YOUNG HEARTS ONLY LOVE / CALL IT A LESSON.

this is only about 'on hold' by the xx in the sense that it has been the soundtrack to a month of downward spiralling.

i may delete this, but for now:

Scrawled on my bathroom mirror, in glass-paint marker, are the words You are beautiful.

Aw.
Cute, huh?
An affirming, fuck your standards mantra. Wake up in the morning and feel like shit? No makeup can hide the exhaustion on your face? Well, honey, don't you fret -- beauty is a construct, and it's subjective, and darling, you walk out and own the world because you got it anyway: we are all beautiful!

Listen:

I am not beautiful.


I'm a 7 on my best days; for about a year in my 20s I verged on an 8. I'm not fat, not thin; some lighting or angles make me look better than others. And yeah, I hate it, too -- when ok-looking girls bitch about individual body parts not living up to expectations, but that's not what I'm getting at here. I know I'm not ugly. I'm not fishing for compliments. My point is simply that, as a whole person: I am not attractive.

It's strangely empowering to write it down. Like an actual fuck your standards statement -- not one that panders to my narcissism, assures me I have enough aesthetic capital to face the day. Nah -- that's all bullshit, and it only gets worse as we women get older. We spend so much emotional effort (and time, and money) trying to emulate a person we never actually were, except in our most self-deluded moments. What am I trying to get back to? I was never beautiful.

You know what I was, though?

I was full.Every emotion I had shattered me. I felt it all, with a depth I don't know I was even aware of at the time -- but when I look back, fuck. I vibrate outwards.

12 years ago I was overweight, hair a frizzy mess with too much gel, black eyeliner designs all over my face. I would have, still would, barked out a laugh if you'd told me anyone had looked at me twice. I was invisible. And I didn't fucking care. I mean, yeah, I cared; I wished I was pretty, but it didn't consume me -- I had no basis for comparison. All I knew was that invisibility. But I had this...inner self. Who rose violently, at that time.

And fuck:

She was beautiful. Gorgeous.
Hard 10.
This girl was goddamn riveting.
But: no one else could see her.

You're getting to that "your inner self is what's beautiful" bullllllshit, aren't you, Jill?

Nah -- the opposite. Because you, reading this, or anyone who knows me in real life, will never know how beautiful that girl was. Is, because she's still with me, as much of a "girl" as a prism living inside a person can be.

And I used to wish what people saw on the outside matched what I felt on the inside. But: you know that garbage we're fed about people being most "beautiful" when they're talking about something they love? Fuck that. Passion is ugly. If you take a picture of someone when they're talking about their loves, it'll get a fast delete.

Look: I'm tired of deluding myself. I'm so goddamn tired of trying to reflect how I look into my head onto my body. The fact is -- I never look "beautiful," and at no time in my life could I genuinely have been described that way.

But those past prisms of myself: ugly, invisible, vibrating with intensity ------ I love them.
I love those girls so much it rends my heart in pieces.

18-year-old Jill, chubby in an oversized David Bowie sweatshirt, alone on the bus in December, heading downtown to Christmas shop with a Lindsay Lohan CD in her Discman.
Grade 10 Jill, with 5 of the same pair of pants cycling every day because she felt so self-conscious shopping, staying up too late and writing song after song to sublimate some, any, of what she was feeling.
28-year-old Jill, confident in front of the classroom and sobbing in her car because her hair didn't look right.

All of these girls were so fucking loved and they had no goddamn idea. No concept that the 30-year-old version of themselves would be looking back on their fashion naivete, their terrible makeup, their extra flesh and thin hair,

and giving
absolutely
zero
fucks.
Because these girls were prisms.
Reflecting everything exploding inside them.
Often heartbroken. Sometimes ecstatic. But always remembered. Incessantly loved.



I think.
We spend.
A lot of time hoping people will love us.
Some of us think this happens because we look the way we used to or the way a symmetrical slender doll would. Some because of the success we attain, or the relationships we cultivate. Fame. Recognition. A glance on the street, a promotion: they amount to the same thing ---------- someone noticed.

But I notice.
And one day. As unattractive as I know I am. As devastated and lost as I feel these days.

I know I will look back on this version of myself and see her
strength.
bravery.
intensity.
experience.

and love her.

I am not beautiful.
But it doesn't fucking matter.



Because I am a prism. I will be a prism.
And I feel it all.

'True Disaster' / Tove Lo

True Disaster

Tove Lo

Come home.

Shit.

Red wine and weed off you in waves.

You know when you sit, at the end of the night, and stare: in ways maybe you shouldn't really be indulging -- in ways you sort of feel gross about -- in ways you thought you'd left behind. Something about the vibe is wrong. The music left you underwhelmed; conversation left you quiet. 

You weren't the pity invite. But you shouldn't be there.

I want to type "What is a vibe?" or something to that effect, but there are faces in my head. Rolling eyes. Sideways glances. Literal steps away so they can't hear you speak. You think you leave this behind in high school, and then you end up teaching it.

Fuck it.

Verbal communication is vicious. As an entity, I mean: only one person can speak at a time. The more people engage, the less information or relevance comes across, and how pointless is one person? Without end, without reason: irrelevant. So no wonder you pull it aside, choose different forms, and work within the parameters that make sense on your terms. But I can't fathom them. I can't bond that way.

What do you do, can I ask that? I'm not asking to be rude. I genuinely want to know. But if I ask, there will be a judgmental gaze (can you believe she has to ask? why can't she just do?), and I will never get an answer that works on my terms.

I want to know. I want to know why I can't broach it, why I'm sitting at 2am on a Friday staring at my computer, listening to Tove Lo, trying to parse my understanding of this.  I can't be cool; is that what I want to hear? If so, well shit -- I'm only telling myself. Yell it from the rooftops, darling: you're thirty, you're desperate for your twenty-something nights -- you know, the ones where you got home at 3 and cracked another bottle, sat on your balcony and watched people stumble into bushes to vomit  ------ oh, nostalgia. And you thought you were old then.

I age. I come to terms. Sometimes with how unrealistic my expectations are. 

I can't be anything to you. And it's not because you are better than me or vice versa. It's purely and equivocally because I'm incapable of faking it. And christ, let me goddamn tell you, I could, friendship, oh I fucking could. Once upon a time I was the queen of it, darling --- I owned bullshit. But I no longer see that point.

So where does that leave me? 

Honest.
With that voice in the back of my mind, reminding me of all this goddamn shit I thought I'd...

But you never leave it behind, do you?

Those heartstrings.

I mean, this night, this conversation, will die in my mind. This particular event, these particular people -- no worries, no issues ------ I won't recall, in a year.

So why do I keep doing this to myself?

What am I really getting out of this?

Zero fucks about it.

Goodnight.

More, soon.

'Stockholm (Parade of Lights Remix)' / New Division

Stockholm (Parade of Lights Remix)
New Division

Last July I woke up late on a Sunday, after a close friend's amazing bachelorette party. And oh you know those mornings: hangover of a particular kind -- no regret all memory, nauseous but no headache, nerve endings hypersensitive, emotional soup. I was vibrating, literally and figuratively. And I lay in bed for a few hours, feeling. Quietly. Reading. And feeling.

I was living alone, so when I mustered the strength to get out of bed and put on coffee -- no thought about recounting the stories from the night before (yes I rode the bull, to Blink 182 no less!, and the wine glass I painted has the Fibonacci sequence all over it). I've only ever lived solo for about 2 months last year and it's a strange memory -- placeless, almost, transient. I felt like I was on the brink.

I was on the brink.

Coffee in hand, stomach recoiling at the thought of food, I stumbled back into my room and turned on my computer. Sipped. iTunes. I was really into Parade of Lights at the time -- put on Can't Have You as I scrolled through Tumblr, posting self-indulgently. I remember lifting my hand from the mouse and watching it visibly shake.

 i can't really process reality right now, I wrote, and everything feels so intense but there is nowhere to put it. 

So I shook.

Posted the song on Facebook because that's what I do when music has a hand in overwhelming me.

And an old classmate from an acting class commented "Find their remix of 'Stockholm' by New Division.'

Well fucking hell, that didn't help, did it.

I shook.

What is it that takes emotion from the chemicals in your brains out into the tips of your fingers, the core of your gut; makes your eyes roll back in your head, your heart flare, your bones ache? Scientifically, it's supposed to have something to do with your anterior insular cortex -- and as with all brain areas, everyone's works differently, so I can only speak for myself.

But fuck: those days, those moments, where something in the fabric of reality slips and I feel the entire universe in my bloodstream -- what am I supposed to do? Where do I put that? It's not necessarily directed at anyone. It's not necessarily something that can manifest physically -- but my body does its best, she tries, and more often than not I feel like I'm going to levitate or fucking explode, I don't know. If we're gonna value-judge, it's the best I ever feel -- but also the most frustrated. Where does this go?

Sometimes I write through it, or make art, to give voice or face to it. And sometimes I dance, and that helps, because often this is caused by or paired with a song --

-- like goddamn fucking Stockholm.

I had nowhere to put it. No words. No images. I was too hungover to jump up and dance. But I was struck, cell to cell, and so: I shook.

I got my first tattoo on Monday: a little ampersand on my right outer ankle.

I've been wanting it for years but couldn't pick a font, couldn't pick a time, couldn't commit. But something has shifted in the course of the year, since I listened to Stockholm hungover on a hot July afternoon in 2015. And one of my diamonds was in town and said I'm getting a tattoo done while I'm here -- Jill, you should get your ampersand, and I barely hesitated and replied okay. yes. let's do it.

Tattoos don't have to mean anything, but this one does. Among many things -- it's a reminder that there is always something more -- another interpretation, possibility, option. Absolutely nothing is static.

But when you cut the cord you cut me all up inside.

I am sitting at my computer, sipping coffee, on a hot July afternoon, listening to the same song I listened to a year ago.

Not hungover. Not shaking. & -- the same and new things on my mind, shifted interpretations of the words. But still intensely feeling, and I still have nowhere to put it.

We're falling down.

'Butterfly on a Wheel' / The Mission UK

Butterfly on a Wheel 

The Mission UK

W. G. Sebald talks about the invisible subject: that topic, that thing, we find so pressing, so permeating, that we never stop thinking about it (even when we're not thinking about it). We may not even be aware it exists -- but it does; it's constantly vibrating at the depths of us. We explore and talk around it, try to define it, craft our entire world around it. Our invisible subject, whatever it is, drives our decisions and our lives in ways that only make sense in retrospect.

My invisible subject, as far as I can figure, is passion.

It takes on various manifestations, and turns me on to various conversations. Creativity, friendship, education, literature and music itself ----- but behind it all there is this fucking necessity to define Passion. To feel Passionate. To be emPassioned at every moment. I know it's unrealistic, I don't care -- intellectually, emotionally, it all comes back to passion.

Relatedly.

Today I am thinking about love.

Attempts to define love inevitably fail. I try to show my gr. 9s this when I teach Romeo & Juliet -- which is not, incidentally, a love story -- but that's kind of the point. We create these comically idealistic representations and try to fit them under a comically small umbrella term: love. Even the qualifying terms we have are pathetically insufficient: platonic, romantic, familial. The Ancient Greeks tried slightly harder, but 6 types is just as inadequate. Current sexuality discourse is all up in queerplatonic relationships, trying to bridge or widen the gap between romantic and platonic as befits each individual case, but guys I think we're all missing the fucking point.

Love is infinite.

And when I say that, I don't mean ~my love for you is infinite~ though the fact that we try to spatially define love probably says a fair bit about our culture. How-ever. What I mean by love is infinite is that I feel a different, particular, kind of  overwhelming intensity for every person who means anything to me. For every interaction with any of these people. Ad infinitum. And I hesitate to call any of it love, proper, because I'm starting to think the term doesn't apply.

Here's my issue: we smile in kindergarten and we're told oh yeah that's 'happy' -- you feel happy. Point to the smiley face, learn your feelings, memorize those sociolinguistic codes. Ignore, or put aside, the fact that your experience of happiness is likely completely different from every other person's. This is true of every emotion, and you may not even have to compare yourself to someone else: when I miss my sister, I feel it in the base of my fingernails; when I miss my best friend, I feel it in the center of my torso. Why? Because they're different people, and I can't help but feel them differently.

I don't know where I can go with this. So much of this entire thing -- the invisible subject generally -- is inarticulable. But I am frustrated, I am done, with this idea that romantic love supersedes all else. I don't even think romantic love exists, at least not in the way we codify and delineate it. I think you choose a partner, if monogamy's your thing, and then: the feeling you get from them is a feeling you need. Differently, but not necessarily more intensely, than what you feel & need for & from other people.

My frustration stems from the fact that:

- when I say I love you it doesn't cover anything that I actually want to say.
I can't express, none of us can; so we grasp at metaphors, nicknames, lines of literature or songs that slip into our guts and spiral. They aren't enough. But these names, these metaphors, are all we have, and so we keep trying to twist our tongues around them, trying to get across how profoundly you matter, how constantly you are present, how deeply I feel.

- when I say I love you it isn't what I want to say at all.

And I only want metaphors, because trying to catch everyone under one blanket term is fucking damaging. Why is a first 'I love you' to a boyfriend more important than the first to a friend? Why are we forced to say it to family members we don't know when we don't actually feel it? Three words that don't mean anything at goddamn all if you're going to splay them around like that.

- I love you is all I ever want to say.

And if I say it, I mean it, I mean it profoundly: I do love you, because love fucking seethes in me; I am absolutely full of it. I want you to know that: that if I have told you I love you, I do, with every piece of my heart. But that scares people off, see; for so many, love is something to be rationed, to be delicately parceled out at an opportune moment. Sometimes it feels like people experience love with boundaries, limits. I do not experience this; I do not understand this. I love resolutely, completely, and quicker than limits would appreciate.

- when I say I love you there is always the worry it will be taken the wrong way.

Because it's not enough. As an expression, it's not enough. Three fucking words to express the grandest passions of the human experience?! Please. And I don't love you like that, trust me: I love you like flame, like ocean, like cells and supernovae. There is no place to put this feeling, no action to complete it: it is boundless within me, pulsing through every vein, but it stays there. And I say "I love you" to try to get it out, to hope you understand -- it's not physical, it's not typical, it's barely even emotional -- it's another category altogether, one I don't think we've defined. And whether you understand or not, I am rife with it. But that's all.

- love is not the right word.

It's just not. And I think that covers all of it: I don't feel love. Not how I'm told I should be feeling it. I feel explosion, violence, magic, thrumming fire, atoms splitting, time spiralling, cells rearranging. And for every person, it is unique, and certainly more intense for some. But: when I say I love you it is a bald lie and a vehement truth. Simultaneously. Every time.

And the year ends again.

Love breaks the wings of a butterfly on a wheel.

'Miss World' / Neverending White Lights

Miss World
 Neverending White Lights

I grew up in a forest. 

Acres and acres of trees stretching out from my backyard, I used to shout at the top of my lungs just to see if anyone would answer back. No one ever did. I mean we had neighbours, I’m sure they heard – but in my little girl brain, I was alone. And this forest, as far as I was concerned, was infinite.

My father cleared a winding path through the forest – skirting deep ravines, forking so I could jump over a creek and my sister could stay on solid ground (or vice versa). Vaguely, I remember him coming in from working on it – covered in dirt, sweat-soaked, exclaiming about some rock he’d just maneuvered out of the way. Dusk, the sun setting; the fresh, rich scent of beech trees filtering in on the breeze.

Vaguely, I remember this.

I turn thirty in two days. And my friends: the nostalgia is hitting hard.

Turning a new decade is two things: a) completely arbitrary and b) completely significant. Like, it doesn’t matter that we’ve been around for another ten years – I won’t change that much between the last day of being 29 and the first of being 30. In some ways, I haven’t changed that much since turning 20.

But in other ways, oh my fucking god, yes I have.

And the thought of marking it – of looking in the mirror and saying to myself okay, my girl, let’s reflect – is permeating. But how – how – do you even begin?

You go for a walk.

So today, I went for a walk.

It started with picking up sticks. It’s finally spring in Montreal, and we had a windy fucking winter, so the beech trees at my mom’s had a goddamn field season with cracking apart. So: time to clear the front lawn. 

Golden sunlight, warm air, t-shirt. Headphones. Naked trees – too early for buds just yet. And I hadn’t been in the forest in years I can’t even explain why I hadn’t I don’t know that there are words for why but my legs were going on their own

and I was walking.

I forgot the book I’m reading at home this weekend, so I was digging around my dad’s old bookshelf for something to accompany my coffee on Saturday morning. I pulled out Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, and in the introduction, there’s a comment about the immense mythic power present in nature. And fair the fuck enough. I’ve had a few seriously damn potent moments this past year looking up at the stars in remote locations (Otter Lake, central Vermont, Whitehorse). Nothing moves me like that, and it’s not about feeling small like people so often say when staring up at vast expanses of sky ----- it’s about feeling complete. Whole. Centered. Say what you will about the heliocentric model – our lives run on our own perspectives. We are the center of our respective universes; don’t for a second think that we’ve moved past that.

And you look up at the stars or you start out into the forest and baby, simultaneously, congruently, you are irrelevant and you are everything.

I have a lot of memories centered on my old house. Most of them, as with most of my memories more generally, I can’t express. I’ve described myself as someone who lives in poems, not stories – and I mean okay obviously I actually live for stories, but – if you looked into my brain, only poetry could make sense of it. I have no anecdotes. I am not linear.

But I tried to follow the path my dad, decades ago, carved through our forest. That, too, though, was a winding jumble. So: I wandered.

And childhood hit me, curious and precocious, hungry for more and desperate to experience beyond my means.

And high school hit me, endless in its ferocity, a girl who painted herself black and vibrated with bliss and rage in equal measure.

And cegep hit me, when I was so full of vitriol and education and joy inside that what people saw on the outside barely touched me. 

And university hit me, and stayed with me, awhile, as I paused to sit on the edge of a steep ravine.

It would be easy to describe 2008 as the turning point! the beginning of something new! when i started to come into my own! and yes it was all of those things but that cheapens it, as it cheapens any year that everything fucking changes. You can’t express that in words. There aren’t words. You barely realize it as you’re living it. You just grasp the railing as hard as you can, or let go, or you do both at the same time and fly while you crash. 

Ah, exactly: 2008 was flight and chaos.

In April, I was more than I’d ever been, because I’d returned to myself. And oh you’re rolling your eyes now; it’s cliche, isn’t it? But how do you describe it, honestly? Do you say this was April 2^nd, 2008 – perfect spring heat, one of the last classes of your undergrad, literally goddamn skipping down the street because your entire body was prisming with explosive light: you were home, again. Drinking a bottle of amaretto with grenadine and 7up, blasting Pink Floyd and Neverending White Lights and mashups of Umbrella, watching and reading and writing and dancing and falling in love until you couldn’t breathe –

And don’t you dare knock girls who take selfies, because this is exactly what I looked like, then, and thank god I have it to remember:

Flight and chaos. I was whole.

And in the forest today, I sat, saturated with memory. With everything I felt when I first listened to Miss World, to every song from April 2^nd, from afterwards, from that entire year, from every year I have lived, all of them to the best of my ability.

I walked home. Following the path as best I could.

Sat on the deck with the beech trees creaking and

I don’t know that it’s valuable to look back on what you expected for yourself as a child. I hope, anyway, that your naivete shifts – that different things matter. I certainly don’t think I expected the life I have now, at 30, as a little girl setting out on the forest path her father painstakingly laid.

I know I wanted to be a professor, and I’m not. But I teach high school and I love it, most days, and I get to talk about books that I love and never worry about them being valvulotomized. I can exclaim about a beautiful quotation and just that – not its significance, not write an irrelevant paper on it, just love that it is gorgeous and discuss the beauty of words.

I know I wanted to be a fancy lawyer living in Toronto, and I’m not. But I’ve had a series of beautiful apartments and beautiful roommates in Montreal, and the reasons that I wanted that life have faded with experience and time.

I know that I wanted to have a lot of friends, and I do, though they’re more spread out than I’d like – but they are diamonds, as I’ve said, and my younger self would be jealous.

I know that I expected my father to be here, and he’s not. But my mother is, and my sister, and my cousin, and my aunts and uncles, and they are worth a million fears and uncertainties and questions because they are boundlessly supportive, endlessly inspiring.

I know that I used to make the same wish on birthday candles, every time. And it was that something would always stop my heart – those exact words. Chosen carefully.

And while realistically, I am no more successful or flawed than any other 30-year-old ----

my heart skips beats, now more than ever.

I’ve made my bed, 
I’ll lie in it.

'Take Me Out' / Franz Ferdinand

Take Me Out

Franz Ferdinand

I have this theory that things resonate backwards.

Okay relax, science people, I know ---- time must move forward; entropy requires it have a one-way direction. But come on: you can't tell me there hasn't been a moment in your past so perfectly timed, so perfectly setting up something in the future, that it seemed goddamn fictional.

Foreshadowing -- real life foreshadowing -- except an author knows where it's going, knows that it's building. We non-fictional characters sit with our memories and say, "Huh, if only we'd known how important this was going to be later!"

But maybe, on some level, we do know.
Maybe the moment everything means most -- that pinnacle of emotion where you love something so desperately you can't breathe -- that moment: that moment resonates backwards and forwards through time, calling us to love what we love, even if it doesn't make sense at the time.
You could say it's the reverse, of course; that the initial love reverberates through our futures.

But I don't know.
Maybe time needs a direction, but I don't know that our experience of it does.

Some random afternoon in April 2008, I was sitting at a Starbucks on Ste-Catherine, studying for one of the last exams of my BA. It was nice out, I think; I might have been drinking tea. The specifics of memory fade after 8 years.

But I do remember that period of my life -- April & May, 2008 -- as where I would want to spend eternity. I can't describe why, or at least -- I could never explain it. Suffice to say I was 21, on the threshold of something immense, and I felt like the universe was prisming out of my heart. Everything changed, that year -- chief among them my relationships.

I've written about friendship and how it took me ages to figure out what the hell it actually was -- well, this was when it started. Birthdays, see, had never really been a huge deal for me. I liked marking the date with a few friends, but it'd been years since I'd had an actual party.

But of late, I'd been hanging out quite a bit with this girl Meg.

Now, to describe Meg would be equally impossible, so I'll just say this: she is the kind of person who matters. Profoundly. If you meet her, you know her -- she is larger than life, and if she's on your side, the room is yours.

So Meg and I'd been going dancing on Friday nights at a bar called Saph. Two floors: downstairs, a DJ who goes by Plastik Patrik spun alternative chaos; upstairs, goth and industrial. We'd dress in corsets and show up early, then own the dancefloor until 3am. More often than not, it was the two of us -- makeup going from flawless to melted, discovering or shouting out song after song, kicking our steel-toed boots and spinning in circles.

And there I sat, staring at my notes and wondering what the fuck I was going to do for my birthday in a couple weeks, and suddenly Take Me Out blared out my headphones and if I could explain anything in words I would, but -----------

I was overcome. My cells exploded.
I wanted to dance so badly.
It was all I wanted to do. At that moment, for my birthday, ever.

So I instantly texted Meg. Thinking of going to Saph for my birthday, would you be in?

Breath held. I needed her to say yes. I didn't care if anyone else could make it: if she was there, it'd be lightning.

And almost instantly, she answered. Fuck yeah!

My 22nd birthday was one of the best nights of my life.

Fast forward 8 years.

Saph has closed. Studying for finals is a distant nightmare. The friendships that were just budding back then have had time to solidify and spin across the country.

But Meg's still here, and she's still larger than life. Our friendship is, too. And we're both turning 30, her in March, me in April. You know what we should do for our 30th birthdays, one of us said, over drinks at 28, is host a dance party, like recreate Saph, and just lose our shit.

And as I said: you want Meg on your side, when you have an idea like that.

Because that's exactly what we fucking did.


We scouted locations. And we talked to Plastik Patrik. And we got decorations and food and art and games and we strolled into O Patro Vys on April 1st, right in between our respective 30th birthdays, and we set up the venue for our huge fucking dance party.


As seems to be the theme of this: there are no words for Friday night. If I tried, it would have to be a novel, or a string of violently ecstatic adjectives, some of which I've made up for the occasion. It was 70 people in a room dancing; it was dozens of heartfelt messages and embraces; it was people from every walk of our lives; it was screaming laughter and spinning in circles and losing our shit. It was electric, blissful, chaotic. It was firespun.

And there was a moment, around midnight -- surrounded by most of the people I love best in the entire world -- when the dancefloor was full. The air was crackling. And the opening chords of Take Me Out pressed out from the speakers.

 And Meg and I caught each other's eyes and, without words, grabbed hands, and ran up onstage.


And looked out at everyone we fucking adore.


And as that inimitable build-up starts around 0:40, we started stomping and raising our fists. With everyone on the dancefloor following our lead, exploding into a sea of hands and upturned faces.

And when the key changed, Meg and I linked arms and lost our shit. The two of us. All of us. Everyone we loved, there or absent -- everything we'd felt in our 30 years -- all of it. Chaos.

And it was absolutely fucking perfect.

So I have this theory that things resonate backwards.

'Thursday's Child' / David Bowie

Thursday's Child
David Bowie

Initially, I didn't want to say anything. Didn't want to mark this date. Didn't feel I had anything to add to the thousands of articulate, insightful tributes. And I don't have anything to add, or at least, nothing that hasn't been said.

But I am heartbroken.

And I am grieving.

And while so many people are experiencing this grief today -- that does not lessen mine.

A glass of red wine raised: I remember.

I remember May, lush and green; grade 5 rushing to its end, summer stretching endlessly in front of us. My father, in the habit of renting old movies to force upon us on Friday nights, brought home Labyrinth. Had he known he'd be forced to rent it again every weekend for the next six months -- I'm sure he would have...but he might've thought twice.

I knew, I still know, every line by heart. On a windowsill in my childhood bedroom -- even now -- are individual letters cut from seventeen to ransom-note a line from As the World Falls Down:  "We're choosing the path between the stars / I'll lead my love between the stars." That was my first favourite song, proper -- the first song I claimed as mine, the first song that clenched inextricably around my heart. I was 11. He had a nice voice. I had no idea.

I remember February, scribbling in notebooks, a sacred, rare newspaper clipping of an Earthling promo shot safely tucked inside: 13 and realizing what music could do. My journal must be incomprehensible: rambling crushings, oh god I am in love with him oh my god; rambling insight, this song is me this song is everything I've ever thought; rambling dreams. I rarely spoke, then, about how much I adored him. It was too potent, too much, to share -- I worried that no one would understand.


But he permeated everything.

I remember March, quietly melting under pale sunshine; my last year of high school. Riven, raw with adolescent intensity, I wanted to explode. There was a boy or there was a test or there was a Grave Injustice Being Done To Humanity -- I felt it all and nothing made it better.

And then spring began to crush winter, and I remembered him, as I always remember him in spring -- and I tied up our family phoneline downloading as much as I could. Spring 2003 is unassailable, in my heart: it vibrated through me, perfect and heartbreaking, and with a constant Bowie soundtrack. I heard Low and I carried it with me, safely in the core, the gut, of who I was: today, Subterraneans plays and I am in London, Ontario for a karate symposium, on the verge of possibility, curled under blankets on the hotel floor with my Discman, body on fire.

I cannot separate myself from this girl who furiously railed against everything but David Bowie: who desperately clung to the honesty and beauty in his words; who watched his music videos endlessly, riveted to his face, his terrible dancing; who knew somewhere in her blood that if she stopped listening, she would fall, and she would get lost.

That girl built herself on his voice.
I would be no one without it.

I remember December, snow and ice, standing outside the Bell Centre with my dad, waiting impatiently for the doors to open. My father, in music production, knew all the promoters in the city -- our seats were incredible. It wasn't that I was too young to go with a friend -- but, ten years almost to the day after a profounder grief than this --------- I was and am so happy that I went with him.

The crowd was everyone: my own thick black eyeliner; 70-year-old women with canes; baby boomers with beer guts; metalheads and dreadlocks and insurance suits and we all knew every fucking word. He sang and we were transported, we were universal, we were one goddamn person, all of us, December 13th in Montreal, as Bowie kicked off his Reality tour.

I remember January, the week after my father died. Nothing made sense. Everything was too fucking surreal to process. I went from class to class, painstakingly taking notes, telling my friends but no one else. I felt numb, sick, quiet -- and I didn't even know I felt any of those things; I thought I was fine, man, all's good no worries death is part of life you just gotta deal ------------

And my headphones rarely left my ears.
I gripped reality by my goddamn fingernails, breathlessly, to 1. Outside.

There is no album more brilliant, none more emotional, in my eyes; nothing that brings me more intensely back to so many moments in my life. I have written essays about Outside; my personal email address is from one of the song titles; if you want to know why I listen to music or how I listen to music or what music I think is perfect I will shove this into your hands and say listen, listen, god, listen, and let it rip you apart -----

and it was all that kept me together.

I remember April, one birthday of many at a bar called Saphir, coming to a close. Last call. The ones who'd stood the test of cheap shots and young blood still dancing at my side. I had danced, we had all danced -- the night had been electric, vibrant. And the lights went up to Life on Mars?.

I was probably not barefoot but I feel barefoot in my memory, spinning with my makeup smeared across my face, shouting out the words and laughingly slow-dancing with Meg -- home. If not in place,

in soul.

I remember months and months. I remember years.

I remember searching for him, the thrill of the HMV hunt; the excitement when hearing a song on the radio and rushing to press 'record.' I remember endless dance parties with my friends and family, gushing vocal treatises on how deeply he affected the cultural fabric of what we know. I remember listening to hours... this Christmas, shocked at how different it sounded to my near-30-year-old ears: something's shifted, something's new, I am older. I am seeing his genius differently. And I know: there is so much more to see.

The world grieves today.
And there are really no words.



But thank you, David Jones, for being everything to me.
For all those years and more.