'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.