(back to salt)

⋄ i was given a taste of acknowledgement. support. some version of recognition. even if mutated. even if the fabric degraded. even if all parts imploded. even if fleeting. you taught me well.

⋄ june 16 2021. 456 days of isolation in a southwestern ontario suburb straight to the heart of mile end. to the stiffest cup of coffee my nerves quickly learned to walk around, along with its boys club, and the quartier of honeyed peculiarities (at first dip). my family sent me off waving through the tears. i couldn't stop reaching for them, looking out for my sister from the passenger window until my neck knotted, then immediately eyes peeled to the rearview until the corner was turned. it felt like every bone in my body was splitting, longing to stay close to the ones i love. what about all you will miss? you might regret this. thoughts that haunted me then and haunt me now. i believed there would be a way for it to all make sense. one day, i still hope it might. but i can't allow myself to think so far ahead.

⋄ my love is bigger than my fear, my mother has always said. i chose to jump into the deep-end in order to do it right. i signed the papers and drove 725 km away 14 hours later. i moved to a new city, alone. *ais helped. he made sure even if i've always felt like it, i'm never really ever (alone). he's always been there. hatchback filled to the ceiling. both the taylor and microkorg my father bought me softly positioned in between my grandmother's old sheets, records, and stacks of journals i collected.

⋄ i bought a blue rusted bike off marketplace first thing. $80 i thought. with a not so secret $200 in repairs at the bike shoppe off rachel. my first lesson and error in judgement. i found my way back to ontario street and we began (222). i dreamt of that moment countless moons before.

⋄ that sweet saint viateur x saint urbain apartment. afternoons sunbathing naked in the sunroom. the old pine. fresh eucalyptus and billie holiday’s solitude playing in the background as i'd cook myself dinner. my most adored back alley. the laundromat across the street that ate all my coins but beat the bathtub. i know nothing in this moment except write. plot. let it hurt, then jump in deeper. call home. i cried myself to sleep most nights, too ignorant to know what yet to fear, yet consumed by the unknowing of it.

⋄ i met you on the corner and you bruised my heart months later. perhaps i bruised my own. but you were a genuine friend in a time of my life where everything felt painful, distant and disorienting. i still picture the first moment we met whenever i walk by. i hope you're happy, wherever you are in the world now.

⋄ i develop a deeper understanding of this complex and beautiful language every day. i feel my brain process differently. there are so many different shades and colours to words and all of their meanings than ever before.

⋄ i wanted to give us green. i guess i did. a little or a lot, it was the most i ever could. we ate off it, didn't we?

⋄ indisputably, i drank and smoked too much. i lost my head. the cartilage in between. but in this season of debauchery, i was reflected who i will never mirror again.

⋄ i had my target set, since 23. to be angry, unashamedly. to allow myself to be. to enter the room heels clanking. to say it, even if wrong. even if harshly. say it. scream it. spit out the gag. and i did. perhaps i'd live and write it all differently now, less abrasively, with less fingers pointed heart racing, but this was an integral part of the process. to forgiving myself. and you. and to understanding you. and myself plus you. to soul-softening. to trusting. to allowing the same validity and space for my being as i do yours. for not allowing yours by denying mine. i can speak now. i can enter a room eyes up. i have 01 (222) and all of its shadows to thank for that.

⋄ different air. different water. you taught me how not to choke by choking me out first maybe, but i've arrived.

⋄ i got to create with minds i admired long before knowing the names of them. when cynthia checked out, pressure was part of the soundtrack that soothed the nightmare of it all. i'll forever be grateful for the chance of our paths crossing. for your choosing of them to. for the little home on marie-anne with laura and getting lost on duluth that first voyage to montréal in february 2019. you took a chance on me back then. we felt like hope. clairvoyance. symmetry.

⋄ this is the portal. to self-discovery. assurance. to play. to molding myself like the clay. to blue morpho. to 02. i am still standing. even taller than before. i'd change nothing.

i wish to honour my past skin. my past hopes. the old love. the hours spent dreaming, sculpting, agonizing. but i’m not sure what comes next.

i usually save the salt water verses for rhymed stanzas in songs but you cut me raw. janky. left me as roadkill. i say it now so on your day i can sleep.

01 (222) an open letter:

you were supposed to feel like hope. you were supposed to feel like some out-of-body spiritual catharsis. you were supposed to feel more like ease and less like misalignment. you were supposed to, you were supposed to, you were supposed to… perhaps you were supposed to be exactly as you were: to reveal, to teach, to eventually protect. but there’s a grief that seems only to grow. loss that doubles and triples over.

i sit in some small pool of relief cradling a wisdom i wouldn’t have gained if not for you. and a softness i wouldn’t have now if not for you, through the warmth that slowly follows your healing… so much of me is made up of you. but i struggle to understand it still. the passing of time. its illusions revealed. the molasses-nature of it. gooey, all trapped inside.

some days, i don't want to release you. some days, i think of burying you, lighting a candle at your feet, shedding water for you, then letting you go quietly into the earth. into the subconscious. unwoven, back into silence.

i’ve daydreamed of making a single press of you and torching it in a dumpster fire. dressed to match your rings. veiled. a parking lot ceremony for the grief. for the inflammation. for the slack-jaw. the blistering nausea. how i believed in you once. how i believed in us.

i wrote do it again august 2020. covid summer. pre-sabotage. or, perhaps, in the midst of it blindfolded.

for as long as i can remember, i’ve feared men. i've feared saying no to them. i've feared the persuasion of their thirst and the violence of their fury. all the ways they could grab and bend and contort me. i learned to appease in order to survive. i learned it as a sort of love language, which bled into nights looking over my shoulder, claws out.

it took me twenty-seven years to begin to believe myself. to secure my boundaries. to stand guiltless in my no. to trust myself and harness into gut intuition. to hold it sacred. to hold my mind and body as its own entity— my own — not one for your crooked, dripping fingers to comb through and loosen.

i lost years of my life in the shadows of your approval and validation. i even became like you in ways that still haunt me in the in between moments of my days. in my breath. i bit back and i bit hard. i lost my foresight. i had your skin under my fingernails. i never wanted that.

sometimes, i still feel sorry for the panic that would surge through my body. that when you acted innocent in your harm, i couldn’t shine light on the wound and exit softly. i became it, sharply.

i was living in a state of hyper-vigilance while making this ep. while making do it again. desperately in need of healing. of recalibration. of self-compassion and recognition. of forgiveness. and deeply in need of purging: the cycles, the vices, the misuse.

i woke up. i weeded it out of me. (i'm still weeding it out)

i wrote hyperfocus while falling out of centre frame. we danced a volatile dance stretched over a border. the pandemic was ending, but so were we. it left a fire in me burning.

the creative process began in my childhood bedroom one night, keys and mic in hand, pen and paper at my side. i had to pull it out of me— the grief, the anger, the shame. i didn’t want to censor it, i just wanted it out.

i started working on my debut ep a couple months after that initial purge, this time newly relocated to montréal. a new language on my tongue. a new apartment, all alone. i'd never written a body of work before start to finish. a sonic carving of worlds. hyperfocus marked the very beginning of the ep for me. track 01. that's all i knew.

in studio, i wanted the chorus to mimic the delirious heaviness that knotted my forehead to my chest to my stomach IRL. at homy, we recreated the sensation with the moog swelling in and out as my vocals cried and swam around. we played with the sound design of my lead vocal to sonically express my disorientation by first introducing my vocal line with a doubling effect that slowly dries out into a singular lead as i bend into my chorus lyric. gab and clem gave it serious depth. they gave it body. production felt like soul relief, blurring the lines and dimensions of sound and painting exact emotion. a true and unique catharsis i’d never experienced before quite like that.

hyperfocus will forever be a special healer of mine. it will forever bring me back to that place in time. back to my childhood room, april 21, 2021. dancing alone. purging the grief of it all. calling my mom in to listen.