I'm Ayden

We sit wordlessly next to each other,

basking in the humming of bugs pilfering thickets of vivacious blackberry brush, ladybugs and bumblebees swirling over thorns into floral fountains bursting with pollen.

Seabirds of every sort interrupt our tense silence, squawking high above us, gliding in the chill blowing up the inlet, its rippling blue contrasted by the formidable mountains across from us.

Our eyes shift from distraction to distraction, crawling cars and buzzing turboprops.

Cracked lips are listlessly licked, dry with disuse, fruitlessly moisturized as we desperately seek the right words to string together.

None arrive, as dog walkers drift by and long shadows yawn wider, the dark of leaves and limbs subtly nudging towards us.

I stare at the side of your head, trying to meet your gaze so obviously angled anywhere else.

The fading sun throws blinding rays into my sunglasses, the ones you handed down to me, bearing the salt lines of your tears.

Not too far from here, not too long ago, you broke into heaving, trembling sobs,

droplets of overwhelming disappointment and frustration pooled on the cheap tinted glass,

shielding you from celestial radiation but not the piercing glances of strangers wearing shades of pity and judgment.

Each shuddering gasp echoed a question through your shaken mind, begging for an answer as to why love, all love, vanished without a sound just beyond your desperate hands.

I found you in a soulless parking lot, unable to face the shame, head buried between your crossed arms.

Refusing to look up, I watched your jaw quiver as I gently whispered in your red and swollen ear, "I'll love you."

Your unsteady composure fractured into weeping hysterics, as I began walking you home under a deepening sun.

Deeper now does the sun sit, as light refracts through the encrusted trail of those memories, entering my retina as a kaleidoscope of hope and optimism for the future.

You won't see it, as our silence finally imparts on me that there is nothing to say, much less an audience to hear it.

We embrace as I motion to leave, our chests rising and falling in rhythm, our fingernails digging into skin, solemnly reaffirming the finality of our hug,

a love innocent yet misunderstood, pure enough to feel cruel as my arms relax and you lift your head from the warm nook where neck joins shoulder.

My barefoot steps lead me pensively towards the next park bench, just a stones throw away on grass now entrenched in the mist of shadows.

Insects continue to tumble around in the brush, chattering beaks fly in formation over head, but my eyes are transfixed on the dandelion puffs and buttercups squashed between my toes.

As I sit on the weathered wooden planks, my vision breaks free of my will for merely an instant, darting over to where we shared those final quiet moments.

You're already gone.

I threw away your note.

Modern romance had never felt so alive when you handed me that tattered slip of paper

bearing your instagram and the warmth of your smile.

As it fell towards the wastebasket,

creases so neat, folds so crisp,

a wave strikes my neck, throwing spray above my barnacle encrusted hair.

The next one laps casually below the jugular,

settling my sedimental mind.

We never went out.

Spoke through broken SMS messages and anxious phone calls,

but I never met your kind brown eyes again.

And with each day, the saltwater of time eternal advances gently,

but without hesitation,

up my algae riddled body.

I stashed that innocent and hopeful tear from your notebook

in various dust-addled corners of my room,

pushing it further from sight but never out of mind.

I would wait however many years and walk through life partially asleep,

just to hand you that yellowed strip over a cup of coffee,

to watch you hide your laugh behind your shimmering brunette bob

and cover your dimples under your elegant white hands.

The ties grows fiercer,

fingers of white foam clinging desperately to the shore,

which looks startlingly far behind me now.

I angle my jaw skywards, as the kelp

which had once rested firmly on my shoulders,

began to float towards my ears.

We kept up enough to maintain my delusions.

You sent me scripts, of which I acted out

like your silent understudy, committing every line to memory

for an empty auditorium, a show to never be opened.

I promised to send you my poems, but no pen touched paper.

You deserved better than any string of words I could strangle together.

The following wash fully submerges my head,

as I brace myself for what I had long since feared.

The resulting splash whispers to my waterlogged ears,

reassuring me that I had nothing to struggle against,

that I can only erode as fast as any other rock.

I was too accustomed to furious crashes,

violently ripping back to reveal sizzling sea foam and dead kelp fibres.

Here, I gently drowned under your warm, shimmering water,

elegantly accepting the kindly tides rinsing my corroded body

clean of our missed connection.

Everyday, I walk past thousands of tiny and forgotten pieces of garbage. Too obvious to acknowledge, an indifferent and unfeeling observation, how many tonnes of waste have I walked past without pause, distracted by swarming thoughts and hurried footsteps? Of the scattered receipts and bottle caps I do see, occasionally a wind of thought blows across the jagged peaks of consciousness.

"If I don't pick you up and dispose of you, who else will?" As the question lingers, gusting over the mountain face, I find myself unable to take another step, incapable of breaking eye contact with you. My mind visualizes all the time that could pass before another person stops to take you away, how yellowed and faded the Snickers™ logo would be by that point, all the toxins and microplastics seeping into the soil. Another gust follows, imagining myself being the last person to ever see you. If nobody else cared at all, if roots spread up your nutritional facts to the 'tear here' strip at your head. If you were absorbed into the dirt hidden from any eye, and my hands were the last that could have removed you. When the breeze stops, and I sit in the silence of that thought along the cliff, I reach down to pick you up. I can live with dirty hands, but knowingly letting the earth get just a little bit worse, I cannot.

I find the act of littering more disgusting than the trash itself. The concept of someone savagely tearing you open, perverting your untouched innocence, leaving you twisted upon yourself and tattered, thoroughly used and discarded by ever-hungry fingers moisturized by cheap rose scented creams from TEMU™, I can't stand it. How pathetic it is, to be so hopelessly addicted to consuming that they feel nothing while their disgusting napkins and Ziploc™ bags roam grassy fields and front yards, mindlessly letting the land clean up after them, so apathetic that they feel nothing as they make our planet ever so slightly worse for their personal convenience. So many billions of dollars are spent and so much more is earned, continually punishing and deflowering the earth by huge conglomerates who will never care, and they are perfectly unbothered by the fact that they're not much better than those companies?

Too often, I find you too late. The rot of humanity, half submerged under tall green stalks, stems entrenched in a false home that can only hurt. It pains me to grasp you firmly and rip you from the ground, pulling life from the mulch, causing more harm. Sometimes, I just can't save you, and the wind howls against my ears, blowing wisps of hair into my eyes. I look down, grit my teeth, and helplessly remind myself that I can only control what is here in the present moment. Evil gales will nip my nose and turn my fingers blue if I consider the scale of my effort versus the all-encompassing and overbearing weight of your proliferation. To settle the air, I focus on what I can do to make the environment in my tailwind just a little bit better.

I reach down to pick a cigarette butt off the curb, and a chill overwhelms me. The draft is entirely unrelated to the weird looks from passerbys, nor the unimaginable amount of bacteria I've invited between my fingernails. As I hold you between my index and middle finger, your crusty filter feels too familiar. A howling and haunting jet stream echos throughout my head, visceral images of each and every cigarette butt I flicked onto the concrete, each and every time I squashed your smoulder under foot. As the sun casts long shadows eastwards, wrapping every cloud in a golden twine, as couples walk their dogs, as kids enjoy the contended haze of dusk, the wind whispers that I'm no better than the uncaring slobs I've been picking up after.

My breathing shudders. My arms, rigid in hesitation. Then, with not so much as a thought, I reach further still to grab another butt. The destructive current of air stops. 'I'll do better next time,' I wordlessly whisper to myself, while lunging for the next butt just a metre away.

The gust picks back up, seemingly asking why I so easily forgave myself. Blowing harder, it tempts me to question why I carry other people's garbage anyways, sullying my clothes and basking in filth, how I developed this instinct while I can hardly take care of myself. The air whips at my skin, numbing my face, whirling through my skull. 'Why is it so hard to tend to my basic needs, yet I can sit here poking and prodding at the ground like a bum?'

The wind has grown barbaric, with the next powerful whoosh lifting me off my feet and upwards into the sky. Watching the ground shrink and disappear underneath me, I continue to rise. Blacking out, I replay all those memories of love lost. Everyone who I've ever leaned on, who I encumbered with my self-hatred and pity while masking the true depths of my misery. In this empty space, free of the boundaries that reality presents, I have the time to talk to them. Some offer polite smiles, some refuse to make eye contact. None of them say a word. I beg and plead, apologising through tears or demanding closure to wounds that have already run dry. With incessant cruelty, and not a hint of ambiguity, their silence speaks louder than I wish to hear. Mind numbing and paralyzing silence. Finally, the last person begins to play a song for me, singing something from a playlist I built for her. She knows how badly I wanted to love her, to give her the world. I explain to her my faults, the shame that entrenched every synapse in my brain, what I never had the heart to tell her. She is unbroken by my impassioned spillage, she can see my tongue is forked. Her eyes remain transfixed into mine, projecting the absurdity of the dream into my half-conscious mind. She's going to wake me up. Hesitation clenches my jaw shut, my lower lip trembles. She rounds the chorus, the one I gave to her as a declaration of love, unaware of the trauma buried under loose dirt just beneath the surface. "No one's gonna love you more than I do." I feel my lungs expand rapidly, and I forcefully bite my tongue.

My sense of smell isn't my sharpest sense, far from it. Perhaps too much time spent racing around as opposed to kneeling by flowerbeds. Perhaps that's why I was scared so deeply.

There was a while where I couldn't get your scent off me. I washed, scrubbed, disinfected everything. I didn't feel safe in the thin layers of clothes protecting me, much less so after I got home. I took them off and left them folded neatly on the dirty floor of the entrance way. Even my socks and underwear were laid out on the tiles, lest any particle from those streets clung to a piece of fabric and infiltrated my home.

The steam of the shower that followed choked the oxygen out of the clean bathroom; scalding hot water singeing the hair on my arms. I boiled alive for nearly an hour, just waiting for the tank to empty out. I wasn't sure if I'd ever feel clean again. I took a beer with me for the nerves, seeing as breathing exercises don't work particularly well if your chest is caving in on you. Still, my hands shook and my teeth chattered. I couldn't tell if I cried or not, but I'm sure my tears would bare an all-too-familiar taste.

The following days got easier, and the fear receded into darker corners of my mind, buried just below the surface. But in gusts of wind, t-shirts I didn't wear, restaurants that felt a million miles away, your odour brought me back to that night. Those terrifying streets. The sights and sounds, the soulless bodies, the ghastly faces walking among me. You spent a week rooting yourself my bloodstream, flashing my mind with the images I tried to erase.

I was sickened at the thought of you dancing around in my nostrils, picking a few moments everyday to waft upwards into my brain just to remind me that anything could happen. That maybe I'd get unlucky too, that I'd find myself unrecognisable in mirrors and looked down upon by the world around me.

I wasn't sure exactly who you were, but I know your stench. Urine and mustard gas, warm spoons and hot glass, cigarette smoke and decay. I remember it on every corner. I found it on their breath, not just lost souls I walked past, but the firefighters tending to a warm body. Pouring out of cars, stuck in traffic next to me, windows rolled all the way up with doors locked. Spilling out of A/C units, flowing from lighters, emanating from trash bins. I saw a man unhinge his jaw and battle against his motor skills to guide a slice of pizza to his gaping mouth. Steam blew off the slice. Cowardice proved a strong motivator, as I refused to inhale despite my rapid footsteps away from him.

I still remember the limbs we stepped over in that narrow hallway, swollen hands and feet outstretched in a way so cruel it resembled renaissance art. The walls no longer bore the hospital resemblance the painters had intended, with the eggshell white beyond scuffed and damaged, stains tracing from ceiling to tiled floor. The elevator was just as cramped, bearing the stinging of routine and intense sanitation. It took all my willpower to not imagine what happened within those stainless steel walls, the nightmare that required a cleaning so thorough nothing could ever live again upon its scratches again. A ding put me back in reality, if what I was seeing was even real. The doors slid open, revealing another entrance way, one final chance to turn away from whatever exists on the opposite side.

Shock and adrenaline riddled my synapses, eyes darting and scanning every detail. Unintelligible screams and voices echoed down the corridor. Light and despair peeking out from slightly cracked doors, as if they too were trying to escape from their rooms. I kept my head up, not glancing at anything for too long, not to disturb the peace in an environment that felt beyond hostile. What followed was an intimate conversation, a moment of vulnerability that spoke louder than any tragic photo or video ever could. During that moment, a static pierced my ears, my eyes glazed over, my mouth went numb, and I didn't dare touch anything. My senses were beyond me, as fear and tension gripped my brain stem and I could only focus on surviving. However, the odour was simply too much to ignore.

As I raced down the elevator, bursting out into the street in a state of panic and disarray, my mind hadn't slowed in the slightest. The capacity for rational thought had disappeared into repeating a single phrase over and over again, willing myself into getting as far away as possible. My breath was shaky, unsteady, but more than anything -- it tasted like what I was smelling.

I recall that water developed a strange aftertaste. I remember that taking out the compost became difficult, that it didn't just stink like rotten food. Supposedly, I had done something great. It didn't feel that way. More than anything, I was scared. Those people could very well be me in the future. The only thing separating them from me was time and luck, and those two never seem to be on my side. I averted my gaze from them whenever possible, took a longer bus to keep my distance from those streets.

Your odour made running away impossible. That fucking scent found me everywhere, following me into places thought impossible and onto my skin, discoloured and dry with worry. You made it beyond clear to me that you had no intentions of leaving, nor letting me leave. Thus, I came back.

I walked down those streets on a cold and desolate weeknight. I talked to some folks, stopped to inspected the scenery. I led with my nose and I hardly noticed you at all.

Instead, I saw people trying to survive, doing their best in a system that prefers to see them dead. Perhaps that's the assumption I made, the thought that shook me to my core. When I saw the firefighters huddled around an unresponsive warm body, I hadn't considered that he might still be alive. Maybe not by much, with toxic fentanyl destroying nerve endings and strangling the life from his malnourished mind, but he bore no body bag.

I didn't get it then. I walked up and down Hastings with the idea that every set of eyes around me carried no light behind them, that dead men shuffled in place all around me, that the ones still clinging to life weren't far off. I had stripped them of the very last thing they had, their humanity. I had reduced them to cadavers yet to be buried, corpses before their cremation. No shit I was scared.

They're alive. They're right in front of me. They have given and received love, memories, smiles, and they refuse to be seen as empty husks or a problem to be solved.

I remember the way I used to talk to you. The roots of those innocent moments permeate my brain stem, lacing around and into my grey matter. I'd close my eyes and dream about you until dark blue pre-dawn light broke through windows, always just in the corner of my eye, reminding me that I need sleep. I don't often look at those windows anymore. I don't often see that glow anymore. Watching you die feels like killing and cannibalising myself, as if whittling down frostbitten fingers with a carving knife. I've always described growth as killing off old versions of me. That language paints horrific and violent ideas, of furious battle against self and habits driven to extinction. This doesn't feel like that.

My fingers aren't the only extremities reduced to darkened and dull nubs. I'm cold. I've been cold for a while. I can no longer sit here and turn myself into shaved ice for you. The frost that paralyses every pore on my skin seeps a mixture of disgust and disrespect into my bloodstream. It knows I shouldn't be waiting outside for you and it's judging me for it. Please don't tell me to leave, please don't give me advice that I've been begging myself to listen to. This is all I've ever known. Your polite words won't change that, won't make it easier to save myself.

What if I need to come back? What if the future is even more hostile? You don't have to remind me that there's nothing to return to. Besides, that only becomes true once I leave. If anything, you should be impressed. Nobody else in the world knows how difficult it is for me to sit still, nobody but you. Even though I wish it was that simple, though I claim that I'm trapped with my feet under ice, that I'm stuck in time, I'm not foolish enough to ignore what I'm beginning to notice.

I can feel the heat radiating and dancing on my back. The warmth crawls up my spine through my neck, teasing the rear of my skull, softening the flecks of snow matting my hair. The melt beckons me to turn my head. The light illuminates my jawline and carves grooves into my cheekbones, cresting delicately onto my nose. I know those freezing nights are over. I know it's starting, all over again. My eye twinkles with a kaleidoscope of rays, exploding into my iris, casting brilliant shades of amber and cocoa. My heart flutters, and for just a moment, I forget about the permafrost that I'm kneeling upon.

I reach into the ground and find rich, moist soil. Roots and life exude from the mass of earth, dissolving into smaller clumps and wads as I press my suddenly pink fingers into my palm. Dirt trapped under my colourful fingernails smells sweet, wicked with rainwater. The arid, dry, solid ground from relentless winter has given way to a youthful, energetic mulch. A gift powerful enough to make me forget about the other half of my face.

Opposite the luminescence, a biting and pulsating nip of wind chill rips away at freeze-dried flesh. One ear glows in a blinding stream of heat, while the other wilts in an icy breeze. Huddled between the two extremes, my mind trails off and thinks in confusing loops, unable to make sense of the patterns. I suppose that sort of balance is exactly what I had begged for, so many months ago.

From that perspective, I guess I don't have much to complain about. Regardless of how I'm doing, that's what I usually tell people when they ask. I don't look to you for those answers anymore. Maybe I knew it was over when I stopped asking anything of you at all. I don't have the energy nor will to prance around in the basement of my parent's house anymore, wishing and wanting for all that the future will hold. I don't typically concern myself with those ideas anymore, wasting away because time keeps me away from where I want to be. My time is more often spent right here, present with myself.

I miss the way I used to dream, but I've got no reason to dream about you anymore. There was a period of time where I tried building walls, doing anything to separate myself from that kid who was always checking his wrist, watching the clock. The bricks have come down, and sometimes he runs through the ruins of what was once "progress" to come hug me. Often, he'll sob in my arms. Occasionally, he yells and punches at the air, storming away just to come back afterwards. He needed to fantasise about you, to escape reality and play with grandiose ideas of what you two would do together, the sunsets you'd watch together.

When I was putting up those barriers, I considered you evil. I thought you were a parasite, a cancer metastasizing into each organ, waging war for reasons I couldn't understand. Previously, I told myself that I would spend every second, every minute, every hour, every day chasing you. For a while, I ran. I continued until my feet were bruised, until my soles had sores, and my legs seemed more dead than alive. As I continued breaking down, splintering into nothing, I fell for the trick that I was just one breakthrough away from getting back on track. Call it chemotherapy, an invasive surgery, a car wreck, just some big display of pain and perseverance to tell me that I had pushed through. To tell me that everything that defined those days had withered into archaic afterthoughts, echos of feelings and habits that once were, dusty books with pages yellowed and stuck together.

I would hesitate to call you any of those things though. I remember you now as the bookshelf. There's an unimaginable amount of shit buried back there, but everything worth looking at sits near the front. Hand-drawn pictures of stick-families, suns positioned in the top-right corner with crude crayola smiles. Most of the memories I can pick off the shelf wear similar childish glee, crumpled edges, and stains of whatever I was eating at the time.

For every angry, hateful word I had written for this "hero's journey," this unending chase of my own shadow, this painful impatience, I've learned something. No need is there to hold onto all of it, to demand every thought recall to mind as harmful as they were. Simpler is it to forget everything, float away in the next wind, yet to keep lessons learned close to heart, wrapped in scarred arms.

Every now and then and here again,

I receive a six digit code from a machine

who is entirely indifferent about me,

simply fulfilling its purpose as the code dictates,

similar to how I swipe left and right on beautiful women with complete abandon.

My fingers tap the screen with a panicked despair.

Somewhere buried in that rush,

an acknowledgement of an unchanging reality

hides behind a faint glimmer of "what if?"

A light I've been basking in for as long as I can remember,

a Shine that has fizzled and can only continue to fade.

Unrequited attention, barren inbox.

A long dormant message from a woman who has already joined

the fleet of women who offered up their number

just to forget me afterwards.

Hope can only erode so far

but fear can build steadily into paralyzing tension.

When those two paths cross,

an unbearable pressure withers the soul,

but so too emerges clarity from a thicket of delusion.

That isn't the only app on my phone that I've deleted,

only for it to wash up on the malcontented shores of consciousness.

The other app reaches out to me first,

informing ominously of a message

behind a stoic stare beguiling a resentful snarl.

It can be only from one woman,

a girl who deserved better than what I gave her.

I left a letter at her doorstep mere days ago,

surely re-opening a would hardly healed.

I walked nervously to her front stoop as I had

with her on my hip and her smile in my mind so many times before.

My hands trembled in a way they hadn't before.

The rumble of rubber against road abruptly ends behind me.

I turn to see her Mom's car, stopped dead in the middle of the street,

as if to do a double take on her worst nightmare.

The engine revved and tore off, but my pounding heart

drowned out the disappointment expressed in her acceleration.

I planted the envelope under the doormat.

After retreating down the driveway and out of sight,

my breathing stabilized and my heart crawled back down my throat,

yet I found myself still glancing over my shoulder,

awaiting another fleeting wisp of that vehicle.

This time, not out of fear.

I abandoned the area with my gaze buried into the ground,

trying to dispel the hope of one last chance encounter.

This act was supposed to alleviate those nagging thoughts,

to release the barbed wire from bleeding and brutalized hands.

A new narrative emerged, as quickly as the old had been dispatched.

In that note backdated over a year previous,

I begged her for some sort of connection,

pleaded for something above no-contact.

I told her to reach out in the way only we knew,

on a platform holding all our memories,

a chat app I had deleted for fear of immaturity.

This site, having my number and missing my engagement,

pings me nearly every damn day,

insisting I have messages to respond to.

Her messages to respond to,

according to a deep rooted fear.

About once per day, a notification sends a jolt of

an unforgiving deep cold down my spine.

Just as the sliding disappointment found after

entering that foolish six digit code.

An underlining uncertainty and terror

riddles each letter of those messages,

an insecurity in every buzz.

So I checked.

Predictably, there was nothing.

Neither app offered a brief respite from

the narrative of an unescapable wanting,

a tragedy unwinding in every waking moment,

through grandiose orchestral acts of sweeping emotion

and in the tiniest breaths and movements.

But this isn't Shakespearian.

This thing carries human weight and a conscious spirit.

It looks back at me, warped in rippling pond water.

It gently strokes my facial hair while

absentmindedly twirling my pen in his other hand.

I spent much of my past life

drawing a firm line between him and myself.

I needed acceptance from my peers, to conform

to the uneven and rough ridges of society.

As I distance myself from that immature and weak mindset,

colours become more vibrant,

sunbeams spark life into each dawn and dusk,

strangers smile more often and children laugh louder.

Sleep feels restful, mornings are relaxed instead of misery.

Even through the forthcoming bliss of

a deeper connection with self,

tension twists in the dark recesses of my mind,

a persistent discomfort behind my eyes that

flirts a desperate spite into my soul.

Simply put, I've been doing me

which is usually easy to define.

But that question that paws at me relentlessly,

the deep rooted insecurity towards those absent romantic notions,

is it central to my character?

is it me?

The query froze me,

threatened to send me spiralling to places

that I pray to forget.

Dark spaces that suffocate the soul,

manipulate the mind in and out of sanity,

spaces that have tightened around throats just to watch

the colour drain from frantic faces,

delighting in every moment of struggle

and airless gasp.

I have felt my lungs empty before.

I heard every gurgle and death rattle.

I watched the light dim.

I tasted the copper of blood in my mouth.

As that simple inquiry lunged for my neck,

stained forever purple and blue,

a scent brought forth an answer.

The chill of a quiet night,

the cold air rushing through my nostrils,

the way it used to when I was just a boy.

I remember how simple it all was.

Pretending to sleep after a long drive to be carried inside

on my father's shoulder,

tucked into bed with my mother's gentle forehead kiss.

The story she used to read me sat idle on my nightstand.

It was all so warm.

I recall the wet heat of my friends tears

as she wept in my arms,

a woman so used to fighting for survival

that anything less than hostile frightened her.

The faint glow reflecting off that stranger's face

as their kind eyes smiled back at me, if only for a moment.

The living breathing toasty feeling that comes in the form

of a stray cat, nuzzling against my corduroys.

The steam rising out of both cups of tea

that start and end my day.

The panting sweltering hot that follows

a brutal hike on a clear balmy day,

surrounded by moss and pine needles that cling to curious hands.

My eyes are closed,

lost in the humidity of those precious memories.

As I open them, the hand is gone.

My breath feels easy, relaxed.

I'm still alive but more than that

I am warm.

That warmth that returns to me

every time the hand nearly snuffs my flame.

This feeling pushes me elsewhere, both within in the walls of mind

and outside, into the world I share.

I exit that space to join everyone else,

just to feel the rays upon my skin.

I spend more time looking up at uninteresting skies,

imagining new animals to find in the clouds.

Everybody around me seems so cozy and familiar,

as if there is a friend in every pair of shoes.

The grass under foot radiates the passion of sun,

powerful enough to bore through sole and into heart.

It takes energy to be present in this moment,

to be at ease with all that covers the land before you.

Energy I can't spend checking my phone,

energy I can't afford to waste worried about a text back,

much less from a pair automated numbers.

Two sets of digits that can only spiral into a comfortable obsession,

a sinking feeling, a paralyzing tension,

The strum of the guitar will always remind me

of that fake grass,

sitting on plastic patio furniture.

Placeholder pillows pretending to invite you in,

that act confused and stiff when you attempt to relax with them.

The concrete beneath your feet too new to pressure wash,

too clean to bother.

You could wipe down the modern fire pit with a cotton ball for half an hour,

and it would hardly gather any soot at all.

Some realtor probably walked some suckers around this very patio,

filling their heads with dreams of hosting friends

around a crackling fire

as their children's bikes and toys

lay tired, dormant just behind them

as the sun set on another perfect day

in their artificial nuclear life.

But that would require love.

It's clear from the soulless hum of the always-on,

always-blinding LED lights

cutting through the dark and quiet night

that nothing like love has ever graced this backyard.

Just me. And this is probably trespassing.

I don't own this place. The "for sale" sign does.

My eyes are closed, enjoying the silence

when a distant anger cuts through the tranquility.

Barbed shouts of hysteria are followed by

another voice, dismissive yet defensive.

From what I gathered, he follows some hot Instagram models.

His attitude sounds like he'd follow more just to piss her off.

She sounds as if she'd yell and cry just the same,

but she would never leave him.

She stormed out, with the echo of the slamming door

still reverberating through the sleepy neighbourhood.

She wept in her car.

He didn't even get up to lock the door.

Something told me she'd be back sometime soon.

The cynical parts of me wanted to laugh.

The other parts of me didn't care if I did.

We all sat in that bleak silence for a moment.

The TV turned back on. The car tore off. I headed for home.

This song will never leave that moment.

I hope some kids are playing in that yard now.

It would feel good to know that

they played tag with the neighbourhood kids until

they all fell into an exhausted pile on that turf lawn,

panting while admiring the sky above their head,

as I once did.

Maybe one day she'll grow a backbone,

walk out the door wth her toothbrush and plushies

stuffed into bags they bought together.

Perhaps instead of slamming the door violently,

with tears streaming down her face,

she'll simply close it with a satisfied smile

because she doesn't have to look outwards for love anyways,

as I once did.

Hopefully, if I'm lucky,

I'll be at a small music festival one day

and a familiar tune will bring a soft chuckle and a smirk

to a much wiser and weathered face of mine.

My family will ask what's so funny and I'll say that I forgot,

they'll laugh it off as me being myself.

If I'm really fortunate,

I'll be telling the truth

because I'd love nothing more than to forget

the address and the realtor's name,

to cling only to the cold air of that night settling on my chest,

to the way it all used to feel.

I've only got so many pages left in this book

and I'd like to spend every last one

loving myself, loving others, and loving the nostalgia

of all that has been lost to time,

and everything else that is only

The gushing whistle of wind over the inlet.

Between breezes, faint voices and belligerent seagulls rush to fill the void.

I've watched the sun begin and end the day from that tiny park,

just one of many that dot the ridge above the water.

On many occasions, I stood in complete irreverence and awe

at the streaks of gold and pink in the equinox of those days,

painted in the sky between mountains Seymour and Fromme.

Standing before the view changed me,

sparked a hope in me,

something long foreign to that person,

the man I was before the I had seen its grace.

I haven't been back in a while.

The blades of grass that sidled between

my bare toes have since died without seeing me again.

Even now I write this from a different place,

staring at those same peaks from another angle.

Today, low hanging clouds and a growing fog

obscure the furthest face of the range,

as if to turn away from me,

to purse its lips and advert its gaze from my desperate eyes.

They don't recognise me anymore.

As I see reflections of myself simmer

in the unflinching gray of the hills,

a wasp approaches me curiously.

She orbits me, crawls up and down the back of my hand,

tracing each vein and inspecting every hair.

She nibbles just above the knuckle of my pinky finger,

as if to ask "what are you?"

I slowly lift my hand, elevating my pinky above the others.

She continues to scrape away at the folds on my skin,

her powerful mandibles hardly making a dent.

I show her pestering to those mountains,

begging them to make sense of her actions.

Without an answer, I retreat from her territory.

My travels take me to a boulder, isolated in a field.

Upon this stone, my thoughts quickly outpace my conscious mind.

Ants begin to crawl up the pages of my notebook,

sniffing at ink deposits.

To the ants, I display a look at confusion and dismay.

Gently, I guide one from my finger onto the rock,

towards a place more prosperous than the scribbles upon this paper.

I start to recall all those times I spent hiking

in the wondrous cacophony of tree and moss,

the living and breathing soul of the vista before me,

that allowed me needed peace and serenity

in its dense and overflowing forests.

I remember how I studied the scale of it all,

from the towering spires of bark and leaves,

to the tiny idyllic patches of lichen and algae.

The thicket of clouds has grown

to remove the entire range from view

but I know exactly where it lies, what they have taught me.

In the same way that a wasp can tattoo my finger,

as an ant can read my words.

A sweeping gust reminds me where I am,

the same breath that lifts the crows around me into flight,

The funniest part is that

I've been in her exact position

as recently as just three weeks ago.

Maybe it's less of a joke and more of a sign.

I'm in the shower, washing the drunk and stale crumbs

off my stomach, reminders of the previous night.

You had sent me a text in the evening brisk of yesterday,

to which I returned a specific sound of silence.

Not the quiet that begs for conversation,

but rather the cold indifference of receiving junk mail.

As I write this some 26 hours later,

you address the static that crackles with

a growing uncertainty, a sneaking confirmation

of what you fear the most.

It is only now that I see your humanity,

that I realise the extent of my negligence.

You don't deserve this, in the same way that I didn't.

Nothing about this is fair to anyone.

I was so close to leaning in for that kiss too.

As you drove away, the replay of that missed chance looped

continuously in my mind, dreaming of what could've been.

The irony is that I thought I'd see you again at the time.

I know now that it wouldn't be good for either of us.

I still remember the softness in your gaze, the shade of your lips,

such a beautiful moment we created with each other.

I wanted desperately to explore that feeling together

and then everything subsided.

Every missed text became a monument to that fading emotion.

As it dissolved, dread replaced it.

I knew we couldn't exist and every message convinced me

that you were chasing your dream for us, the one I made you believe.

You deserve better.

Someone will love you for you,

and exactly in the way that you will love them.

I know it cannot be me.

I cannot continue to lead you on.

Saying sorry isn't enough of a response, rightly so.

Nothing I can say will make you feel better,

no language exists to replace the truth.

I wish it had turned out differently,

but those words mean nothing because

my actions are mine to bear and your hurt is of my failure.

Thank you for your time Meghane.

Someone will value those moments the way I never did,

My pen moved independent of my mind.

The scrooge in me sneered in contempt, as if to say

"you're risking a parking ticket for sake of some dumb letter

which may or may not have an impact."

Of course, I did find a yellow little slip on my car.

Of course, I paid it.

Of course, only after I asked my brother for advice.

The next time I thought about the ink on that paper,

I was a vastly different person.

At this moment, I was upset at my family

because they couldn't find the will to change.

I was pissed that I paid 40 dollars,

drove to North Vancouver,

held my breath for months,

all for what appeared to be nothing.

Later still, a smarter man sat in a field with me to ask about desire,

to discuss expectation and wanting,

to learn what it is that corrupts a soul.

We didn't settle on an answer. We rarely do.

But I left feeling wiser than I had before,

which was very common of our talks.

Eventually, I grew the courage to ask my brother about

the stinging silence he offered in return to

my uncommon display of affection and admiration.

He gave an excuse I can't recall

but the fog of mind settles to reveal

three simple little words we shared

at the conversations' bittersweet demise.

I hope and pray that I hugged him then,

but the view of the sky from within his arms

has fallen to time eternal.

As more priceless moments steadily recede into a similar fate,

notes of somber jazz serve to remind me

the meaning of all that has been loved,

all that has withered in time,

all that has been forgotten.

That process seems to haunt every aspect of my life,

appearing in every wind and bend that I experience.

I've let distractions occupy vast quantities of space in my mind,

allowing myself to exist at their whim,

swept and misguided in their wake.

But love lives in the whispers still present in mind,

the ordinary sunsets and sunrises,

the normal moments that refuse erosion.

Those playthings and passing fads have long been

reduced to memories of a memory,

temporary placeholders for information that once existed.

But I will always recall the way I felt walking away from that conversation,

the same way I did when I opened old birthday cards for the first time,

the same way I did waiting outside an SFU lecture hall for an hour,

I saw my mom yesterday.

We sipped Turkish Coffees and talked

through the same tired conversations we always do. 

I remembered why I always left in such a hurry.

But as I watched the soft yellow light above the stove shrink away,

recede into the darkness of a warm May night,

through the rear view mirror of my car,

a lukewarm wash of guilt engulfed me.

At one point in time, along brick lined streets,

a man stood forever still in time

perched upon a mound of brick and mortar.

His name carved into a bronze plate, washed and discoloured.

His copper skin, oxidised to a uranium green.

Sharp features now worn smooth by

the blowing rain and wind he once conquered.

An icon of a time that neither builder nor observer was present for,

representing a figment of a universal delusion. 

During his stay, he watched his street corner

alternate nauseatingly between attractive and undesirable,

fought for and hunted,

respected and ignored entirely.

I guess somewhere along the way, somebody grew up

and forgot the lie we all told ourselves.

People tied ropes upon his neck,

anchored straps around his chest. 

Hands of every type clamped down on the tethers,

pulled with the force of a thousand buried memories resurfacing.

He returned onto cobbled sidewalks,

face down, disgraced, a piece of history now redundant. 

The corner doesn’t feel any different without him.

The remnants of his presence drain further and further down the stream of consciousness,

surviving only through old photos and older minds.

Nostalgic visions of what once was are eviscerated by the sands of time.

This is his place no longer, a fact that few hang onto.

Just a few, and himself.

God only knows where he is, if he still is anything at all.

Not too far away, but too far to stick around,

a similar fate befalls myself.

When everyone goes to sleep, the glass of wine combined with

that faded yellow hue asks me why I’m still here,

despite the fact that this isn’t home

the fact that you promised this cannot be home ever again.

I never have a good answer.