i’ll stand at the foot of your lake
i’ll wait in the grass while you take it too far
i’ll give you the keys to all the canoes
i’ll sing to you, until you sing back
i’ll sing to you, until you sing back.
SEEING THROUGH THE END OF THE WORLD
I remember the precise moment it happened. The floor of the tiipi was woven with fresh cedar boughs that didn’t remind me of Christmas. The fire had matured. It was mid-afternoon and the sun was high and strong but the air was still cool. It was simple. It was nothing. We were sitting. We were all just sitting listening to your Kokum reminisce about her life as if she was flipping through a book — a casual observation here, an insight there. We were there on those cedar boughs, listening to her as her Nishnaabemowin seeped into our marrow. Then, for no reason, you leaned in towards the fire, an elbow on the boughs, your body stretched out. It was that simple. You were just you being you. They were just being them. It was effortless. Nobody normal would have even noticed. But I noticed.
It was the precise moment I fell in love with you.
It matters and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because it’s not the kind of love that changes anything, except of course that it is love and so it changes everything, but just slightly and never forever. It requires a great deal of care, as all loves do, because we need to come out the other side of this love okay. When I think about this part, I resist thinking that it would be better if there was no love between us at all. Because it might be easier, but it wouldn’t be better. It’s never better.
If I had your undivided attention, even for five minutes, I would tell you to stop panicking. I would tell you that you have no idea how amazing freedom feels and that you should stop giving a fuck about all those things you are supposed to give a fuck about, even if it is just for five minutes. For one thing, you’d realize that ice storms always melt, eventually.
If I had ten minutes alone with you, I’d tell you that I love you. I’d tell you not to be scared, because it’s the kind of love that doesn’t want anything or need anything. It’s the kind of love that just sits there and envelops whoever you are or whoever you want to be. It doesn’t demand. It isn’t a commodity. It doesn’t threaten all the other people you love. It doesn’t fuck up and it doesn’t fuck things up. It’s loyal. It’s willing to feel hurt. It’s willing to exist on shifting terms. It’s willing to stay anyway. It doesn’t want. It’s just there. It’s just there and good and given freely, sewing up the holes unassumingly because it’s the only thing to do. There is so much space around it and the space shimmers.
All of this would scare you. I know it would. So part of us tasting this freedom, part of this gentle, stolen, savage love, is to just give it away without saying it. We just need to let it be lovely and giving and overwhelming in every single moment. We don’t need to do anything, except to stay glad.
The malignancy coursing through my veins would also scare you. Even though I loved you like this before, and I’ll love you like this after. Fuck it. The only way to exist outside of malignant right now is to lie about having it. And I didn’t want to ever lie to you or fight about whose turn it is to do the dishes or how we are going to pay off the Visa or whom you drunkenly made out with. If you found solace in her skin then so be it. So you deserve to. I want that for you. I want you to feel the rush of someone new, even if it isn’t me, even if it’s a risk, because it’s always a risk. I only ever wanted to be the one that knew. I only ever wanted that dance.
I want to explain this to you because I’m going to be gone and you’re going to be mad at me for not telling you. You’ll think I didn’t trust you. You’ll think I didn’t give you the opportunity to love me, to stay, to grieve with me. You’ll be hurt and angry instead of hurt and sad. You’ll be hurt because I didn’t give you the opportunity to say goodbye. You’ll think I am selfish.
But this isn’t how you and I work. We never work through things together. We never deal with the worst; we just come together and celebrate the very best. You’d say that we exist in a bubble, that it isn’t real, that we aren’t real, but you’d be wrong. We were truth and it wasn’t sustainable. So we sustained it through distance and time and struggle and persistence, because we know how to do those things and we’re damn good at them.
I imagine what it would be like to tell you. You’d listen. Ask official questions. Offer standard support. Check in. I’d make inappropriate jokes. You’d worry and ask more official questions. I’d deflect. You’d back off to give me space, and I’d need you to do the exact opposite. I’d need you to fall into me. You’d worry more, which would lead to more fake bureaucracy. I’d retreat into myself, abandoned. By you. By my body. By life. Then I’d be gone.
I’m mostly sure this is how it would go. I’d become one more thing for you to take care of and manage; you’d become one more thing I’d avoid. I didn’t want this for us.
So I didn’t tell you until now, until this letter, which has been delivered under circumstances that are inevitably going to cloud your reading of it, so much so, actually, that I think you’re never going to understand what I mean, which is why I’m publishing it. I’m publishing it so your friends, my friends, strangers, whoever, will get it and possibly even explain it to you. I want them to say, “She loved you. Not you the circumstance, but you. All of you. The fucked-up parts. The not-fucked-up parts and everything in between. She knew the lists you kept in your head just for yourself. She didn’t care about any of those things. It was a flawless love. She loved you and she didn’t want to own you or cage you. She had your heart. She had your back. She just loved you in an endless way.”
I know what you’ll say because you’ll be mad. Angry like you’re being falsely accused and waiting in a line while someone berates you. You’ll want to scream that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if I loved you or not, because in the end, at the end of everything, I’m gone, and you’re abandoned and hurt and alone.
You’re going to feel betrayed by me. Death is betrayal.
And you’re right. I took you out of the equation. I decided. I didn’t think about what you might have been brave enough to say to me. I didn’t give you the chance because nothing you could have said would have made it better and knowing that you loved me, if indeed you did, would have only made my forced exit more painful. But then the last minutes came, and last minutes can change a person. I can’t go through that final doorway without you, so I ask my wife to write this last part down and then I ask her to call you. When you ask your wife to call someone from your deathbed, she does so knowing that this person is neither a friend nor a colleague, and she does so because this is what seamless love does. She calls you. She explains to you from outside my room. I can see her pacing back and forth through the tiny window in the hospital-room door. I love her right now and I love you right now and my heart is on fire. She is explaining to the man I love that the woman they both love is dying, is nearly dead, that she’s been sick for months. That she hid it. My wife is explaining to you that she knows you are hurt and betrayed and angry, but this will be the very last time you will speak to me. My wife is speaking to my lover and they are both wearing the same makizinan.
Miigoaaniwi comes into the room holding the phone. She hands it to me and kisses my forehead. She tells me she loves me, and then she turns and leaves. I hold the phone up to my ear but I don’t say hello. I just listen to you breathing. For several minutes we just listen. We are making love for the last time, two thousand miles apart, just listening in our fragile, shimmering space.
travel to me now
the wind has worn my edges
the cold pricked away brittle skin
bones lying here in front of you
lost before they can begin
there’s red on the ice of the lake
there’s bruises that never heal
th
ere’s past collapsing on present
she took things i didn’t know you could steal
i cried like the ocean
i fell into your arms
my house is burning
& i’m ignoring the alarms
sometimes it’s ok to feel that way
you whisper
take the covers off your makizinan
stop counting the nickels & dimes
let me cry one more great lake
kiss my forehead a thousand times
build me a never-ending fire
play songs i’ve already heard
tell me stories about caribou & skateboards
fill my silence with pretty words
i’ll let your warmth seep into my bones
i’ll let your light strip away the dark
i’ll let your spring suffocate my winter
i’ll let you fill the holes in my bark
build me a never-ending fire
play songs i’ve already heard
tell me stories about caribou & skateboards
fill my silence with pretty words
there’s nothing in this
that isn’t love
AKIDEN BOREAL
The brochure for Akiden Boreal is cluttered with words, a pamphlet of the kind that has too much information and in a font demanding a reader’s commitment. But we all read it anyway, and saved it, and passed it around to our friends who get what it’s pushing and act nonchalant for those who don’t. We hovered over it while it was passed from sweaty hand to sweaty hand, babysitting it until we could get it safely taped back onto the fridge, behind the magneted pile of shit we can’t lose and have nowhere else to put.
Akiden means “vagina.” Literally, I think it means “earth place” or “land place,” though I’m not completely confident about the meaning of the “den” part of the word and there is no one left to ask. I think about that word a lot because I approach my vagina as a decolonizing project and because metaphors are excellent hiding places. The brochure says that you can’t take any expectations into the Akiden. That whatever happens, happens. That this could be your first and only time in the natural world, and you just have to accept whatever experience you have. For some it’s profoundly spiritual. For others it’s just full-on traumatic, and still others feel nothing. The brochure says that learning takes place either way. That the teacher, the Akinomaaget, will teach whatever way it goes.
I’ve read and re-read the Akiden Boreal brochure every night for the past six months and so has Migizi. The words “last place of its kind” are seared into my heart. A combination of fear verging on horror mixes with fleeting placidity when I get to the “Tips for a Great Visit” section. I’m worried that I’ll have a panic attack or some sort of a meltdown and fuck up my only chance in this place. The brochure warns in stilted legalese that there’s a “sizable” percentage of people who visit the Akiden network and never recover. They spend the rest of their lives trying to get back in. This kind of desperation is a friend of mine and I know myself well enough to know that it is perhaps better not to play russian roulette with myself like this and with Migizi. I also know myself well enough to know I will.
When I asked Migizi to do this with me last year he said yes, seemingly without taking the time to feel the weight of “yes” on the decaying cartilage that barely holds life together. People do all kinds of shit in the Akiden network, and in the tiny moment he said yes, it was unclear what he was saying yes to, exactly.
The network was initially set up for ceremony, but when people thought about it, there are all kinds of things we can’t do anymore and all kinds of those things can be thought of as ceremony — having a fire, sharing food, making love, even just sitting with things for a few hours.
I decided ahead of time not to ask Migizi questions about our visit to the network or about anything else that I didn’t want answers to. And you should know that I’m not sorry. We are from people that have been forced to give up everything and we have this one opportunity to give something to ourselves and we’re going to take it. We are fucking taking it. Even though occupation anxiety has worn our self-worth down to frayed wires. Even though there is risk. After all, everything we are afraid of has already happened.
The confirmation number for my reservation at Akiden Boreal is written on a slip of paper, scotch-taped to the fridge, behind the brochure that is also taped to the fridge, hidden in plain sight. It is for three hours on June 21. I also memorized the confirmation number because I was confident I’d lose the slip, and on the same day I scratched it into the right front bumper of my car in case of early-onset dementia. I’m not good at looking after important pieces of paper so I also wrote it on the eavestrough on the left side of the house, because houses and cars are harder to lose than paper and no one will think to look there.
The number is ten years old now, booked on the blind faith of youth, in hopes that I’d have enough of a credit rating to borrow the money to pay for the three hours. Blind faith rarely pays off, but this time it did, and I do. Barely. The bank says it will take me the rest of my life to pay off the loan, but it doesn’t matter. No one gives a shit about owing money anymore.
I arrived a day early in accordance to the anxiety-management plan I made, as was suggested in the brochure. I booked a massage at the hotel, spent some time in the sauna and steam room, ate leafy green vegetables, did yoga and cardio, just like a white lady. I was still carrying a lot of frightened that the two of us will just be caught up in awkwardness and we won’t be able to relax into this place. The brochure suggested taking anxiety meds, and most people do because this is a more controlled strategy than self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. I wanted to be the kind of person that could melt into this experience fully present. I wanted to be that kind of person, but I knew in my core I’m not. I’m the kind of person that actually needs to self-medicate in order to not fuck up important things.
Migizi and I met at the hotel bar that night for a few drinks and to reconnect before the visit. It was graceless at first for sure. But after the first bottle of wine I could see him breathing more easily. He stretched out his legs under the table and let them touch mine. My eye contact was less jolted. He seemed more confident as the night went on, and the silently voiced “you’re not good enough,” which marinates in the bones of my inner ear and pricks at my edges, was a little quieter.
Now it’s 10 a.m. and we’ve each had two cups of coffee, one at the hotel and one in the waiting room at the security check-in. You have to arrive two hours before your scheduled appointment to make sure there is ample time for the scanning process. Last year some activists burnt down the Cerrado, a tropical savannah habitat in Brazil, by sneaking in an old-style flint. They wanted open access, which I want too. But in the process, they disappeared the last members of the tropical savannah choir.
I’m watching to see if Migizi is nervous too, but he is good at holding his cards close to his chest. He drank three shots of whiskey from a silver flask just outside the scanning room before we came in. I had two because I’m desperate to be able to feel this place. I tell myself our Ancestors would be ok with that; after all, we’re going to be someone’s Ancestors some day, and I’d want my grandchildren to do whatever they had to do to experience this. Compassion and empathy have to win at some point.
We clear security and wait in the holding room until the Watcher comes in to unlock the door to the site. She does so at exactly noon. I walk inside and am immediately hit with the smell of cedar. It’s real cedar, not synthetic, and according to the brochure that means it comes with a feeling, not just a smell. The brochure says to be prepared for feelings and to let them wash over you like the warm waves of the ocean. This is the key to a good visit, the brochure insists.
I feel my body relaxing in spite of myself. The space seems immense even though I know my Ancestors wo
uld think this is ridiculous. The idea of finding the smallest amount of habitat that could sustain itself and then putting it in big glass jar without a lid. The glass dome. The edges.
I feel like crying. Actually I’m starting to cry and I know Migizi hates that and I hate that too and so I’m biting my lip but silent tears are falling all over my face anyway. Migizi licks the tears off my cheeks, takes my hand, and we walk to the centre of Akiden Boreal, where there is a circle of woven cedar, like our Ancestors might have done on the floor of a lodge. He opens his hand and he is holding two tiny dried red berries. I ask. He says they are from his Kobade, his great-grandmother, and they are called “raspberries.” He says they are medicine and his family saved them for nearly one hundred years in case one of them ever got into Akiden Boreal. I ask him if they are hallucinogens. He says he thinks so. I’m becoming overwhelmed in the same way the brochure warned us and so I decide to eat one. We both do. Within minutes, I’m more relaxed and happier than I’ve ever felt. I’m drowning in peacefulness and calm, and there is a knife of deep sadness being forcefully pulled out from deep in me.
Migizi reaches over and touches the skin on my lower back with just his fingertips. It feels like he’s moving around the air very closest to my skin. I’m losing track of my body; the edges are dissolving and I’m a fugitive in a fragile vessel of feelings and smells and senses. My lungs draw in moist air to deeper reaches, my back is arching, my heart feels like it is floating out of my chest.
Then Migizi lies down on the cedar boughs, on his side, facing me. He puts his right hand on my cheek, and he kisses my lips. He’s kissing my lips, and in doing so he is touching that part of me I’ve never shared with anyone, because I didn’t know it was there. There is a yellow light around his body and I can feel it mixing with my light. Part of me is a pool of want. Part of me is a waterfall filling up that want almost faster than I can desire. At one point he stops and takes his clothes off, which he’s never done before, because he’s afraid I will see his self-hatred, the self-hatred we both share and pretend doesn’t exist. And we’re there, in the middle of Akiden Boreal. Naked. Embraced. Enmeshed. Crying. Convinced that being an Akiden addict for the rest of our lives is important, convinced that living as an addict, dying as an addict, is unconditionally worth it. Convinced that breaking all of our healthy connections to the city, the concrete and even the movement, for the chance to be here one more time before we die, is worth it. Because this is how our Ancestors would have wanted it.
This Accident of Being Lost Page 4