

The shades of blue alone are assaulting.

“Will you take a photo of me in front of it?” Asks Taylor, an idiot savant, handing me his phone.

After taking his photo, I explain that the way you’re supposed to look at that painting, I think, is to lie on the floor. A professor said this to me once.

We lay on the floor together holding hands.

A deep, masculine voice booms from behind us. “Don’t do that.”

Taylor and I drop our hands and pull away from each other as if we’ve been caught by a parent.

As I stand, I apologize to the shadowy figure in the doorway and explain my teacher told me to look at the painting that way. Then I remember I’m 35.

The man steps into the gallery where we can see him more clearly. He is short, plump and grey. He’s dressed extremely fancy, like a butler in a Disney film. His stunning vest has elaborate silver embroidery that seems both artistic and historical, resembling the outlines of constellations. From inside his suit jacket, a gold chain leads to a pocket in the vest. I’m convinced it’s a pocket watch. The man seems not of this earth but a surrealist creation, an apparition perhaps, who has wandered here on behalf of Dalí himself.[iii]

“If you will come with me...” The man escorts us to the painting with the artful wave of an uplifted palm.

Taylor and I follow him like loyal children.

“To experience the full effect of the artistry of Salvador Dalí, you must lie,” says the strange old man, “with your feet touching the wall.”

Taylor and I sit down side-by-side, then lie on our backs, the floor cold beneath us, the Santiago El Grande above.

The old man begins his monologue. “In 1957, the world first witnessed Salvador Dalí’s Santiago El Grande...” He directs our gaze towards the Christ on the cross, beams of light circling Christ’s devastating posture, and then outward, listing the various elements of the painting in excruciating detail.

“You will notice,” he says, “the way Christ seems to be floating towards you.”

Except, we’re way beyond that. The arches of the dome are all around us now, as if we’re included in its embrace. The foot of the saint hangs over us and seems to wag. The horse could topple onto me on any moment. The sky is my sky. It is full of dancing angels. Christ, God incarnate, is rising and Saint James is touching him. Blessed are we in this moment. We aren’t even holding hands. Something deeper than touch unites us.

Santiago El Grande by Salvador Dalí

We’re both shaken as we leave the museum. Few words are exchanged as I drive to Taylor’s place.

To reach Taylor’s apartment, we navigate a ramshackle stairwell. Inside is a small, windowless one bedroom with a large television, videogame paraphernalia, and white walls covered in posters of rappers and hardcore bands.

His entire bedroom is a bed. He touches me. Then I am only touch. Colour becomes a feeling.

We make ourselves as close as possible. The sun sets unnoticed.

The next morning, my friend Viv in Toronto texts, “Wait. When you said 4.5 hours did you mean SEX?!?!”

“Yes.” I respond. “He spit in my mouth.”

“That’s gross,” Viv answers, “but I think I get it.”

I feel cured.

This empowers me to reach out to the appropriate people and organizations in Blue Mountains to introduce myself as an author, editor and professor moving to Thornbury for the summer. I suggest events and classes I could facilitate with my skillset. I want to be disciplined about creating possibilities for connection in this new community and that starts by first contributing to the community I want to be a part of. My spirit is a hummingbird trying to kiss every flower. The organizations respond enthusiastically—I have a zoom meeting full of smiling new faces belonging to my future home. These new friends and colleagues send me an official invitation for a residency so that we can work together.

I had been so absolutist in my notion that I was too fucked up to be around others that I forgot that many people are also kind. The whole world isn’t waiting with a dagger. If I hold onto that fear then I won’t ever truly be a participant in life. I must convince myself to believe in the good.

I’m driving through Mactaquac with Taylor, we play Fast Car and shout all the words three times in a row as we swirl around corners and then stop across from a dam to watch the stars through my car’s skylight. He plays a game where he must always be touching me: I have to let go his hand to grab the wheel so he puts his hand on my thigh, he touches my cheek with the back of his knuckles, he moves my hair out of my face and then he returns to my hand and kisses it. The electricity that moves through all living things seems to me a perfect summation of God’s miracles. Nothing else matters—not the drama at the university, the devastation of Niagara, the pressure of being a writer, the uncertainty of the future, the altar in need of offerings—nothing matters but now.

The week I start packing up my apartment, Taylor gets sick. It’s convenient for me because there’s much to do before Buttercup and I drive across the country. Although, as I take inventory, I realize there actually isn’t much to pack. Sorting through what to donate and what to keep, I’m reminded that when I moved here I lied to myself that I would be going back home soon. As a result, I never truly moved into my apartment in Fredericton. It was always temporary like an Airbnb. Other than books and clothing, notes and pens, I’ve acquired nothing over the last two years. Days before I’m leaving, it seems there’s actually less in my car than when I first arrived in Fredericton.

It’s become apparent Taylor’s illness isn’t just physical. There was a mix up with his medication. He had a meeting with his therapist. I don’t want to put pressure on him but then he ghosts entirely. My phone is overcome by a sullen silence. I worry about him and feel far away from the world again.

Except it’s different. I’m leaving. I’ve summoned a new community that’s waiting for me. There’s a beautiful home, a summer of reading amongst the lilac trees on the Georgian Bay where I will become a smiling freckle. I hold this image in my head and promise myself not to let go.

This is when I seek out Ambrose and Rebecca, the friends who I avoided because, in the state I was in, I could only take from them and I didn’t want to take too much.

It’s my final day in Fredericton. I drive to Rebecca’s house and bring her a teapot and teacups and a card with a letter expressing my gratitude to her which is so immense it could never be fully expressed. She gives me a present that she’s had for me since the winter solstice. Rebecca’s partner Dan brings us tea and I talk about Taylor whom we call The Emo Kid From the HVAC Warehouse.

The sky looks like it wants to rain but won’t, as if it’s trying to hold in tears.

“The sky looks like a meeting with my male colleagues,” I say.

“The sky looks like trying to explain CanLit to a therapist,” says Rebecca.

“The sky looks like when I opened my SSHRC results,” I say.

“The sky looks like trying to find a job after my PhD,” says Rebecca.

“The sky looks like this one time when I was on the bus and I had to ask the bus driver to let me off even though there was no stop because there were so many people around and I could feel a big one comin’ and I needed to let it out without people looking at me and the bus driver could see it too so he let me off at the Westmoreland Bridge,” says Dan.

The sky does cry but only a little as I’m driving home. I continue the pattern in my head: the sky looks like Kathy touching my hand, the sky looks like Emma holding me in the ocean, the sky looks like the convenience store after seeing the pigeon, the sky looks like checking my phone for Taylor.

Ambrose stops by with his girlfriend Nova who I never met until today. They bring me soup. We sit in the backyard and now I recognize how many possible friendships were lost to my isolation and am unclear if my decision was the right one. There is no answer.

The last thing to pack up is my altar.

Tonight there’s a full moon in Scorpio. Astrologer Chani Nicholas says this full moon in Scorpio is even louder than most because it’s sitting in opposition to Uranus and will bring on massive, big, huge, cathartic emotions that push hidden feelings to the surface. She says this full moon is in the realm of horror. Whatever seems like a horror to us personally, that’s what the full moon in Scorpio will present. It will reveal to us what we’re afraid to look at, what we’re afraid to feel, what we’re afraid to process. That’s part of Scorpio’s magic; it gives us what we’re resisting.

On my Chani Nicholas app, there’s a ritual for the full moon in Scorpio.

After I perform the ritual, covering my candle in lavender oil and leave it in the woods in my backyard to bathe in the moonlight, I notice the other candle in the box with the Venus symbol carved in its side. It’s the candle from my ritual for the full pink moon in Libra, the night of my first date with Taylor.

I move it to the centre, light it, and then light the rose incense for Venus, shaking off the invisible critic telling me this is insane. As I open my phone and look at my message history with Taylor, my breath is suspended.

Beneath his name, there are three unanswered messages from me. From where I’m sitting, I cannot see the full moon in Scorpio but I trust that it’s there.

I type:

Taylor,

Really not sure why you ghosted me. If it’s your own stuff then I’m sorry for your pain & wish you the best in this lifetime.

If it’s because you have told yourself that how I feel doesn’t matter then you’re wrong. Everyone is significant. My feelings matter. My pain matters. If you hurt someone in Fredericton, it’s just as significant as someone in Ontario, just as meaningful if it’s someone on the other side of the world.

Truthfully, even if you’re unwell, the least you could have done is send a message so I’m not sitting around feeling awful about the universe. Maybe I thought we were friends or would stay friends. Now I’m just confused.

I guess I’m not sure where to place you, how to think of you, which emotions to ascribe to what passed between us.

What goes through men’s brains when they decide if they’ve slept with someone then they’re no longer deserving of basic human decency? How do you square the way you treat women interpersonally with your activism & politics?

Not sure what else to say except I wish the world was different & you were kinder.

-Julie

Send.

In front of the altar, I watch the light from the candle shimmy shadows across the faces of my dead. The pictures reminding me that they’re now permanently contained in the past. 8-years-old in a swimming pool. 12-years-old tossing a bike into a field. 15-years-old at the youth centre. 19-years-old beside a bonfire on a beach.

My phone dings me into the present.

It’s Taylor.

Truthfully I don’t square those things well. I don’t like way I act 50 % of the time. Ghosting you wasn’t my intention. I have no idea how to face things and give a goodbye when someone is leaving / somthing ending and I’m sorry it’s cowardly of me and not fair to you as a person. I genuinely don’t want to cause any pain but im not good enough yet to avoid it. I’m aware that I also have a lot of flaws with interacting in general and I’m sorry for those ones. I’m very sorry that I couldn’t just do things like a person should and I chose to be a coward about it because cleary that caused even more pain. I do value all thr time we spent together please don’t think that it was just time to me because that’s not true and that devalues you and all the moments of it. I domt think I deserved it with how terrible I just left things to feel but still thank you. I will treasure the salt lamp and it will make me think about time we spent when I see it. I don’t say any of this for forgiveness cause u have eveey right to dispise me for way I acted it out of my own inability and not anything you did or about you

We go back and forth. He’s apologizing and apologizing. I tell him know what it’s like to feel crazy and hide from people. As I fall asleep, I think about the imaginary rope bridge between Ontario and New Brunswick, Niagara and Fredericton. In my dreams, again and again it snaps and disappears into the chasm and I must repeatedly confront the abruptness of my expulsion, the many vital pillars of my existence collapsing without notice or apology.

Somewhere in between sleep and awake, I tell Taylor that I just want to hug him goodbye.

At 6 am, Taylor texts yes, of course.

Except, he has to get to work.

I say I’ll drive him to work, throw on my hoodie and yoga pants, and speed across Fredericton.

When I pull up outside Taylor’s place, he’s wearing a matching black hoodie and vaping beside the front door. I get out even though I know he’s already late. He walks towards me, picking up to a slight jog as he gets closer and wraps his arms around me for a long time. In this moment, because he’s so much taller, my face is fully in his chest, his heart beating into my mouth as my heart beats into his stomach.

The path I’m taking back to Ontario isn’t the same bridge as before. I am comforted by Taylor’s presence, that he could come through for me and say goodbye in my final hours. By virtue of him being here, I know the past is not doomed to repetition. I can build a new bridge.

In my car, maybe out of nervousness, he tells me about how the stretcher in his ear came out and started bleeding and rambles on about this incident to cool down the intensity. Except it can’t be assuaged entirely: he holds my hand and then touches my leg and then holds my hand, again playing the game where we must always be touching.

It occurs to me that despite having never visited an HVAC warehouse, I know exactly what it is. We pull into the parking lot beside the red brick building and nothing is surprising.

“Are you going to miss me?” I ask.

“Of course.” He says.

“Will I ever see you again?”

“Are you gonna come back to New Brunswick?”

“Fuck no. Not if I can help it.”

“Then I don’t know.”

There’s nothing remarkable in front of us but we both look ahead quietly, our fingers interlaced. We both know we have to say goodbye and the heaviness of it renders us mute. All around the parking lot, men are leaving their cars and entering the warehouse. Marking where I cannot enter, the warehouse walls are an ethereal gate between my world and Taylor’s, distinguishing one dimension where we’re together and another where we are not.

He hugs me over the center console, reminding me of our awkward first date, except this time we do kiss. He says goodbye, opens the door, let’s go of my hand, closes the door. I am disturbed by the kinetic drawl of my longing as I watch him saunter towards the warehouse and disappear amongst the men.

When I get home, I rescue the Scorpio full moon candle from the woods in my backyard and place it in a box beside the libra full moon candle. I don’t want to put the cork board mosaic of my dead in a garbage bag. It’s to protect them, I have to tell myself, and I do it anyway.

There are two stops I need to make before I leave Fredericton.

1) Go to Sobeys to get road snacks.

2) Fill up at the gas station convenience store.

I walk through the familiar automatic doors of the Sobeys and the abrasive lights pummel my eyeballs. There are so many sounds. Have fruit always been this loud? I just want some jerky and Red Bull, a bag of chips, maybe something sweet. Except then...I see her. She’s faraway but, on the other end of the store, I watch her train a new cashier, she’s taking all of the items out of one bag and trying to cram them into another so they fit in a single vessel.

It’s Kathy.

Her face seems not of this earth; gaunt, hollow, evil even. Nothing has changed. Her copper hair is the same length and shape, her grey roots haven’t even progressed but watching her now, carrying on as she always has, an unsettling superstition runs through me.

All around me is regular: an old woman and her husband touching red onions, a mother tells her child to return a chocolate bar, a man in a baseball cap examines bouquets of flowers. Yet, I can’t bring myself to go even one step deeper into the grocery store, nearer to Kathy whose bony fingers raise a container of raisins to meet her maniacal gaze, her lips protracting into her slimy gum revealing the oblong tops of her teeth along with a single silver filling as she searches for a barcode with her eyes squinting into two vicious slits. It is as if she has the power to pull me backwards into some dark tarry substance that will suck me downwards into a sticky, black tomb.

I am disturbed. Maybe by Kathy. Maybe by myself.

As soon as the next person enters, I run out of the Sobeys through the entrance-only doors. I run from Kathy, Fredericton, and who I was, who I became, while I lived there. The gas station is just up ahead. I drive right past it. It was only a few days ago that I last filled up and I need to get the fuck out of this place.

Somewhere around Edmundston my car starts acting funny. My gas gauge is broken but I know the problem’s my empty tank. I take the next exit and enter a small Acadian town called Rivière-Vert. Typing “gas station near me” into my phone, I almost drive off the road and can feel the pedal becoming less responsive. The station is close but the GPS keeps directing me in circles through farmlands.

This has happened before, I know I only have minutes so I follow signs of civilization until I come onto a street with little houses and Acadian flags. The car putters and gives up across from a house where men are fixing the roof. I fucking hate roofers. They’re the worst people on earth. Sure enough, as I approach the men they act as if I’m not there. I stand around for fifteen minutes but they don’t acknowledge me. I return to the car.

Recognizing I’m at God’s mercy, I clasp the Joan of Arc medallion fastened to my necklace, close my eyes tight and summon whatever is left of my childhood Catholicism.

“Please God, let me leave New Brunswick.”

When I open my eyes I see it, as if pulled from Salvador Dalí’s Santiago El Grande, beyond the rooftops, atop a hill, the highest point of the town, the sun’s beams circling all around like brilliant fiery petals on a burning windmill: a crucifix.

I take my laptop bag and, with Buttercup by my side, wander towards the cross, climbing the hill, until we reach the church. For a town so small, the church is quite large but no one is inside.

Across the street is a Catholic assisted living facility. I knock on the window where an elderly woman is knitting. I can only assume what an event it must’ve been for an old lady living in a town of 700, to have a random anglophone in a tie-dye shirt with a small, concerned-looking pug knock on her window. Still, she buzzes me in.

Through a lively mixture of French, English and charades, I successfully communicate what’s occurred. She disappears into a corridor.

Alone, I realize my escape is entirely up to fate. There’s a picture of a priest in the 70s on the wall. He has sideburns and dark sunglasses. All I can do is trust what life has to teach me.

A thin man in a baseball cap comes out. He’s in either his late 60s or early 70s; healthy for his age with only a few sunspots and wrinkles.

In a friendly Acadian-French accent, he introduces himself as Clarence Thibodeau. He says he’ll drive me to the gas station and he’s grateful for the opportunity to speak English. I immediately know his type, there’s a lot like him amongst the older generations in Niagara—men who pride themselves on being useful and are grateful for the opportunity to be of use. Normally I would be uncomfortable getting into a stranger’s vehicle but I’m not at all intimidated by him and, besides, I have no choice.

Driving to the gas station, he tells me his life story. He’s been married for 42 years and has one child whom he left his farm (a cow, several horses, sheep, chickens and one brand new piglet). He used to work on transport trucks. His wife worked in a t-shirt factory but it hurt her back too much being on her feet all day so she took a different job helping elderly people.

At the gas station, Clarence is familiar with the cashiers and explains the situation. The women giggle at Buttercup who’s squishy-pug-face adds an extra layer of absurdity to our situation.

Clarence has numerous siphons in his truck because of course. He siphons the jug of gas into my car.

The first time I turn the key the engine fails.

I yell “Fuuuuuuck” forgetting Clarence’s Catholicism.

“No,” He says, “I tot it would do dat first time. Give it anudder try.”

The second time she goes.

The jug could only hold five dollars worth of fuel so it’s imperative I fill up immediately. Clarence says I can drive behind him and he’ll show me how to get to the gas station to avoid the GPS sending me in circles again. I follow his truck as if it were a star leading me to a saviour.

Once there, I shake his hand through the window. There’s such a sweetness in his eyes. I want to say kindness is rare but I’m changing. Ever since I started opening myself back up to connection, I’ve been surrounded by kindness, often from strangers who owe me nothing and whom I could never repay. The world looks like a good place now, full of people ready to help those who are in need. Even in New Brunswick, the place I’m fleeing.

I drive for days, passing thousands of small towns with unknown backstories, thinking of how my hometown, Fonthill, must look to the outside: just another Town Hall beside a Giant Tiger. My heart is still broken but I’m not afraid. I can’t see the full moon in Scorpio but I can feel it—holding my head in her firm grip, revealing what I’m afraid to look at, showing me what I keep resisting, sucking out the poison.

When I reach Prince Edward County, I decide to skirt Toronto and instead take the long way to Thornbury, driving through woodlands, campgrounds, the beautiful and vast nothingness of Canada.

I stop in a town called Gooderham, two hours from Thornbury, because I have a feeling my gas is going to run out. The gas pumps are aged and don’t pump when I pull the lever.

Inside the gas station convenience store are two old men sitting in lawn chairs. I have this awkward tendency to indulge my own folksiness in these situations and tell them a grand tale of my escape from New Brunswick and my triumphant future in Blue Mountains. They’re amused. One of the men offers to work the pump for me.

Labour has done to his hands what poetry does to language. As he pumps my car, he explains he’s lived in Gooderham his entire 54 years, that Gooder and Ham were two guys who invented a whiskey together, got the town drunk and then the town drunkenly decided to call themselves Gooderham.

I pay and the men tell me I’m a smart girl, driven and urge me to keep going the way I’ve been going. The compliments aren’t frivolous, even though they’re plentiful. They can see I’m at a crossroads and it is as if this, too, is a kind of fuel they’re making sure I’m stocked up on so that I can keep going as far as possible. I want to kiss them but instead I shake their beautiful hands full of poetry.

I return to my car and charge onwards through the Ontario wilderness.

Hours later I start to worry I won’t make it before sunset. Then I spot it: a clearing through the trees that appears as a brilliant white light.

As I pass through, the sun warms my skin and Buttercup stands on her hind legs to peer out the window. Creamy clouds are nestled around the fertile green necks of mountains. The trees and fields are full of flower blossoms. If I were to pull over, I could reach out a hand and pick a lilac. Lake Huron’s waves lightly pat the land as if it were a crying child.

The sign for Thornbury looks so happy I swear its smiling.

I can’t see the full moon in Scorpio but I know she’s there, bringing everything to the surface, forcing me to look at what I’ve been resisting. The world is all around me and I am a part of it. I’m ready to rejoin the madness of existence. I trust what life has to teach me. I am reborn.

---

[i] If they’re out, I revert back to my old brand, Canadian Classics. For a while John Players were cheaper, maybe it’s different in Ontario, but now, in Fredericton, Canadian Classics are cheaper. I still sometimes accidentally call them Quebec Classics because I mostly smoked those when I lived in Montreal and would say with a cute affectation “There’s a poison in them that I can’t get in other cigarettes.” I stand by that.

[ii] My epic poem, titled “A Body of Rushing Water”, loosely borrows its structure from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and has more footnotes than pages of poetry—making it double as a concrete poem that is shaped like a waterfall.

[iii] I contacted the Beaverbrook Art Gallery for information on this man but they never responded. My belief is that he is a ghost or apparition and the organization is very hush hush about it for understandable reasons.

Special thanks to Tara McGowan Ross for her editorial input on this piece.