Glimpse

If we are surrounded by death so too in our understanding by madness. – Ludwig Wittgenstein

I am 14, on a bench in Montreal with my brother. It’s summer here and the weather is soothing, cool air finally washing over our suntanned faces after so many months near the equator. We buy three tallboys from a corner store and drink them in a park near the river; people stare at us. A lady in a pink visor wrinkles her nose and puts on jet-black aviators. Inside the beer can, there is a ping pong ball. I rattle the can. Later googling the open container laws on my flip phone and become suddenly aware of our ignorance. We are in Montreal on account of my mom’s job. She often applies to conferences that allow us to travel and stay in hotels all expenses paid. She goes off and presents her work to other like-minded individuals around the US and Canada. We skirt the edges of whatever city we’ve found ourselves in.

Washington D.C. it’s 2014. I leave the hotel where my mom and brother are sound asleep at 12am to wander the city alone. A homeless man is sleeping across from our hotel and I’m worried because snow fell the night before and 17 people died, frozen, homeless. I rage alone and watch his chest floating up and down under layers of blanket, the steam from his breath rising around the top of the covers, but I’m too scared to speak to him. To ask if he needs help. Instead, I go to an all-night café/bar/bookstore and order coffee, flipping through the pages of Civil Disobedience and not finding any answers for fury. In my head, I repeat the phrase looking is the opposite of action, looking is the opposite of action.

I’m 18, North of Halifax, Nova Scotia. I learn that Halifax was the last stop on the Underground Railroad. This makes me think of the Chunnel, transference, codes, dissection, warm thunderstorms, organizing bodies, a body of text, language as it is vs. language as it will be, the body of the reader, the body of an author shouting into the void, a landscape resonating the whole fucked up story. Now, deep in the Canadian wilderness, it’s late December and there’s a new foot of snow every night. Outside of the house one morning- it’s quiet, the way things are quiet in the country. They only appear so for a moment. Then you learn to listen for the small noises. I open the door to go out for a cigarette and notice there are two large deer with full, oak-brown winter coats gnawing at something in the snow. I spark the lighter. They scamper away barely making a sound. I go inside and make coffee, and look out the window for a spell. There’s a path to the train tracks by our house and the lake beyond has frozen. A blizzard comes in the night and trees break, falling across the street onto a telephone wire. I wake up thinking it’s Hurricane Charlie. We lose power. I drink four whiskies cause the wind screeching all night makes me anxious, creeping up and down the stairs. The trees tap on the windows. I say four whiskies but what I mean is I sip out of a bottle repeatedly without measure. On the train tracks, days later, walking to get cigarettes, I have to go over a small bridge that passes above a river. I throw the biggest rock I can find down onto the ice to see if I can break the surface of it. Then while crossing the bridge I look down at the water that runs below. It’s brown and grey and will instantly knock me out from sheer cold if I fall in. I’m a strong swimmer but I know I stand no chance if I misstep. The plats are a foot apart and I have to hop slightly to get to each one. My heart thumps. I go fast to keep myself from shaking. A huge flock of birds takes off over the lake and all around me I hear them flapping their black wings.

2017 in Seattle, it’s summer again and hot. The days are O so long. We flew from Miami up here to this corner, that’s the bottom right corner of the states to the top left. We came for Pride and I wear a pink planned parenthood t-shirt to the parade that was awarded to me by an ex who’s now a policymaker at PP. It started with activism, what’ll it end with? It seems inappropriate to wear the t-shirt but I wear it anyway cause it’s the only shirt I have that suggests I’m ‘on their side’. There’s a happy ending but not without mistakes and pain, joy, and horror too. There is an entire city of homeless folks in Seattle and they set up tents under a bridge near the center of town. I hear some of them have jobs that pay over 70k. While driving on the highway I turn to my left and see one of these people shitting outside of their tent, their home. It seems like an endless stream. I wonder how this can happen in a country that has so many empty houses just waiting to be sold, and then I rethink my thought. Days later, I wake up on a lawn across from a house where Jimi Hendrix once lived. I feel everything. The sun, the wind, my head, my cells, there’s a weight to it all. My sleep schedule is off. On my way back to the house, I count the meth lab explosions in the neighborhood, 5, 6, 7, 12. So many charred living rooms. I find it beautiful. I see something in the living room’s of the deceased, and I can’t say what it is but it’s not like in here, I point at my chest, it’s something I don’t want to run from.