Freedom & Shame

On the shiny surface, the bathroom is a perfect escape for a thirty-seven-year-old mother such as myself. It's a safe haven in which you are guaranteed at least a decent certain percentage of allowable quiet alone time. But -

But.

There are not one, but two mirrors. They're hung side by side, like two lopsided eyeballs staring me back in the bathroom. They make me think of the close bright headlight of a train about to wreck. Or of the white-hot part of a flame - the intense point of impact that creates the impenetrable glow.

The mirrors never reflect what I expect them to. Let's just leave it at that.

But the bath is like a big warm hug. I simultaneously sink and float.

Paradoxes abound.

At least while the mind is racing, the body can relax.

Hollow Wonderful Glorious

The girl sat hunched into herself. One might have observed that she was curled up like a shrimp. Or a potato bug. She was trying her best to protect herself. She was failing terribly. The girl felt overcome and hollow.

She thought of the body and of material possessions and how none of it makes sense. There is never any peace. She felt beyond hollow, as though she was composed of only eggshells and that the slightest movement may shatter her entire existence into dust.

- - - - - - - -

Her favourite record was playing. A smile briefly superimposed itself on the girl's face. The voice wafting through the air calmed her. She felt a little less hollow because she sensed her idol had also felt hollow many times just like her.

Infinite negatives fused at that exact moment and all that were left were positives.

She felt a little less hollow. A little less alone.

Where

I'm having difficulty finding things lately. I can't see what's in front of me.

Wattage

I sit in the glow. My vision, straight out to its most peripheral points, inherits the glow. The glow is all around me. My face wears a smile that betrays me.

I brush off the sandy crumbs. They hit the floor and meld into the once-white rug. The sweetness that moments ago crept down my throat has now tangled my stomach. The sweet turned suddenly sickly. I am all at once wired and exhausted. I lie down on the couch and fall asleep with my eyes open. That's enough to scare even the truest friend.

I wake up at nothing o'clock. The glow is still there. I forgot to turn off the glow. I am still flat.

I trip my way to the white bathroom. Light. Bright. I wish I may, I wish I might.

I make my way to the bed. I close my eyes and see dreams smeared across the sky. Projectiles of the mind.  Fragments of a lifetime before or one yet to come.

Graffiti XO

My soles join the pavement, each click of contact connecting us further. The atmosphere envelopes me and invites me in. The city takes me by the hand and guides me through its rugged streets. It swoops me up, loosens my shoulders and takes me where I need to go.

The view is raw. The pavement is patched and broken but beautiful. The walls have been decorated and dressed up in technicolour in the dark hours of the night. When the morning light arrives, it reveals the art left behind by the beautiful minds.

The inhabitants are inspiring. Each face tells a different story. Clothes are not simply worn, but draped and adorned. This city has serious style. Even the grit is beautiful.

The furniture on the sidewalks is worn. Paint chips show lives lived before this one. Edges have been roughened up by weary backs. There is an appreciation for the past. Creativity flows through the streets. It seeps out of the soles that touch them and spreads like a fantastical virus up and through and into the atmosphere. I breathe deeply. I want to be part of it. The smiling faces welcome me in. They fulfill my yearning.

Is it better here? Not necessarily, but it's a city that tries. This city juts out its hips and forms an inner circle. It walks circles around the others that don't quite try as hard.

I am spoiled here. I have the luxury of time to sit in a roughened cafe at ten-thirty on a Tuesday morning. I am bathed is the scent of freshly baked croissants, sipping a foamy cappucino. I have the time to write a love note to a new favourite place filled with delectable spaces and faces.

I sit at an old wooden table on a chair with a crooked leg. Beside me sits my familiar black bag. Inside this bag is my passport. I am a million miles from home...

Feed Me

My hand has formed a blister. The tool handle has rubbed it so many times, it’s raw. My shoulders feel strong and warm from the heat of the sun that’s beating down on them right now. I am sitting - well, more like squatting – over a plot of dirt in my garden. This pathway is overgrown with thick weeds. They are all bright, lush and green, but tough now to get out. I rake through the earth with my hands and grab out great chunks of these weeds. I chuck a patch, which looks rather bizarrely like a toupee. I feel as though I am hurling a large, green scalp through the air. I get up and grab my hoe. I whack at another patch of ground. I am thinking about everything and nothing while I am in the garden. It is the Great Void.

I think about the muscles in my back and shoulders. I think about the blister. I think about The Past. The Future. The Present. I think about people I know and don’t know. I think about books. I think about patience and impatience. I think about the intensity of the colours that surround me. I think about travel and architecture. I think about love. I think about weeds. I think about flowers. I think about Important Things. I think about fashion. I think about money. I think about Life. I think about what all of these vegetables are going to taste like once every inch of the garden bed has been tended to and weeded and loved.

I am fascinated by the work my husband puts into charting the plot each year. While the ground still lays frozen, royal blue pen lines are set out like a maze on dirty pieces of graph paper. The garden is huge and was dug entirely by hand. There was hard work and love and sweat turned over and spread into that soil. I love how over the course of a few short months, this giant brown square slowly turns abundant and green. Like a stop-motion camera, some days you swear you can actually see the plants growing before your very eyes.

I walk through the rows and pull the weeds by hand. My toes find their way into the warm earth. There are streaks on my cheek that map exactly where a wayward hair has fallen. The sun continues to beat down on me and my sundress dips into the dirt at my feet. This garden brings me peace and makes me feel useful. I appreciate it just as much for feeding my heart as it does my belly.

It starts out slowly and requires some degree of patience, a lifelong skill that I still struggle with but am working on. You turn the soil and prepare the land and drop tiny seed specks into that ground and then...you wait. And you wait some more. You wait so long, you wonder if anything's ever going to actually pop out of the ground. You start to think all of that hard digging and work might have been futile. But then, one day, you wander over to the patch of brown and you see something green! A tiny emerald green sprout or tendril or stalk has found its way to the surface, and you realize that all of that hard work was worth something after all.

That one tiny speck of emerald green sets off a chain reaction. Suddenly, there is more green sprouting out of the brown and then more and more and then the whole thing takes on a life of its own and starts to grow upwards. Minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, the sleepy plot of land comes to life. The plants are suddenly an inch tall, then a foot, then as tall as a three-year-old. The green bits sprout white or yellow or pink flowers. The flowers sprout food. And there you have it - the abundance of what feels like an entire farmers' market is just outside your back door.

My garden reminds me of the importance of patience. I walk through the rows and mentally measure and note the differences since last time. I rub the dark green leaves of the tomato plants as I walk by and inhale that lovely smell. I see the tiny tomatoes sprouting and know it’s only a matter of time until they will be on every plate I eat off from morning until night. I swear I can taste the hard work which makes each taste that much sweeter. There are neighbourhoods of peas and beans and broccoli, onions and garlic, turnip, lettuce, carrots, basil, tomatoes, corn, watermelon.

The apple trees in the orchard beside currently have mini versions of what will soon be their adults selves. These too have been planted with love and plotted on a chart from the person who lived on this land before we came along. There are apples that are best for pies and apples that are best for sauce. Some are perfect for cooking while others are best crunched into practically straight off the branch. There are crabapples for cousins with a particular penchant for the tart. There are now two yellow plum trees and a cherry tree to add to our chart.

Summer will sadly eventually come to an end, and this garden will soon be just another nostalgic memory of summertime love. There will be crops that produce so much food I couldn't possibly stuff another one into me. These will be picked and cleaned and chopped and mingled and stuffed into Mason jars, ready to eat at a later date when both the temperature and the sun have dropped. My husband will pore over recipes and produce meals with these provisions worthy of a five-star restaurant. The vibrant hues. The earthy taste. The juicy flavours. None of it compares. We are spoiled.

My garden has become one of my favourite things since I moved out to this often foreign-seeming place. It's made me see a different side of myself: a side that can live off and respect the land. It requires a lot of work and a lot of patience, but it's worth it. I will have to make it through another long, cold winter before I can feel the warm dirt under my feet and the first taste of sweet peas on my tongue again. But I know it will be worth the long wait.

Someone told me once about a bug. It’s not the kind of bug you can catch and keep in a jar like I sometimes like to do. And it’s not like a flu kind of bug that sits in your tummy and makes you feel sick. I don’t know exactly what it looks like, but I imagine that it’s all the colours of the rainbow all put together and it’s beautiful and exotic. It doesn’t have one home; it’s all over the world. I’m told that people either catch it or they don’t, but if they do, it holds on tight and can stay with you forever.

I am eight years old. Mummy and Daddy just told me today that I will be going on a plane in two weeks. This is so super fantastic! The best news I have ever heard in forever and ever. I can’t sleep. I try real real hard, as hard as I can hard, but my head is buzzing around and around and it just won’t stop. I have never been on a real airplane before. Some of my friends have but only the really lucky ones. I get to fly all the way to England which is on the other side of the world. We have had visitors from England come and see us before but it’s never been the other way around. This is my first real time doing real traveling. I get to miss two whole weeks of school and I have to do a huge report in front of my whole class about my trip and what I learned when I’m back to make up for it, but I don’t care one bit because I get to fly on a plane! Through the sky! To the other side of the world! Up up and away…

Finally it’s two weeks later and the day is here that I never ever thought would actually come. We drive to the airport and wait for three long hours because Daddy is very prompt and pays attention to travelling rules and travelling rules say to arrive at the airport three hours before an international flight. Finally the electronic board flashes the right combination and the garbled voices over the PA system tell us that it’s our turn to go on the plane. This is it! The moment I’ve been waiting for! We walk through a weird tunnel that makes me feel as though I’m a little elf walking through a giant accordion and we’re greeted at the end of the giant accordion by a group of smiling people saying Welcome! and Straight ahead, Ma’am and Have a wonderful flight! Then we’re finally inside the plane and it’s gigantic. It’s not anything like what I pictured in my head. It’s so long that when I get on I can’t see the back and there are little numbers for all of the seats and smiling people and tired people and little cubbies for our belongings above our heads. A pretty lady wearing a uniform and bright red lipstick brings over a basket full of candies for us to chew so our ears don’t hurt and we eat food at a funny time and I’m still so super excited.

I’ve been excited for two whole weeks straight and I can’t believe that I’m really up in the air shooting through the sky right now. It doesn’t feel like we’re going as quickly as we really are, but in real life we’re really zooming. We’re going so far away that it will take hours and hours even though we’re zooming. There’s no other way of even getting there other than by boat but that would take days and days instead of hours and hours. I look out the window and we’re so high up in the sky that everything looks miniature down below and not very real. I wonder if the people down below are looking up at the sky when they hear our plane going over their backyard or their school or their work like I do when I’m down below and I hear a plane up above me. You can’t help but look, can you? I wave out the tiny window just in case anyone can see me. I hope they’re jealous that I am on a plane getting to have this adventure while they’re down there on the street doing their everyday things. And then we’re so high up that we can’t even see anything down below anymore.

We get to go and visit the pilots in the cockpit and see all of the bright lights and buttons they get to play with while we’re sitting in our seats eating peanuts and doing crosswords. Wow! I have no idea how they keep everything straight and know which button does what thing even though they explain a lot of it to us. There are clouds outside the windows with the little personal shutters and funny smells and lots and lots of different kinds of people all around. There are movies to watch and two floors but we can’t go in half of the plane because that’s where the people go that paid for privacy. I drink tomato juice and ginger ale and walk down the long aisles where I’m allowed to go to stretch my legs and I pee in the doll-sized metal bathrooms with the funny loud sounds. I wonder where my pee goes after I flush. I hope that’s not what really falls on my head when I’m down below on the ground and I think that it’s raining.

After a while, the lights get dim and Mummy tells me to close my eyes and go to sleep and rest because it’s a long journey and we have lots of things to do and people to see when we get there and I won’t want to be tired. I curl up tight like a shrimp and I’m so small I have made my body into a tiny circle on the airplane seat. Mummy says she wishes she was small enough to do that too and I try and try to sleep but I’ve never been very good at sleeping so while everyone else on the plane is fast asleep, I’m wide awake the whole time we’re in the sky. How can everyone else sleep through all of this excitement?!

After forever, we finally land with a giant thud when the wheels touch the ground. I forgot that the plane had wheels and it seems funny that when it’s on the ground it drives just like a really huge car and parks in a monster-sized parking space. We wait in a long line to get off the plane and then we wait in another huge line to speak to a very serious man behind a pane of glass who we have been warned not to make any jokes around and then we wait in another huge line and then our bags come around and around with everyone else’s on a giant conveyor belt and we have to check the tags to make sure we’re not walking off with someone else’s bag that just looks like our own. We see our relatives that I don’t really know very well because they’ve come to meet us from the plane because we never get to see them and so it’s a big deal. We all hug and tell them about our plane ride and we walk out the big sliding doors and get in Grandpa’s car.

The minute the engine starts I’m fast asleep, dreaming of my big adventure…

I didn’t feel it bite or anything, but I know I caught the bug. Oh yes, that’s its name: the Travel Bug.  I caught it for sure. I climb on its back and it spreads its beautiful multicoloured wings. It takes me on many adventures. It carries me to places that once lived only in my dreams. To the vineyards of Champagne, the streets of Vancouver, the canals of Amsterdam. To the edge of Germany, to family trips in Vermont, to the bars of Calgary. It takes me to gritty Manchester, to the shops of London, and to farms in Massachusetts. It takes me to dip my toes in the Maritime waters, the top of the Eiffel Tower, to the candy playground of Las Vegas. We sail through the bright lights and the deep countryside. There is so much more to see…