We Have the Rest of Our Lives

When I wrote about our wedding day on this blog I said something about how wonderful it was to be loved for all my ordinary attributes, for all the small and simple things that make me fundamentally and effortlessly me. 

The irony in this is that our relationship has been anything but ordinary. 

 

I met him when I wasn't looking. I was focusing on me, on bettering myself, and healing from past hurts. 

But getting to know him felt so much like healing that I couldn't say no. 

So I said something else. 

 

"I'm moving to the East Coast." 

 

I wasn't sure of it until I said it in that moment, and I couldn't take it back after that. Until I said it out loud it was only an idea, a thing I saw faintly in my future, like a light I knew was coming.

 

He said, "That's okay." 

 

And somehow I felt it too. 

 

  

 

We had a matter of months together. As friendship became love, I felt shaky and uncertain when I was alone and my brain overthought and complicated matters. But there was something about being with him that simplified things, something about the way he quieted my fears.

 

But things got complicated fast when he left to go back home for good this time. 

I found myself crying on the way home from the airport. But somehow I never once felt scared that this would end things between us. 

The only problem was that things had barely started, and they were already becoming more difficult.

The rest is a bit of a whirlwind. The rest is something I still struggle to wrap my mind around, that still makes my heart feel like it needs a chance to catch a breath. 

 

We counted months apart. Across more provinces than years, we followed one another. 

 

At some point we were apart for more months than we were together. Then that changed again and we were together for more months than we were apart. 

 

Now I see him every day. 

 

Somewhere along the way I noticed a pattern that made my thinking problematic. Instead of thinking about the fact that we made it, that we are building a real life together in the East Coast, something which seemed so far when we counted the days till we'd see each other again, I started counted the things we'd missed out on. 

The distance robbed us of a few things, and so did the pandemic. I feel like I have been trying to catch up ever since.

 

I have felt this overbearing desire to make up for those missed experiences, the milestones we had to skip, or the phases we had to jump ahead to. 

A relationship that started off so simple and natural became too real too fast. It felt like we had to decide on forever or on staying apart. In the end it felt like we chose forever in a hurry. 

But that doesn't bother me anymore.

 

 

We did a few things backwards. Then, two years after a wedding in the midst of the first lock-down, we finally had our honeymoon.We went away, to an unfamiliar place, surrounded by strangers, in no ones company but each others. We walked on foot to another country, spoke with foreign ducks, and played mini-golf. We drank champagne in our hotel room as the sun went down.

 

We might have missed out on things, but, in the end, its not the missing that counts. Its how we grew, and comprised, and made things better; it's how we did things we never knew we would.

The milestones come even when their unanticipated, even when you don't realize that you've passed them until you are looking back and see how far you've walked together. 

 

 I'd walk anywhere with you, the short way or the long way. I'd take the detour; I'd walk the steep road. 

I'd walk all the way to France with you, or cross the bridge to Luxembourg to have dinner by the river.

 

If This Were Our Home

Can you imagine if this were our garden? 

Can't you picture me skipping through these trees? Or reading tucked into the cranny of that tree? 

 

Can you imagine if this were our pond? We'd fill it with ducks and give them the names of gentlemen. I'd visit them in the morning, and trail the meadow with them in the evening.

 

If this were our window, I'd look out of it and dream. I'd think about the great wide world at the bottom of this hill; I'd nestle deeper into my cushion and think about how there is no where else I'd rather be. 

 

If this were our house, I'd sit in it after dark and cover pages with stories. I'd know every animal that passes through our land and every bird that sits on our roof. I'd wait for the geese to come home after winter, and pray for the fox during the storm. I'd open this door for the cat at supper time and watch it slip inside and fall asleep.

 

If this were our home, I'd never leave it. And if I did, this home would be the compass by which I would orient everything else. The wide world would spin around it, and I would wander its premise like a forger.

This home would be the center of my map, and I would draw everything else around it and label it by the names of the critters that live here. 

I would name this house after a villa I've dreamed of.
 

If this were our home, my bare-feet would wander every inch, every helm; every floor board would know the feeling of my step. I would know every sound, every creak and croak off by heart, and I would memorize the way every light shines through the bedroom window, the peak of the moon through the curtains and the touch of the sun when I'm waking. If this were my house I would line the walls with my books and skim the spines with my fingers.  

I would know what it is like to be intimate with a house, to know the house just as well as it knows me. I would haunt this house like a memory so that one day when people look down the driveway they would picture me in the window even when I am not at home. 

 You and I are old enough to own a house, but while we're penniless we are still young enough play pretend.

For now, you and I are guests here, skipping through the trees in a hush, stopping to read by the stream in the shade of a tree till it's time to go. 

Our home is the stuff of dreams.  

For now, let's pretend we live here.

 

Wordly

I have found my writerly self in the world. I have been away from home, and come back to the same conclusion. 

 

The world is overwhelming large, and it would take many lifetimes just to discover how vast it really is. 

 

 

 

There would be so much adventure, and no time to come home. There would be so much to see, and a whirlwind of contemplation that never gets to settle in. You could delve into the city, but there are so many more through which you'd want to wander. You could map every wood, and come back next summer just to see it changed. The landscape changes when the sky does. The earth changes with the weather. Each city has a season with a separate face.

 

And when the night rolls in, and the life grows thin, the traveler would realize that they have only scratched the surface of a sea of secrets spaces, unexpected castles in an ancient wood, an ocean brought to life a hundred different ways just by the way the light shines on it; a still stone wall with a murmured story; a river laced with legends. The world is speckled, scattered, sowed and sprinkled, strewed and swimming with things to surprise you.

 

The wind carves out artifacts, but it stashes its favourite secrets under sand and stone. 

Nothing on this earth is really are own. 

We are simply here to try, in our small human way, to take it all in. 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been away and I have realized that the only thing I can do when the world astounds me, takes me away, makes me ache inside, gives me the urge to run away, is write about it. 

Everything else simply won't suffice.

 

 

The Day of the White-Out

 Writing Ghost Stories during a White-Out

The world was a ghost of itself that day. The trees were ghosts. The building across the way was ghostly through the snow. 

I spent it mostly in my chair by the window, looking out of it from time to time, wondering how much paler the world could get.

 

 

 

The stuff came down thick as cotton, like fluffy rabbit tails, getting caught on everything it happened to touch. The tree outside my window was laden with fluff. The cars out-front disappeared under it, frosted over into hibernation. It filled up the world, disguising the town around me.

 

You forget you live in a town on those days. No cars come by. No people wander out their doors. Paths and roads get lost on those days, and all the town's people go missing under the weight of snowed in rooftops. We all live under ground on those days, like happy moles, the world and the wind barely remembered. 

 

I watched as the wind pack snow onto my windows all throughout the day. It was the most literal snowing-in I could imagine, and it thrilled me. I could faintly see the tree that stands just outside, bare limbs scratching, waving lonesomely.  

 

It thrilled me because I thought my chances were higher this time than the time the streets flooded whilst I stayed home and edited my book. This time wind and sky and snow were banning together, I thought, to build a snow-fort around me. In the morning, all I'd see is the close winter, pressed against the glass of every window, refusing to let me out, letting little in besides a faint impression of light, weakly melting.

I would not complain, not about the mountain on my front steps, too much for one shovel to muster; I would not mind about the car which has gone missing somewhere in a driveway which has equally disappeared. 

We can go dig out the world later.

 

I can go anywhere on the white page. And, though the white winter world is gone and distant, the ghosts on the page are more tangible than the cold seeping through the glass, just so long as the storm lasts. 

 

Still, my windows were only partly covered when the dark settled in, as it comes in winter, somehow softly, touching everything evenly. You look away, and then the day is over, and you bring out the candles and pretend the night will last forever so that the snowday does not end.

A lifetime of snowdays should me enough for me, I think. Books depend on snowdays, after all.

    

 

 

In the meantime, I will sit here in my snowfort through the school days and the times when cafes close. They will start to wonder where I went. They will forget where the front door is.

 

But sometimes in the dark a wanderer will dare the winter, and if they come by the snowfort which has a house under it, and maybe a lonely tree, they might see a light glowing faintly from somewhere under the snow and they will know someone is still in there and that they have not run out of candles. They will know someone inside is still awake, writing in secret.

 

For now, I would like the time to edit. I would like the days to fill themselves with winter, so I can stay snowed in. I would like to stay in my snowfort, safely forgetting that I live in a town, and not inside a book. 

 

Bird Watching

C.S. Lewis compared his writing process to watching birds. For Lewis, writing came to him in pictures. Ideas settled before him like sparrows. 

 

To me it seems a very vivid way to describe the process because it suggests that there is something at work that is beyond you; a silent sort of being that lives on a different schedule, in a world so secluded from yours, it is like another world entirely. Picture it: you sight a bird, the very image of an idea, once there, up high or down low, then gone with the rise of the wind, the sound or smell of invention still in the air. But the bird flies away, moving at a pace apart from yours, flitting in and out of contact with you.

 

 

 

The more time you spend in a place the more you get to know the birds that live there. You see them often enough, if you look out for them. Other than the spiders, they might be your closest neighbours, for they build their nests in your trees and on your rooftop. Like ideas, birds weave their way in and out of our lives, aloof and stunning, but sometimes they make close contact, such as when they don't know you are watching them from a window. 

 

I made rather close contact myself this summer, but without the glass, for I spent some time napping in a hammock strung from two trees in the middle of August. It was wonderful, for even as I drifted into a light sleep, I could hear the world around me, the wind and the sound of the lake more real than the sun streaked black behind my closed eyes. Yet my favourite part of the nap was the end of it when I would awake silently and the birds, wholly unaware of me, were all around me, living their secret lives as if still completely unobserved.

 

 

 

Like bird-watching, writing comes on a schedule wholly disconnected from your own daylight hours. It awakes long before you do, and so, it sees so many things you do not, for it knows the world before it awakens. Writing feels that way sometimes: Like the start of a day or a story in which no one yet knows what might occur, and so it meanders, flowing slowly into happenings. 

Like a desire for writing, birds come and go, adorning our lives with their needlework each time they appear, for even throughout the day, they move through all the unseen corners around you, passing in and out of sight, slipping into tree tops you never reach, hopping into the shadowy kingdoms under brush and root where only the small critters live. 

 

Yet as with birds and pictures for writing, some people simply do not notice them. They are just mundane enough to not interest some, feeling so like a day dream that many do not take the time to speculate. Many do not ask: What if this was part of a story? 

 

 

 

Lewis saw such pictures. As a young man he saw a Faun with an umbrella beneath a snowy forest. He knew the Faun was carrying parcels, and though Lewis did not know why, he thought it looked like a story. Today almost anyone shown a picture of Mr. Tumnus walking through the snow would be able to tell you where it came from. 

Still, it is important to remember that at one point Lewis himself did not know. I suppose Mr. Tumnus was very much like a bird in that way, for Lewis did not get to see where Mr. Tumnus went after he'd been sighted (or who he met along the way). He had to come with that part himself.

 

Another author I greatly enjoy said something else about ideas and the art of having them that seems fitting to share. When asked how he gets his ideas, Neil Gaiman said that when it comes to having good ideas there is only one big difference between writers and ordinary people: writers notice when they're having them. It is like the gift of being able to remember your dreams; like an awareness for critters, some people notice it, and some people don't. But anyone can, if they try.

Indeed, like bird-watching, writing can at times be tedious and uneventful. After all, a Faun walking through snow with an umbrella is not a story in and of itself.

But it only feels that way so long as you are expecting something to happen. Birds do not lead lives of drama, not to the unimaginative eye. But when the bird takes off and flies away and you can no longer see it, some people simply keep dreaming and drifting. Few take the time to wonder where the bird goes and what it does before the next time it is seen. 

What We Found in the Woods

2019: We went for a walk in the woods, you, me, and your family. The sun was out, and the snow was glistening. The trees were bare, though I could feel that in the warm winter air they were beginning to awaken. As we whisked through the forest, waltzing amongst trees that stood like sculpted pillars around us, something mystical occurred. 

Maybe it was the way the sun was shining, like a romantic sort of photograph in which the sun ignites the world with a flare, with sun-specks or sun-spirals or sunny-streaks that shimmer in your hair. Maybe it was the way the forest floor was frosted over with snow, like a ballroom floor glimmers below crystal chandeliers. Something about the way the trees whispered of spring and the way the earth smelled of change gave me a breath of something that felt like certainty. 

We came to a river, frozen at the foot of a gorge. Your mom told me about your childhood, about picnics and the way the trees had since changed. You told me that a lot of your stories took place here. Maybe that is what made the place feel so nostalgic; even though I’d never been here before, there was memory here. There were little versions of you running through the trees. 

I too grew up in the woods, running through trees with dirty feet and feathers in my hair, searching for adventure like Peter Pan’s Lost Boys; storing secrets in tree-trunks and looking for the entrance to Narnia or other lost realms.   

Forests have a weird way of appearing timeless even as they change. We both grew up in forests of our own, forests that we mapped and memorized, forests filled with the trees we climbed and memories of us as bare footed summer children, our noses sprinkled with freckles and our heads crowned by the sun, fancying ourselves the kings and queens of our forest kingdom.

It wasn’t then, but at some point in time my forest and your forest aligned. It occurred to me then, that, as I prepare to leave my forest behind, I wouldn’t so much mind moving into yours.

 2021: We went for a walk through a different wood this rather warm winter day and I was reminded of this piece I wrote almost two years ago. Me and my husband were only just dating, and I went to visit him over the break. It was the first time I met his family, the first time we started talking about what our future would look like. 

I decided almost on a whim that I would move to his province that summer. Sometimes I wonder if we would still be married now if I hadn't.

But that is the way adventures go, is it not? Occasionally a whim strikes us, almost like a childish desire to run away to live in the woods, but much more serious. 

All I knew then was that I was restless without him, and that home was where he was.

    

Books for Blankets

"I am sitting... looking out across the the backyard full of blue evening snow, everything is slick and crusty with ice, and it is very still. It's one of those winter evenings when the coldness of every single thing seems to slow down time... Tonight I feel that my love for you has more density in this world than I do, myself: as though it could linger on after me..." ~The Time Traveler's Wife

The schools let out early that day in preparation for a storm that came a lot later than we anticipated. 

I looked out the window often throughout the morning and into the afternoon, in-between customers and during them, looking out into the dead world for the snow that we had been promised was coming. 

The buses canceled in waiting. 

It was only on my way home from work that tiny flakes started to fall onto the windshield of my car; only after I fell asleep in my bed was the world transformed, as it usually is. 

You cannot watch the change. It always comes suddenly, softly, while you are sleeping. It's like magic. Even if you are awake, it creeps in so silently, like someone slipping into bed late at night when their spouse is already dreaming.

 

 

I awoke in the evening inside a blue darkness. Outside my gently weeping windows the world had been dressed white.

I read in my bed for hours after, tucked into a soft blanket, my fingers curled around the large pages of my book, listening to the silence. 

I never thought this book, with its meadows and its picnics and sunny childhood days, would be a winter book. But now, reading it for the second time, I realized that it was. It is full of winter, full of festivities and New Years parties. It is full of snow banks, and cold naked nights, and stagnant winter days, and soft and still ones too. It is packed with cold pavements, and tragedies that happen on Christmas, and wedding days during snow storms. 

It is full of soft silent nights in which its characters curl up in bed with a book, or with the warm body of someone they love. 

It was the perfect book to keep you warm in bed on a night like this one.

 

 

The spell still hasn't broken. But the book was over by the time I made my way into the night to behold the winter's magic. The only disturbance in the snow was a cat's soft footprints and the showers of a tree laden white,  leaving trails of its own as it shed bits of its new coat. 

 

I crawled into bed after, with my mittens and boots drying downstairs and my book put aside on my nightstand without a slip to mark its place in time.  

 

It is strange how a narrative is remembered when it is over; not in thought-out paragraphs or ordered pages, but existing in one's head in fragments and duality, in coupled moments and disordered dialogue, misplaced moments stuck in sections of a nonsensical timeline. It is as if it has happened all at once, a stream of consequence nestled into a soft white night spent in reading, and nothing else.

 

 

Spending Time in My Printed Book

I have spent the last few months inside the first few chapters of my book.

Part One, which I wrote so long ago, in another province, in a house now far gone, in a time and a life so unlike this one, is a thing of my past. 

I have spent these last few weeks revisiting it, sifting through its words, righting its tilted paragraphs, rummaging through its pages like sheets of music that need organizing. 

First, they were untouchable, black on a white glowing page, easy to erase and alter, to mend and mistakenly correct. All I had to do was press the keys. 

Then, a few weeks ago, they became concrete. 

With the help of my family, Part One, written one summer when high school was done but my new life had not yet begun, was printed now for the second time. But with it came something new; something more hefty and more full of change; something written by a writer so unlike the one who spent more time deleting than she did writing; a writer who somehow learned to write so effortlessly, she almost believed she was doing something wrong. 

 

Thus, Part Two was printed for the first time. The book in both parts was bound by twine and many helpers, as we sliced and organized and punched holes. It had to be bound in three parts, due to its length. 

Furthermore, something both small and great happened: the book was printed with a name. For the first time since I first started writing it, this book that was mine had a title wholly apart from its former one ("my book", a unfitting title altogether, since it will not always be mine.) I always knew it would need a name in order to go out into the world. But I never thought it would come so easily.  

 

But this copy in its incompleteness, in its messiness, with its notes and scribbles and its curled edges, will always be mine. So, as I toil with it, as I get frustrated with it, as I hop across its shortcuts and try to find new ways to write about things that to me are by now old and familiar, I learn that what I love most about this printed being is to hold it, to feel how much it weighs, and remember what it was like to fill out these pages when they were digital and blank. I knew it as the printer coughed it out, and I picked up the pages, and all I could say was "I wrote all of this!"

But, not only did I write it all, I worked for it all; I fought with it all; I got fed up with it; I hurt for it; I lost sleep for it. I wrote every word.

 

Now I get to think about it; I get to fix every fragment and cut up every run on. I get to ponder each word and select some new ones. I get to cut and paste and alter. 

 

So, as I edit Part One for what I hope will be the last time in a while, I resist the urge to rush to the end, to the new stuff yet unread, wholly unedited, but full of tension, and mystery, and murder, and so much more. I resist the urge to call it good enough, and I ponder with my pencil these now printed words. I cross things out. I jot things down. I think about unfinished paragraphs when my mind can wander during long work days.

I tell myself that I do not know when I will be returning here next, to these chapters written before the beginning had yet begun. 

I do know this though: when I return, I will be a better writer than I am now; when I return, I will have written chapters I still know nothing about; I will be one step closer to the last one, what ever numeric title it may bare. I know that it is out there, somewhere on the paper white horizon. 

I know also that the next time I read these chapters I will look up from this book, this book that is mine only for a time, and the life around me will be different too. 

It is strange how thoughts like these affect me: making me both eager to get to the end, and desire to linger here a little while longer.

Stuck Editing in an Imaginary Fishbowl

I was reminded of the scene in Big Fish in which Edward Bloom is engulfed by a rain storm. Within seconds of the storms beginning, his entire car is immersed as a lake gushes from the sky, equipped also with fishes and the ethereal woman who we've learned is also a fish. What follows is a scene of tranquility. In the ghostly underwater world, Edward sits in his car like in a fishbowl and watches the strange fish blow bubbles around him. 

I, however, was not in my car, and it took at least the whole night for my house to be engulfed to the brim. The rain had been driven onto my window all night. Eventually though, it sounded less like raindrops and more like a waterfall. I could hear the tree crashing against the side of the house as the tempest thrashed away with it.

I spent most of that night editing, usually forgetting the gloriously nasty weather outside. I had a candle by the window, and from time to time, I pressed my face to the glass. I could see almost nothing outside. It was dark, and my reflection peered at me in the black. I did not see any fishes.

Believe what you will, but moments after this picture was taken, a trickle of water leaked through the frame of the window and put the candle out. 

 

I admit, I am never quite sure where the time goes when I'm writing, and after a night spent imagining things, it is always strange to come back to the real world. By the time I return to my surroundings, it is usually pitch black outside, and there being no street lights where I live, there is nothing out there to see by. 

 

All I had was the sound of the outside world to spur my imagination. I could hear the rainstorm pounding on the rooftop; I could hear it running down my windows; I could hear the waterfall outside our door gushing wildly; water; water; water. It didn't seem to stop nor lessen. 

 

As I tried to fall asleep, I listened to the trickle leaking through the top of the window, and I imagined what might be going on outside. Then sleep came, and with it silence. And still the water trickled. 

I slept there, in that tranquil lake.

 

 

I was saddened when there was no lake around my house in the morning, and so, I had no choice but to go in to work. The ditches and dykes I passed on my way were flooded, but beyond that, I had no proof of my strange night. 

 

I suppose fiction can only be incorporated into one's life to some extent. I'd imagine myself into Edward Bloom's fishbowl any day, if I had the choice. There is less to do there, and so much more time to write.