Heidi Priebe

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Pull out your teeth. Place them in a cabinet you can’t reach without a stepstool So that you cannot call her and tell her to come home. Picture your body like a giant, all the empty air that you still have left to grow into,   sit by the flowers in your neighbour’s garden, ask them for advice on how to bloom. Listen carefully. It took them a long time to break through all that dirt. Learn her new girlfriend’s name, repeat it over and over until it is no longer a secret that the knives inside your stomach are keeping, let it soften, melting into you like caramel, the mornings you’d lie stretched across her bedspread; both your bodies twisting into an offering, the higher powers feasting on your bravery, remember the depravity, the taste of her like sugar coursing into your bloodstream, overdosing until your stomachs ached Try to remember, when you see them holding hands outside your favourite cafe   that you are not the only one deserving of something so sweet. And when the time comes, pull the stepstool out from the back closet, Place your teeth back in your mouth, this fast will end when your body is ready Do not try to be ready. Try to be 10% bigger than you feel, when you wake up in the morning stretched out across your own bedsheets, alone. You do not have to be a giant. Remind yourself that it is okay to have all of this dirt still left to break through, remind yourself that it sometimes takes a very, very long time to blossom into something brand new.

There were all of these years when I was young, when I lived in my parent’s house, where I would fantasize about falling in love with someone (anyone, really. I was twelve).  

Okay, so not anyone. Normally the people I was picturing had bodies and minds but not faces that I could ever place. My fantasies never lined up perfectly with anyone I knew in real life, or even anyone I ever hoped to encounter. They were blurry, shapeless people whom I hoped would one day become clearer. 

I grew up. But they didn’t get clearer.

Instead, other people took their form. There was the boy who liked to kiss me on his couch when his parents were out of town but not so much in public, there was the other one who smiled at me shyly but never made a move. There was the first person who’s hand I ever held hands with in the school hallways, the first one I brought home to my parents, the first one I slept with, the first one I ever said, ‘I love you’ in response to. 

All of these people had faces. And bodies. And minds. Some of them reminded me of the person I’d hoped to fall in love with when I was very young and living in my parent’s house. Others reminded me of nothing at all. 

But there was this particular shade of summertime that always reminded me of the vague hope of meeting such a person. It was something quite literally in the air – a scent I can still scarcely describe – that would make me feel nostalgic for a life that hadn’t happened to me. It was pine needles, mixed with the stillness of the cool air on the lake. It was the scent of possibility, set across the backdrop of a Northern Ontario nowhere town that would never see my dreams come to life. But it was the scent of wistful maybes. A scent that would one day come mixed in with marijuana smoke, with wandering hands, with the kind of magic that is born from discovering yourself, discovering your place in the world, for the first time. 

It was the scent that infiltrated the first non-Northern-Ontario town I ever lived in. The scent that would find me in the early evening hours, curled up in bed with the first named, faced, person who I ever thought was made of pure magic. It was the scent of first love and possibility; it was the scent of beginnings and wonder. 

It was the scent I’d settle into after long days on the road, exploring strange cities in caravans with strangers. It was the scent that nicotine would curl into while the people who were leading the pack would light up cigarettes and I would just lie back and inhale the evening. It was the scent of growing into myself, the scent of letting the world unfold around me. 

And then there was the years where it was gone. 

The years were city smog took the place of pine needles. The years where I found myself but lost the sense of sweet possibility that had once infiltrated almost everything. The years where I felt too old for hoping for anything faceless, and so I assigned numbers and figures to each fantasy. The years of having grown into myself. The years where it seemed nonsensical to wish. 

And then there is the paradox of coming back home. 

The paradox of opening my bedroom window one evening as an adult and finding myself confronted with that same scent that haunted me as a child.

The scent that forces me to visualize the possibilities I still might have before me. Makes me think about reaching out and kissing someone real; someone with a name, someone with a face, someone who knows the same scents of pine needles and summertime and having given it all up for a life of something harder. 

The scent of realizing that not all new beginnings have been had yet. That they can still weave their way to me; that the aching, desperate taste of possibility can still be tasted on my tongue. That there will still be new beginnings left to have. 

Unless. 

Unless at twenty-five years old, I am assigning names and faces to a vague and restless sense of possibility that will never become satiated. 

Unless the reason there was never a name, never a face, never a body that I could assign with permanence to the impression because it was meant to be shapeless; impossible to ever pin down.

Unless it was the particular shade and scent of summer that could make you fall in love with just about anyone. 

In which case, I lay my memories to rest for the remainder of the evening.  

it has been one year and six or seven months since we were in love. what i remember: a kind comment you made once, on a photo of me wearing a bandaid. your dreadlocks. all the skyping. the inflection of your voice when you were happy. the last five years. the poetry collection. the other one. the friendship that followed it all. you, camping out in times square. me, being glad you exist. 

it has been eight point five years since we were in love. maybe more. there was a rooftop that i visited recently. there was the city i’m sitting in now. there was your status, my insecurity, your kind words, my shaking hands. there was being seen for the first time. there was leaving for the first time there was the first big mistake. there was every mistake that followed after. 

1.

Izzy took me to a psychic last week and I couldn’t decide what to think. She said, ‘right now is the first time in your life when all of your coping mechanisms don’t work.’ I gave her my best poker face but it was true. Later that week, I went to a counsellor and told her the same thing. She nodded sympathetically, and I decided to not ever go back. I hate when counsellors are sympathetic. I am always looking for people who will call me on my shit. 

2. 

This morning an old Kendra article popped up on my newsfeed and I started reading it and thinking about how I read this article a little over a year ago and how strange it was that when she first wrote this piece, and when I first read it, I didn’t love her yet. 

As I am reading, Kendra texts me ‘How are you this week?’ And I tell her the truth. I like the idea that a year from now, I might love someone else I don’t love yet. I always forget that. I forget about the parts of the future I can’t control. 

3. 

I spend 12+ hours every day in a hospital this summer. I like to be in the hospital because nobody is pretending anything there. We are all helpless, and grasping at straws. I start to make hospital friends, who are not friends, just people I nod at. The Asian man who is always in the lounge eating something that he brought in a Tupperware. The Italian woman from next door who calls me ‘dearie’ and cries openly, often. The very old man, who nobody ever visits, but who always smiles and asks me the time. One day, a man comes in and plays the guitar to acute patients and the old man who always smiles smiles so big I think that his face will crack in half. I always assumed I’d hate anything that makes me feel closer to my own mortality, but I do not hate hospitals. That surprises me a lot. 

4. 

An unassorted list of things I’ve been reading about lately: Biocentrism, past lives, reincarnation, Buddhism, people who consider themselves to be mediums, neurodegenerative illnesses, grief, anger management, dreams. If you dream about a rat, it’s not a rat, it’s someone in your life who isn’t trustworthy. If you dream about a pet rat that you forgot to feed, it’s about an untrustworthy person in your life whom you are slowly emotionally starving to death. I’m starting to think there’s something to dream analysis.

5. 

Where you are, everything is human the dust collects on the tops of your cupboard, because no one comes to wash it, the sirens wail Outside of your home because there is no air conditioner left humming, in the summers we awaken to the smell of fresh air.

Where you are, there is no past or present Time stops When your body is with mine, right and wrong leave white flags staked on their doorsteps, Destiny tips its cap respectfully and the entirety of history recedes.

Where you are, everything mingles Synesthesia Of the memory and soul

We count elements every single morning I am ether but your hands are where the earth found its name.

In the evenings, we pick through past lives, read philosophy books for bedtime stories, did you know That the lowest calibration of the human soul is shame? You nod, you know. The past beats between us like a Fable We have slowly forgotten.

Where you are, nothing is dying Anymore. I see an old flame Holding hands with a new lover, I go home to you, We stay up all night.

Here is how each love story begins: with disillusion And here is how every one ends: in your bedroom after the storm.

there was that one fall where we sat by your campfire and talked about how you never know when you’re right in the centre of the best times of your lives and I stayed silent because i’ve always known, i always know. 

this is one of my favorite things about myself: i do not delude myself into believing things are any worse or better than they are. life ebbs and flows. we latch onto the good times and we go with them, or else they pass. it is the same with the bad times.

i don’t believe that happiness is the primary thing we ought to strive for in a lifetime, but i do believe that it’s the best reason to stay. this summer is the one with all of the forgiving; the crying on bathroom floors and in tents staked in the wilderness and late, late at night curled up in somebody’s bed, naked. it is the summer where we’re all old enough to know how to say sorry and mean it. old enough to understand what we’re apologizing for. 

there were the years where everything was ending. driving through the rocky tree-lined rivers of western canada, an old friend tells me, ‘I feel like I missed the hardest years of your life,’ and i recline my seat and tell her, ‘you did, but it’s okay. those years are over,’ and it’s nice to be able to mean the things you say. 

i don’t delude myself into believing that everything is going to work out. there are still the hospital monitors back home, still the miles of forgiveness to go, still all the people to love and then lose. 

but it is the summer where all of it grows hazy. where friendships are allowed to be rekindled, where love is allowed to rebloom. it is the summer of sixteen-hour sunshine on the west coast, of the panic subsiding on the east. it’s the summer of waking up from the plane crash dreams cradled in someone else’s arms and reminding myself, it is allowed to be this easy. love is allowed to come free. 

it is the kind of a season that reminds you; that there will be other years of loss, other seasons of self-hatred, other battles to fight and then lose. but after that, there will be redemption. there will be forgiveness. there will be cakes with ‘i’m sorry,’ spelt out on them, left frozen in someone’s refrigerator. there will be tears. there will be forgetting. there will be a reckoning. there will be seasons and seasons of sunshine. 

and when they come, you latch onto them. you do not deny yourself the joy of it. you do not reject what you’ve found.