this is a character i have a hard time writing but when i do it ends up being way more authentic than when i try to write any of the male characters.
Fiction Alert!
I am not supposed to be pregnant. No. Especially, I am not supposed to be pregnant and painting. Where is the inspiration coming from now? Cigarettes, drugs and booze were my muse. A lot of people, men people, the ones in bands, think it's the music. No. Music is what I used to smoke during the breaks from cigarettes, drugs and booze. Now all I've got is the music and the emptiness where vice used to be and it occurs to me that music is not that bad and emptiness is okay once you tarnish it somehow with the dirt of life experience.
The attic of the B and B is no longer cold like it used to be. Byron spent the first part of September - after the tourists left and before I returned - insulating my studio. Perhaps to ensure I never leave again like I did last fall. It's too warm now but I can't tell him this. It is stifling. I open the window and the air and the sounds of outside are invited in and a little bit of my soul is allowed out. The music is different somehow now too, not better or worst, just different.
The music is distracting, yes. When you listen to familiar fingers making sounds against the guitar and know you have made similar sounds under similar circumstances, with those exact fingers, and you start to sway with brush in hand and you picture yourself as you once were, mistress-home-wrecker to guitar-wife.. you feel guilty and this guilt becomes shape and colour on canvas. It isn't a bad thing. and when you start to get the impression the music is painting through you and you feel phony for just a second when you paint the sound of his voice orange and wonder if you should worry about offending him, or worst, flattering him.
I place the brush upside down in the jar, wipe my hands down the front of my belly and make an attempt at finding an album of music consisting of a band free of past lovers, real or imagined, and it is a difficult task. I settle for Janice Joplin. Of course it is impossible to not be nostalgic when the future holds nothing but the impossibility of kinetics and the promise of pain. And Janice Joplin reminds me of the summer I just had and the boy who, unbeknown to him, changed everything about my future while fighting hard to forget his own past...
Sunday, July 3, 2011
solar eclipse
could i sit here and pretend i knew what he was thinking all those years ago, on the bottom bench of the orange lacquered bleachers of our squeaky, high school gym, scared and drenched in his own sweat?
i suppose i could. i suppose i don't need to pretend.
the boy who should have grown up next to us but his daddy was afraid to stick him in a taxi to send him off to the school across town, his dad convinced all taxi drivers were child molesters. the boy who started high school with us at the public school but after a short while transfered to the catholic school because their basketball program was way better, and he would get more exposure playing with a better team, get a free ride to university, which was probably true, and probably happened.
now he is grown and teaching school in a town i lived in only a few years back, living around the corner from my old flat, eating the same pizza and jogging the same riverside trails.
and whenever we return to the town where we grew up, at the same time, tucking ourselves in the awkward spaces of our childhood homes, we escape to the same bars with the same group of friends and acquaintances. like that Christmas he came back from Asia with all that hair and exuberance and I couldn't stop staring at him and it was too late because that boy on the bench had grown up and so had i, and our lives, when they did overlap, only overlapped for the briefest of moments, like a solar eclipse, and not enough for anything more than a vague acquaintance and a few isolated conversations, a handful a decade, where he dazzles me, having grown tall and learned to curb the teenage stink, and where perhaps, if i am lucky, i dazzle him too.
i suppose i could. i suppose i don't need to pretend.
the boy who should have grown up next to us but his daddy was afraid to stick him in a taxi to send him off to the school across town, his dad convinced all taxi drivers were child molesters. the boy who started high school with us at the public school but after a short while transfered to the catholic school because their basketball program was way better, and he would get more exposure playing with a better team, get a free ride to university, which was probably true, and probably happened.
now he is grown and teaching school in a town i lived in only a few years back, living around the corner from my old flat, eating the same pizza and jogging the same riverside trails.
and whenever we return to the town where we grew up, at the same time, tucking ourselves in the awkward spaces of our childhood homes, we escape to the same bars with the same group of friends and acquaintances. like that Christmas he came back from Asia with all that hair and exuberance and I couldn't stop staring at him and it was too late because that boy on the bench had grown up and so had i, and our lives, when they did overlap, only overlapped for the briefest of moments, like a solar eclipse, and not enough for anything more than a vague acquaintance and a few isolated conversations, a handful a decade, where he dazzles me, having grown tall and learned to curb the teenage stink, and where perhaps, if i am lucky, i dazzle him too.
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