Sexy Body

Fucking for sport made me super confident. I became really comfortable with my body by exposing it and deriving pleasure from it. It was never the men I was intimate with who made me feel bad about my body, it was the beauty-perfection-obsessed culture and its shitty products and even shittier promises. I’ve been a victim and a peddler: I work in advertising and I’ve helped sell boring, oppressive, unachievable fantasies to women. It’s impossible to separate yourself from it, whether you’re writing the copy, or just riding the bus. 

Some years ago I decided to fight back and treat the poisonous symptoms like a nasty cold. I stopped buying and reading women’s magazines (which was hard because I loved magazines), making body resolution lists or taking my measurements or buying diet books or any of the other seemingly positive “goal-oriented” ways I used to police and compartmentalize my body. I stopped weighing myself. I tried very hard to transform the language I used to speak about myself to others, and in my own head. I walked everywhere I could. I honed a sense of style and wore my clothes well. 

And I fucked my brains out. I performed. I switched my head off and just became a sexy body. Nothing made me feel more beautiful than coming on a stranger who was wild about my form. 

I didn’t execute all that perfectly, I was too drunk much of the time, I don’t love every part of me every second, and there are really serious consequences to fucking for sport — it has to be safe omg, but I’m surprised how I managed to inoculate myself in a few years. Aging helps a lot because as you get smarter and more confident, you naturally reconcile unwanted physical changes with how much better you feel about yourself overall. I've merged from monitoring myself to caring for myself. The switch is an internal one, it's not even something I could teach you. It's a decision and it's work. 

Honestly, I’d never go back to my 20s. Ever. If my body was hot or beautiful, I wasn’t ready to embrace it anyway. I’m glad I listened to Fiona Apple and other angry chicks when I was young because even if didn’t embody the sentiments of their songs yet, their strength and vulnerability got under my skin, helped me fight the disease. I have countless fierce female mentors to thank for that. 

So I lost a decade to the fucking magazines. At least I strutted my way back to self-love in really hot heels. 

Young Woman

A couple of years ago, when I was grappling with my writing I had a recurring dream. In it, my middle and index fingers pulse painfully with blood at their tips like they’ll burst right through. To reduce the pressure I massage the blood back from the tips, but it surges forward, pulsing, wanting out. I worry about such a serious finger pressure condition and wake panicked I need to get to a hospital. I check my fingers and they’re fine.

The last time I had the dream, I’m in the belly of a cruise ship crouched down half naked in a bathroom stall anticipating a full finger explosion. I hear someone walk in the bathroom; it’s an old colleague and she’s come to see if I’m OK. Just then the blood breaks the skin and sprays out from my nails in all directions like loose garden hoses. It’s gory but doesn’t hurt. I’m humiliated that the blood's now creeping out from beneath the stall in tiny crimson rivers, inching towards strangers peeing next to me. I’m also relieved. Finally, oh god finally they’ve burst. I’m slowly losing consciousness but totally unfazed by possible death. I’m embarrassed that my underwear are pulled down and that I’m about to be fully exposed to strangers. 

__

With no language skills and little knowledge of the culture, I have never been as alone as I am in Japan. I live in a small, isolated farming town in middle of the main island of Honshu and the love-lack reproduces inside me like a hungry little monster that grows bigger by the day. I am the monster. Staring back at me in mirrors and in classroom window reflections is a doughy, pink Westerner wearing a blue-eyed mask. I hate myself. I have nowhere to hide. I am so fat, so round, so lazy. Why can’t I be small, compact, and efficient?! In Japan, there’s no escaping the confrontation of self. I stare longingly at female Japanese teachers’ child-like waistlines, willowy wrists, and delicate feet. Junior high school girls poke at my belly and say “soft” -- I wonder what they think of my ass when I walk away.  An old lady at a clothing store touches my stomach and asks, “Baby?”

They say I look like an angel, that I’m so pretty: kawai. The children chase me around, asking to touch my hair, clinging to me like I’ll sprinkle fairy dust on them. After some time the admiration feels more like infantilization. I see that no matter how long I live here, they’ll always be amazed that I can use chopsticks. 

__

After just one month, I decide to use my May holiday time called Golden Week to go on a 10-day silent meditation retreat outside Osaka hosted by mostly Western Buddhist monks. As someone who speaks and thinks and writes incessantly, I look forward to the challenge of learning how to “quiet the mind”. You must be absolutely silent during the ten days, including smiling or making eye contact with other students in order to stay in an interior place at all times. It’s very bizarre for me. I break the code of silence with my bunk mate a few times. She’s a thin, statuesque Australian model from Tokyo whom I’m dying to gossip with. I am so intimate with the fatness of me. I massage the round, doughy roll hidden beneath my yoga pants like it’s possible to massage it right off. I constantly pull on my shirt to hide it and do this over and over while meditating.  

Day after day, hour after hour, I learn how to reign in the expanse of my thoughts which at first seem to shoot out to the furthest star in the universe. Each second I attempt to draw them closer, then even closer until they almost seem to be on Earth! By day seven, they’re practically in the room. Breathing in…breathing out…following the breath…pay attention to your breath...you will never be loved…you’re a failure…you’re ugly…you’re disgusting…you are fat and eat all the bread at breakfast…stop eating all that bread…follow the breath…don’t eat the cheese…watch the amount of cream in your coffee…breathing in…drink more tea…breathing out…I’m so hungry…why didn’t you learn Japanese?...her waist is so tiny…your thighs are huge…you’re stupid…you’re lazy…you’re weak…breathing in…breathing out…follow the breath…

This ticker tape of incessant, self-hating thoughts pounds through my head in the silence; my back and legs ache from sitting so long.  The overall experience is a soft trauma within the greater trauma of total strangeness that I’ve just begun living outside the gates. Twice a day, we sit before the teacher and speak softly about what we’re feeling or experiencing though it should be related to meditation. Sometimes I cry when I sit before him, confessing those incessant thoughts that come to me while meditating. Then at the next sitting, I smile widely and share how wonderful and transcendent I feel. His answer for all is: “It’s only the mind. Focus on the breath.” 

On the last day, for just a few seconds at a time, I meditate for real. The small house is damp from two days of rain, it smells of wet grass, old tatami mingled with musty silk pillows and ancient cedar. I think I’ve reached the deep pool of calm within. I promise myself that I’ll meditate every day after I leave, that I'll choose the right path, and embody impermanence; respect all living creatures and be one with the universe! Easy! 

When I leave the grounds after ten days, it seems every gesture, every look, every flicker of my energy is measured. That it matters. I feel connected to every molecule and so very briefly, like maybe a day or two, my feeling of alienation lessens. We’re all just one, infinite pulse of primordial matter! I can almost erase the physical differences between myself and Japanese people in this fleeting sense of oneness. I’m also a bit tripped out and agoraphobic after days of silence in that tiny house and it’s a pretty weird journey back into the wilds of Osaka to catch my train home. 

I honestly never meditate again. In this bid to be better, calmer and “good”, I fail to return to the deep pool of calm. I feel guilty all the time. I sit on the internet reading women’s magazines and self-help sites with their irritating mix of love-yourself advice, exercise instructions, and images of tiny models lounging in dreamy, distant locales. I can’t escape the prison of my wants: to be good, to be focussed, to be hardworking, and especially to be SKINNY and if I’m SKINNY, then surely I will be loved. Love will come if I change, if I’m better, if my desires are reigned in and managed! I have four journals from that time and not one of them contains an actual fucking story. They are full of exhaustively long, judgy, policing passages detailing the interior world of my struggle to be good in a culture that takes perfection very seriously.

Relief comes when I have a man to obsess over; many of those thoughts quiet and turn to him. They measure the way his qualities will complete me. I am helpless on my own, I write, and he will make me better. His love will save me from myself…if I can just get myself to be loveable!

__

REQUIRED READING: "The Young-Girl is her own jailer, prisoner in a body-made-sign inside of a language made of bodies." https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/preliminary-materials-theory-young-girl

Love Is Letting Go

Paris broke me down. Sometimes slowly by sex, cigarette and wine, sometimes a rapid disintegration. My complexion flawless and dewy at dusk, the dream was so real that sidewalks lit up just for me. Then dark spells of disillusion. Bats dove for insects at high noon in one of the coldest springs on record. I was agitated with constant hunger so I ate till my stomach hurt. Forced to shed all notions of “the writer” and just sit with myself, I curled up into long stretches of ennui feeling the distinct anxiety of taking a leap for personal progress. Bonjour Tristesse! 

The thing about a fantasy is it rarely materializes in its original image but may you live the promise and disillusion of being estranged in a city, may you break down into millions of tiny pieces then slowly, painfully crystallize. 

I quit my job and went to Paris to write a book, optimistic I could emulate literary heroines like Marguerite Duras, Françoise Sagan, and Anaïs Nin. My plan was to re-enact their confident commitment and churn out a draft in three months. It was only partially short-sighted as I wrote thousands of words, but not on the coming-of-age story I was finally going to finish, instead, I wrote on how painful writing is, and how to seduce without remorse. I burned through my savings in about 5 weeks on yummy Parisian things like silk scarves, solo dinners, all-night parties, and cab rides to visit lovers. 

My growing debt was a secret shame though, one I didn’t mention when talking about my time there. Once, I was invited to brunch with some young, bourgeois Parisians and we were discussing theft because my wallet had been stolen during one of those all-night parties. I explained I was waiting for both my credit and debit cards to arrive by courier. Someone asked the difference between the two and I said one is for liquid cash and the other is credit that you pay interest on. They seemed genuinely shocked when I said that many Canadians use credit regularly, like, to live on. It was apparent that, for them, having even a few thousand dollars of consumer debt was revolting. One of the women stated, “I’d rather not eat.”

Oh, Paris. My first stop was at an apartment in the 2nd that belonged to Mat, a man I’d been in love with for ten years while knowing for five of them that he was gay. We met when I was 23 and he was 17. I was an English language assistant at a high school in the south of France and he was my student. In his eyes I saw some distant, future dream and in older, emotional me, he saw an ‘out’ (at the time I was not aware of just how ‘out’ he sought to be). What followed was a secret love affair for 4 months then years of separation, his reticent yet piercing brown eyes burned into my memory like beacons of an unknowable but possible forever. He would grow up to be beautiful. I just knew it. 

He still hadn’t come out years later when I visited him at his university. This meant I retained my hopes while he firmly rejected me. However I was one of the first people he eventually came out to, deep into a relationship with a man his friends and family only knew as his “best friend”. He and I would meet every few years to spend a week together, marvelling at the other, and sharing the sublime still image of when he lost his virginity. My love for him was perfect and mysterious in its quality. He did grow up to be beautiful and successful enough to host me on his pull-out couch in the 2nd in Paris while I wrote my book. He’d known me a long time so he tolerated my binge eating and emotional outpourings and admissions of jealousy. I felt safe there but I still wanted my own space which I got a month into the summer. The time in his apartment was part of our lifelong intersecting. It mattered.  

Paris kept me in the throes of new man-obsessions. One that comes to mind is with an original Parisian, a older, charming filmmaker from the 19th with dimples for miles; bringer of the most exquisite first kiss. It's only of this kiss that I'm clear because I lost my mind in the sex. Could not keep it together. When I saw handsome him sitting at the table in that open square, I became nervous in a shy, girly way, that terrible "will he love me?" way, that way I fucking conquered as my summer progressed. 

He was in a very strange state of being when I sat down: he began our conversation by telling me his friend’s wife had just committed suicide by jumping off a balcony after a quarrel with his friend while his cousin had been admitted to the hospital with a case of terminal meningitis in her brain. All this death in the air and him moaning,"Tu m'as tué, Carmen, tu m'as tué..." over and over as we fucked. We sat on his bar stools naked in the afterglow listening to Glen Gould, smoking Merit cigarettes and drinking wine, our faces barely visible in faint lamp light, the sound of scooters whizzing by....

I rolled the details over and over in my mind in the days following, telling myself that he smelled right, tasted right, felt right. I obsessed about why he hadn’t contacted me after our encounter. It was torture. I had to push my mind through it, I had to tell myself over and over that I would be there for myself in the end, I would be OK. I would be OK. It was hard. I didn’t feel OK. I wanted him to call me. But I pushed through to the next lover.  

___

Huffing on romantic fumes is different from love. Needing love is different from love. Love is so many things. Love is the only thing that matters. 

__

He hasn’t been feeling well and tells me while we’re walking along the canal. “My stomach is really hurting,” he says, “can I lay down by myself, maybe sleep in the spare room alone until I feel better?” We’ve been so intimately connected for his stay that the sudden suggestion of separation is jarring but I pull it together.

“Of course, yes, take care of yourself,” I say. After tucking him in, I lay in my bed wishing he were near so I could stroke his back when I’m awash with the memory of that night at summer camp 20 years ago. My first love has left to take care of himself and I am waiting for his return knowing he will, trusting he will come right back to me, cuddle right in next to me. It hits me: love is having faith.

And love is letting go.

Holding Henry Miller's Hand

I always admired girlfriends who didn’t cry after one-night stands. Girlfriends who didn’t feel like they had a gaping hole in the middle of their bodies that needed to be filled. Girlfriends who could casually date a guy first, not even be tempted to sleep with him. Girlfriends who could wait to text or call, and didn’t feel nauseous, painful anxiety when a man didn’t respond. 

“Make him work for it” they’d say. 

I had a close girlfriend in my mid-twenties who was in a relationship for years and never uttered the words “I love you” -- that was the kind of withholding I’d dream about having. I had to work very hard on not being vulnerable to a man, not desperately need him to validate my existence and “complete me”. I trained myself to be the taker so I could flip the script and make them vulnerable to me, make them fall in love with me; walk through an afterparty wasted and keep those rays of light to myself. Be untouchable. I wanted the opportunity to reject and use someone without remorse, walk away feeling nothing, gloat a little bit even. 

Why did I want to use? There is a simple answer (which applies to non-sociopaths only): 

“Hurt people hurt people” 

The love monster only feeds on love as power, because it believes it’s getting back what it lost by consuming it in another person. The love monster is strictly a consumer, it doesn’t give anything back. It’s just a love hungry bitch.

“Just be patient” they’d say.

__

We’ve been sharing my bed for a few nights but not having sex. This slow, tender intimacy is unfamiliar but it’s lovely. We spend our days talking and walking and gazing at each other. We’re cuddling at one point and he says, “I know I really like you cause you keep getting prettier and prettier…” Driving back from a restaurant one evening I ask him why he’s so reticent to have sex with me. 

“It’s not explicitly about you. I haven’t slept with anyone for a year and a half,” he says back. 

“On principle? Or…?” 

“Yeah I felt like I was being used, and I was using in return, and humans shouldn’t use other humans like that…” 

“I’ve used…” I say quietly. 

“Yeah so you know…” 

“Yes…” 

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the whole spectrum of consensual sex, I don’t judge anyone’s choices, like, do what you want, just for me at this point it needs to be right,” he says, grabbing my hand.  

__

The Swiss violinist pays for our drinks and we skip back to my apartment in the Beaubourg at 3 a.m. The romantic story about “The Canadian girl who moves to Paris to write her first novel” comes to life as he looks around my 5th floor flat to behold piles of books, journals and pens, empty wine bottles, ashtrays full of cigarettes, dried up roses, and a broken laptop open on a page crawling with little black letters. 

I turn on some music and stumble around the tiny flat looking for a couple of clean glasses to pour us some wine. “I love your place,” he says. 

He’s a tower of Swissness at about 6’5” with slightly sloped shoulders and a blank but handsome face. He wears tidy little glasses propped on the end of his nose. His green eyes are kind and his gaze is winsome - I sense he really likes me. We start kissing and I try to set down my glass but miss the table and it crashes all over the white tiles. “Fuck!” I yell, throwing a towel on it. 

Red hot lava burns down the walls leaving me alone on the top of a swaying tower overlooking Paris, its streets filled with reverent onlookers, the ghost of Henry Miller holding my hand. I breach the bank and the violinist ceases to be a person, he’s like a giant wave, there’s water everywhere, shards of glass, red wine, smoke and ash. 

We’re woken at 8 a.m. by the sound of an angry fist pounding on my door. It’s my downstairs neighbour, a woman I’ve never met, screaming about waking her baby in the middle of the night. I don’t open the door cause I’m terrified. “Bitch,” the Swiss violinist mumbles, turning over. I rise and start cleaning up, my head aching, the sheets bloodied and the floor soaked in wine. Not exactly the spitting, smouldering volcano of last night, but I don’t feel empty. I feel OK. 

“Can I have your number? I have a few nights here and I’d really like to see you again,” he asks, putting on his glasses.  

I’ve cleaned up the apartment and July sun is pouring in, “Um how about you leave me your number? I’m pretty busy the next few days and…” 

He gently interrupts, “I’d really like to take you for dinner."

“We’ll see…”

I feel OK. I feel OK! 

Storytelling

When I attempt to write fiction it rings forced. Same goes for poetry. I am a writer because I am a journal writer of the non-fiction variety. I began putting words to page in a journal my mom gave me around age 9, and the first entry was a very natural continuation of a conversation I'd already been having. I was always telling stories as a child and primarily to myself. 

A very vivid period of storytelling was in one of the houses where my parents, two younger brothers, and I lived, a run-down bungalow along Highway 11 where once a stranger lost in the fog rapped on the door asking for a room thinking we were a motel. It was a particularly tumultuous time for my parents, lots of arguments and money problems. We slept in odd configurations in the two bedrooms, my mom often sharing a bed with me, perhaps my dad slept on the couch. A killer phantom in my mom's close-knit family was my grandparents' alcoholism. Grandma Murrant succumbed to the disease right before Christmas.

My brothers and I discovered a cold storage cave dug into a hillside a few hundred meters from the house. We'd play there, relishing the remote secrecy, occasionally entering the cave with a flashlight when there was money for batteries. 

I’d regularly stand at the dresser mirror and talk to myself, conversing with a character living on the other side in a world opposite but still my own. These mirrored worlds existed simultaneously in my mind, even when the mirror portal was unavailable. On the other side was a idealized dreamscape where my parents had money, our home had a spiral staircase, I slept in a princess bed, and I had two best friends who accompanied me everywhere. I find it difficult even today to exist in only one world as I straddle my projected “story” self and my actual self.

The most prolific periods of journal writing often coincided with times of confusion, lostness, and strife - but not always. When I was heavy into drinking, drugging and empty relationships, this delusion of projected self was amplified. I’d feel almost dizzy with the story I was live-writing, unwilling to separate myself, high on the drama. But there were other periods of prolific composition when only the pages of my journal were privy, the conversation no less dramatic, but just not exposed. Not yet anyway. Because in the end, sharing some of the stories is cathartic, a remedy for the pain.

Exposed or not, as I build the shelter and coziness of a real life and the embers of self-love grow to flickering flames, I don't feel wounded by outside opinion for I will always have a safe home within myself. I will always be able to sit at my own fireside for warmth.

As Stephen King brilliantly writes in his book On Writing: “…put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.” 

Divorce

The afternoon we signed the papers, winter's grit blew through the streets and scratched at my eyes. I was crying when I arrived. Except, for once, I wasn't. The notary's office was near Côte Vertu Metro station, a strange, remote place to officially end our relationship in a city that belonged to neither of us. I was uncharacteristically stoic and emotionless. He looked broken and frail. 

My mind just couldn't work it out. About a month after we finally stopped seeing each other, painful shingles emerged on the base of my left thumb. I finally began to understand that my body would tell me if it was right, my body would tell me to slow down, to rest. The day before we got married I sneezed all day until my diaphragm ached. I had to lay in a dark room to shield my eyes from the light. When our alarm sounded the morning of our wedding day, I couldn't get out of bed. My body held me to the floor but I drug myself along.

"But I'm doing what I always do!" I kept thinking. "Jump then ask questions later!" He promised to take care of me. Isn't that all I needed? Isn't this love? Breaking up sucks but when you get married, you have to ask for the law to officiate the end making what is already a long, painful realization into a solid failure. I mean, that's how it felt to me when I'd actually let myself feel it. 

Maybe it was appropriate in the end, two practical strangers who met in a strange city, moved to other strange cities, and ended it all officially in a strange office, estranged. 

Impossible Dream

We're still on the topic of "believing in love" and I reveal my impossible dream. 

"I want love that gives me complete security and total freedom," I say laughing, like it's the most outrageous thing in the world to ask of love. The three men in the room don't laugh at all; I hear little sounds of agreement and the puffing of a vape. The man with his hands on my feet, sitting under the soft crescent of my legs, is calm. I want to test the idea out loud in his presence, see if he squirms or makes a comment about neediness or fidelity. We all go on talking. No one says my dream is impossible.  

__

Future husband and I needed very specific things from each other when we met, as if our opposing energies were just the right voltage for the other to plug into. I needed someone to take care of me for a little while, help me stabilize my finances, offer emotional support, and he needed a brave, worldly partner to help him navigate through the new and sometimes frightening realities of leaving his country for the first time at age 38 to find himself and start anew. 

We also liked the poetry of the other person. It was a skills check between us for a kind of cultural battle, two rebels who would never slip into sleepy platitudes, two rebels who assigned meaning to everything. Anarchy! I wasn't loyal to my country or any country, he had been beaten by his. It was exhilarating not to be held to anything but the possibility of togetherness. There was a genuine sense that we could conquer anything together. I especially liked his genteel way and his heart. He liked my sparkle and affection. He was very well-read and a rebel artist. He liked when I read to him. 

His story was totally captivating. I loved him. 

__

Paris. Le Marais. Each night I sit two small bars directly across from each other, La Belle Hortense and Le Petit Fer à Cheval and each night I meet a new man to seduce. I gossip with repeat characters like the bourgeois gay jewelry designers and their poétesse from Tunisia. One evening I meet a Swiss violinist in town for a concert with his national orchestra. We sit at the bar for a long time talking, he buys me glass after glass of red wine. I can see myself from outside myself, I've become this character I was destined for, part naïve apple pie, part serpent seductress. I'm going to make him fall in love with me. 

Dark Parts

Married lovers are like bulls because they only see red. When they're in hot pursuit, the other parts blur by, the parts holding the picture together, partners and kids bearing their own burdens of desire or confusion or lust or loneliness. I see bulls isolated by choice but surrounded by necessity.  

I was red. I made sure I was red. 

__

The Bull in Black

"Come meet me," was all we ever had to say. 

We could access other parts of ourselves, parts we didn't like to show in the light of day, parts almost simultaneously discovered and revealed in secret. We are already shrouded here in the shadows, so why not reveal all? In the shadows where our cravings danced with each other, où nos faims se dévorés. We are seduced by the darkness; the seedier, the later, the smokier, the drunker, the better. Remember when we stayed up all night at that girl's house, the American one, snorting lines and talking about her impressive collection of books. She talked so much, even more than us. We didn't just have a thing for drugs and alcohol, we had a thing for personalities. We liked to be surrounded and swallowed up by big characters, big energies, take parts of them away with us to discuss and dissect later, and get high on those parts again and again. We never wanted the party to end. We liked that 5am sunlight to burn off the last of the chemicals, watering our eyes. The washing hour for lost souls.      

__

The Bull in Cashmere 

"You are everything," you once wrote me. 

Morphing, we become each other's fantasies. Once, we discussed road trips and magically in the days following a plan for one manifested in my head, the details you'd already dreamed of but had never said aloud. How's it possible that we have access to secret dreams that only appear in each other's presence? "You give me hope," you once told me. Shapeshifting, we become all the parts we don't even know we were searching for, metaphorical parts of ourselves, rocks and water, waves and sea, we became all the parts the other isn't, all at once, in great swaths of desire and projection. 

"I love you," I once wrote back. 

__

Thing about Bulls is, they lay claim to independence but hate to be alone. 

Thing about being red is, eventually you burn. 3rd degree. 

Trusting Silence

The next morning I wake up with some clarity*. I realize that my anxiety is less about his reason for not wanting to kiss me, but rather that maybe I, me, I'm not choosing and instead merely succumbing to his attention without checking myself first. Plus I wonder if I'd built up a fantasy in my head and kept it simmering on the back burner for a year. Holy shit, I think, do I even like him? 

__

Along with a small group of other foreign grown-ups learning English in Vancouver, I taught my future husband a grammar class. At the end, feeling slightly less hungover and slightly more adventurous again, I wrote the name of a restaurant in East Van that hosted samba and salsa dancing on Saturday nights on the whiteboard, inviting the socially deprived people out to an area that didn't directly cater to their naïveté*.

He approached my desk after class and wanted to know a few specifics on the grammar lesson. I probably faked my way through the answer because grammar always felt like math (sorry, all my former students!)* but he was earnest in his approach. I looked at him with a slight leer, in one of those liquidy moods where all I can think about is rolling into the next bender and fucking the world, but he was so nice. Like, really, a good person.

The next evening, I almost didn't go meet him, but she drug me out of our ratty apartment and down to the restaurant. We were already halfway in the bag, skipping through the street, doing that thing where we were in love with one another but going out to meet men when I spotted him sitting at the bar all by his lonesome, all dressed in black. He stood up to greet me and that was it, I knew our destinies would be looped together by that invisible string.  

I didn't even know if I liked him yet but I was in love. 

__

The burdens of expectation and disappointment have lifted when I come downstairs for breakfast and see him sitting at the table puffing on his vape. He stands up to greet me with so much tenderness in his eyes that I almost break into tears. But I don't. I'm going to let myself choose this time, see if I like him, put some space between us, try "slow". 

"Can I make you a coffee?" he asks. 

"Sure." 

"How did you sleep?" he looks at me from under his brow. His body seems to sway between reticence and devotion.  

"Fine." 

He sets down the coffee. We sit in silence for a few minutes as I drink it, and it's not unpleasant that silence. 

"I tossed and turned all night. It was awful," he finally says. 

"Oh you did?" I reply softly, not wanting to sound like I care that much. 

"That oil from Paris, I could smell it all night...could smell you. It was just, God, it was just too much," he says the last few words forcefully.

"Why because you're seeing someone?" I blurt out. 

"No!"

"Then why didn't you kiss me?" I say looking down at my hands, then back up at him.  

"I just want to take things slow. I like you. You're so smart... and different." He puffs on the vape and smiles, "Wanna hang out today? Talk and cuddle?" 

That makes me so happy I want to burst but I stay cool. 

"Yeah, sure, that sounds nice." 

__

Silence used to be painful because I didn't like what I heard in it; endless chatter suggesting I was stupid or ugly or inadequate or indecent or vulgar or unworthy or too much. Sometimes I would lay down at night and my head would be screaming "I'm sorry" -- sorry to whom? Sometimes I'd default to choosing a man to be sorry to, the last man I encountered. I must have done something to make him not like me, I must have come across too strongly, turned him off. Even though those voices are the machinations of self-hate perpetuated by how one grows up, and the woman-hating culture at large, they're also protection mechanisms. They're all about me in the end, damaged or victorious. The obsessive chatter fuzzed out real contact with others and more importantly, with myself.   

I was saying sorry to me. Compassionate, loving, but still very quiet me was apologizing for all the hurt I caused myself.   

*Footnote on the amazing extra benefits of sobriety: I so rarely wake up with pangs of regret, I've lost weight without trying (no more gazillion wine calories, late night crap food or hangover pizza), I have money in the bank, and substance-free, I sleep so much better. I can nip cravings and obsessive thought earlier, whatever they happen to be. I feel actual fucking FEELINGS. Mornings have become light moments of truth instead of dark rushes of anxiety. Are these the secondary embers of self-love?

*Second footnote on how much I hate shitty bars and restaurants in downtown sectors across this country. It SUCKS BALLS to be stuck in a foreign city and be subjected to mass mainstream bars and restaurants. If you ever meet a foreigner in your city or town, please throw them a bone and suggest some decent places to eat or hang out. Thank you. 

*Third footnote on teaching English. It was my golden goose for almost 10 years. I met so many deeply fascinating and beautiful people and was privileged to be their teacher. I was weak at grammar but I hope I made students feel loved and heard. Teaching is really hard and requires so much energy, dedication and heart! Respect. 

Love Fetish

After our awkward bathroom encounter, I go to bed with a terrible, sinking feeling that I've just slipped into another impossible love scenario. I'm kind of angry with him - why did he pick up my foot at the table and massage it if he has a fucking girlfriend?! I do a cross check on our day to make sure I didn't flirt first. We'd walked the canal together engrossed in conversation, occasionally bumping shoulders. I wasn't digging into my usual bag of tricks, more just being myself, relaxed and chatty. We moved fluidly from funny, to deep, to brilliant, to silly, and back to brilliant with no showmanship. He was kind, courteous. Didn't seem to have an agenda...

__

I used to have an agenda and I almost always got what I wanted. The seeds of what became my giant love monster were probably planted very early, but the little beast didn't really start to grow until I completed 3 years in Japan where I suffered from prolonged isolation. If lack of intimacy was my condition, rapacious seduction coupled with drugs and alcohol became my remedies. 

Following a few months of traveling around Asia, I moved to Vancouver and encountered a vibrant queer community in East Van all engaging in open, communicative loving relations with each other. Or that's how it felt to me anyway. I was totally amazed and dazzled by the queers I met. Especially the women. So sexually empowered, so in charge of their desires, so at ease with a criss-cross of relational dimensions, polyamory or whateveramory. Revolutionary!

I fell in love with a woman. She was, and will always be, one of the most naturally talented and beautiful human beings I have ever met. A tender, old soul housed in a body sculpted by the gods. Our love appeared suddenly on our first outing like a warm Pacific downpour that carried us away. She played me songs on her guitar and I whispered sweet stories in her ear as she went to sleep. Les vraies bohèmes, we lived in a cheap, ratty apartment, one of the last vestiges of affordable housing in East Vancouver, smoking nonstop, dropping ash on its stained berber carpet, ash she put into her paint, paint she put on her nude paintings covering the living room walls while we drank and danced and blasted Sam Cooke and Robert Plant. 

But we needed men and loved them first. Mystified by our growing bond and unprepared to define it, our rapacious little love beasts kept asking for more, our cups never quite full, we'd accompany each other on man hunts, binges, and benders. I hated the crowd she was attracted to, nouveau riche dirt bags who glamourized Pablo Escobar and thought they were bad ass. Vulgarists. I hated them because I loved her, the one so deeply real, the real bad ass, the real one who attracted fakes and posers. Just like I attracted vampires. I hated that about both of us but I wasn't ready to be better. I was only ready to run. Fast. 

She didn't hate anybody. Even when I left our apartment, left her, and dashed off to Brazil to get married, I left ruin but she only had love left for me. 

__

I asked him if I could say it out loud while we had sex.

"Oui bien sur," he said, "mais quoi exactement ?"

"'Je t'aime...'"

"Cris-le ma chérie ! Cris-le !"

I perfected seduction in Paris. I figured out how to make it more understated and charming, less vulgar and desperate. I'd had a pretty good run that year in Montreal on a divorcée reign of terror, but in Paris I pulled it together and picked men off like ripe raspberries. The snake began to earn its charm.