A Casual Absence

Anger manifesting as sadness seems impossible to shake without an outlet and so the rift widens and throbs between my brain and my eyes. I do not want to cry, seems melodramatic now after so many years. After 7 years. Maybe I feel like I should because at the time I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was at work at the café, bussing tables and pouring coffee, putting on a smile for the regulars whose happiness depends on the 5 minutes of cheer from the supporting cast of characters, the baristas, of their lives.

It’s the mid morning lull and I’m stacking saucers and folding half-read newspapers when I see a wallet sized photo of Aidan smiling back from the front page. I almost brush it off. He’s started some Terry Foxian marathon swim along the Trent Severn water way, I think, something athletic and philanthropic. Something totally wholesome and totally crazy, all at the same time. But then this villainous, horrific word. Slain. It punches me in the gut and for a moment I would like to collapse in a heap on the tiled floor but the door tinkles the arrival of more customers and I tuck the paper into the basket and put on a smile.

It has happened more than once now I live in the north. The inner panic, the absolute agony of being handed a gun. People up here think nothing of it, they fondle them casually and show them off like a new iphone. But the weight of it in my hand conjures horrifying images in my mind, images of flesh torn open and a heart beating blood on snow. In my mind he is always wearing white. It was his Halloween costume from a month before. The last time I saw him. I don’t even know what he was dressed as. A pirate? This billowy white blouse and a grin so wide and so gentle, with this slight awkward twinge like he was not yet completely comfortable with how absolutely beautiful he was.

He was a bit of a fringe character in my life. Always at the same parties, the same pubs. Two years behind me at our small Liberal Arts University and so somewhat of a little brother in my mind. An embarrassment of curls and eyelashes and mischievous grin, so a kid that was hard to miss. I was really down yesterday, bombarded with thoughts of sadness and anger at his violent, senseless end and my partner asked if Aidan had been my lover. I scoffed. Of course not. One does not need to have been in love with someone to mourn their death, to mourn their death years and years after the fact. And then it occurred to me. Aidan was the world’s lover.

As human beings our emotions are bonded to the casual presences in our lives in ways we don’t always realize. The Chinese woman you see on the subway on your way home from work, who one day is silently weeping and you have this urge to take her into your arms. The cheerful bank teller who is so efficient you wish she were slower if only to enjoy a few more moments of her pleasant company. And then there is the neighbor you see occasionally in the fleeting moments of gathering the mail and shoveling the driveway, a twinkling rare jewel of a neighbor who respects your privacy, and you theirs, and this silent agreement goes unnoticed, but is so integral to your peaceful existence on the planet.

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.

Jess is right. If you mashed the two of us together, gave us a guitar, some tits and an awesome voice, you would have LISSIE! (bottle of tequila optional)

salty mcnulty

wanted to shake you and scream that the high level of functioning you exhibit, despite the brick wall of debauchery around you makes me grieve everything extraordinary you are not accomplishing. and i don't even know you. i'm going to change your name to Doolots and beat the irishness out of you one of these days.

conflict-free ziptie

Got the news from my pseudo-hippie University roommate that she is engaged. She tells me her fiance made sure to ask for her if the diamonds were Canadian and conflict free. I guess everyone has to sleep at night somehow and if this is what works for them then, sure.

I don't have to worry about blood diamonds because my engagement ring is a ziptie. And, Yeah, the thing cops use to mass-cuff the cuttoff wearing "bystanders" at the g-15 whatever this summer.

Ziptie. At a planting camp these little buggers are indispensable. Especially when the supervisor, (my fiance) becomes so enamored by the cook (me) that he decides to lock down her and her meal-making abilities for good. I was eating water-mellon on my cook shack porch waiting for muffins to rise when he came back to camp to get something and that's when it happened...

Enough about me. So, I went to tell the news to my other best friend from university but i dawdled because she is not yet engaged and has been with her boyfriend since forever. And yeah, I admit, if i wasn't engaged I would probably, deep down, be pissed to hear this news just as i am secretly ticked when i find out people are pregnant ("accidental" pregnancy really pisses me off especially as i do not believe it is possible but more on this later) so I'm still talking about me. So, yeah, I probably just ruined my other friends day... but the news had to come to her somehow. Sorry blondie...