'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.