by Leesa Dean
He thinks about waking Leslie but decides against it. She looks so peaceful, sleeping with her head turned to where Alex used to be.
AT SOME POINT in the night, Leslie felt Alex let go of her hand. Now, she reaches for it but is surprised to find the bed empty. She opens her eyes and checks her phone. It’s 8:27 AM. Two empty glasses sit on the bedside table. Outside the window, loose snowflakes shimmer as they hang suspended in the air. The storm is over, but Toronto has become a white planet in its wake. Today, she decides, I’m going to do laundry. She looks to where Alex’s clothes and first-aid kit and bulletproof vest were strewn about and suddenly remembers him moving around the room, the slight rustling, the final click as he fastened his backpack. None of it remains now except the strange pink crystal from his mother, sitting on her desk, its prism-like facets catching the early morning light.
CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE
STUPID RHYMES WITH CUPID
The first time we had a conversation, I was in grade 10 and you were in grade 12. Right before Christmas, your band played at the school talent show and I couldn’t stop laughing because you spat water into the crowd and nailed the principal’s left breast, an act that earned you a one-week suspension. When you came back in January, I cornered you in the hall. “Guess what?” I said. “I had a dream about you last night. You had three legs!” That dream didn’t actually happen, but it certainly got your attention. We talked at length about the possible mechanics of such a body—you said walking would be more of a trot and I said a three-legged person would probably drag the middle one like it didn’t exist. We both agreed pants would be difficult.
We didn’t talk again until the summer. Your band had a new album and the launch party was at the gravel pits out on Theatre Road, a name that doesn’t make sense because there’s no theatre anywhere. A man with a purple mohawk sold home-recorded cassettes out of a cardboard box and told anyone who didn’t buy one to go the fuck home. During the show, the generators made more noise than your guitar, but no one cared because at least something was happening in town for once. At the end of the first set, the bassist dumped gas over a pile of pallets and lit them on fire. You stood against the backdrop of flames drinking Canadian Club straight from the bottle and told people you wanted to be a porn star.
“Imagine, sex all the time and you even get paid.”
The statement secretly made me cringe, but I said, “Yeah, yeah, totally.” I blushed, because I was a virgin at the time. Turns out you were, too. I should have known. Who else would brag about wanting to be a porn star?
That fall, I was back in school but you were gone. Not only had you graduated, you’d moved from Cranbrook to Vancouver so you could start a “real” band and write books until one day some publisher opened their eyes and said “Holy fuck, Nathan Matlock is a cool asssss motherfucking writer.” Then you would be famous.
I KNOW HOW TO APPRECIATE BEAUTY I KNOW WHAT’S BEAUTIFUL
I was in grade 11 when you came back from Vancouver. I saw you one afternoon by the clock tower downtown, on a day that made me happy to be alive—burnt wood smell in the air, a crispness over everything.
“Hey!” you shouted. “Three-legged girl!”
Your hair was longer but you kept the sides close-shaved like a real punk.
“Come for coffee?” you asked.
I shrugged like I didn’t care and followed you to a nearby café. As we stacked creamers to impossible heights, you told me about all the cool friends you’d made in Vancouver, like Sid the draft dodger who lived in an underground city, and Malcolm who kept bees on his roof. You also told me about the time you got high on mushrooms and told people in the streets that life is a bad remake of a cult classic based on a screenplay adapted from an incoherent novella. The cops found you ranting at the corner of Hastings and Columbia and took you to a hospital. You kept yelling on the gurney because the acoustics tripped you out. I bet you sounded like an eagle when you screamed that night.
While living in the big city, you worked at a recycling plant where employees wore masks to keep the mould away. Mounds of dead carton post-liquid and blue with right-angles meshed into abstraction is how you described your work environment. At night you listened to community radio, sometimes in languages you didn’t understand, and called in requests that never got played. Sometimes you found great things in the recycling, like fur coats and antique weathervanes, that you later sold at flea markets.
Once, you found a story in the heap. It was about a dragonfly that travelled to places where people lived in grey and brought colour to their lives. In the story, a woman who’d lost her husband stood at the sink crying because instead of two dirty plates there was only one. Soon enough, the dragonfly flitted past the window, bringing colour with each palpitation. Eventually the trees changed to green, the flowers to orange, and the sun’s reflection flamed white-gold. The sad person couldn’t help but cheer up.
You read me the story while I drank my third coffee. What a voice you had. Just like a radio announcer, and I always wondered why you never became one. “Wow,” I said when you were done. “That’s really good. Really.”
You folded the paper up small and slid it across the table and told me I could borrow the story for a while. Eventually, the paper wore thin and the ink bled purple along the folds because I carried it everywhere. In later years, when we could no longer bear to speak to each other, I threw it away because I was convinced you no longer believed in beauty.
I wish I still had it.
DO YOU REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME WE KISSED
We became friends immediately. Most days, you drove me home from school via the junkyard where you collected scrap metal and wires for your various art installations. Sometimes we drove to Kimberley where they had a yodelling cuckoo clock. Local kids had started sneaking up the back of it at night to change the yodelling tape. You never knew what you’d get—death metal, Malcolm X, the Jabberwocky. One night, you sent me up the clock to put in one of your band’s tapes, but a security guard came after us before I could finish the deed.
In December, we started our own gang. The mission was social justice and our main goal was to protect the town from the new Wal-Mart. People were going crazy spending their money and some local stores had gone out of business. We spent a lot of time drinking coffee at the Husky, you and I, discussing the trickiness of promoting local sustainability while smashing capitalism. Under the bright restaurant lights, we made hundreds of posters that said things like VIOLENCE IS A FAILURE OF THE IMAGINATION and YOUTH AGAINST FASCISM and ONE DAY THE POOR WILL HAVE NOTHING LEFT TO EAT BUT THE RICH and the one you liked most—LOVE YOUR FAMILY, KILL YOUR TV.
Our relationship had been strictly platonic from the beginning, but that changed Easter Sunday. My parents were mad at dinner because I ate fast and refused to say grace. You barely ate anything because you were a vegetarian. Since we understood each other so well, we tended to skip nonessential words when speaking, meaning no one else could understand our conversations. It drove my parents crazy. After dinner, my mother brought out a Jell-O and pineapple dessert. When you mentioned how gelatin is really made with horse hooves, we were asked to leave.
The road was blackened with ice and we fishtailed three times on the way to the Husky. After several coffees, we hit the streets and taped mean posters to stores we didn’t like and left love notes for the ones we did. In the doorway of the only independent grocery store left in town, we stood close and strategized how to keep it in business aside from bombing the WalMart. Later, we walked to Rotary Park. You put down your scarf and we sat on it by the cenotaph, inventing life stories for the soldiers.
“What do you think about the fact that we’re all going to die someday?” I asked.
You thought death was something a person would mentally participate in until the absolute end, at which point the still-active mind would enter a new chamber of consciousness.
I said that didn’t make sense at all.
We agreed to disagree.
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br /> Driving back to my parents’ house, you were unusually quiet. I asked what was wrong and you said you thought I should be your girlfriend.
“But you’re my best friend,” I said.
You seemed unsure about how to respond to that. The uncertainty looked good on you and suddenly I wondered if us being just friends was a mistake. Without warning, I pulled over in front of the Alliance Church and said, “Kiss me right now so we’ll know.” Conscious of your coffee breath, you unwrapped a piece of gum and gave me half. We counted to three.
It didn’t feel like kissing a friend. Not at all.
EVERYTHING NOW JUST IS . IS . IS .
It was like turning on a switch: everything was the same but different. We still drove around in your van listening to thrashy punk groups no one had ever heard of and drank lots of coffee at the Husky, but instead of hugging at the end of the night, we would kiss. Our relationship felt more complete that way. We tried taking off our clothes to bring our intimacy to a new level, but each attempt ended with us discussing how it felt staged, like we were trying to live out fantasies that had been canonized by popular culture. Are we asexual? we wondered. Is there something wrong with us? Eventually we stopped asking questions and just accepted our way of being with each other.
One night in July, the day’s heat still radiated from the sidewalk long after dark, so we drove out to Monroe Lake to cool down. It was mid-week and there was no one around except us. There was a rope swing on the shore and you could practically fly to the middle of the lake if you ran fast enough. Along the banks, the black pines stitched land to sky and I wanted to stay there forever. The two of us ran and jumped and floated for hours until our skin wrinkled, then we made up old person names for ourselves—Gertrude and Hank. Our splashes that night sounded like the only thing in the universe.
In the van driving home, you said something I will never forget:
“I bet if we both wrote a book it would be the same.”
HONESTY. NOW. IS WINNING.
In September, I started grade 12. Most of my friends had already graduated and I knew it was going to be a year of awkward loneliness. You said we could meet for lunch every day, except your boss at the pizza place switched you to day shift. I ate most of my lunches in an empty classroom.
A week after school started, a guy named Joe showed up in homeroom, which was a big deal because no one new ever came to town. People just left. For the longest time, all I knew was that Joe came from the Okanagan and once spent a summer painting apartments in New York. We sat at the same table in visual arts. Joe didn’t really talk to anybody so I didn’t talk to him either, but we shared a comfortable silence while we worked. Sometimes we admired each other’s paintings.
Visual arts was in last period and I often stayed after class to work on projects. Most of the time I had the place to myself, but Joe stayed once to finish a painting of the Staten Island dump.
“Fresh Kills,” he said. “That’s what it’s called, and did you know the garbage is piled higher than the Statue of Liberty?” I admitted I did not. My painting was a trash can full of flowers—lilies with bent stems, bleached daisies against metallic grey. I’d seen it on the way to school earlier that week and thought it was the most beautiful thing.
Joe and I kept working on our trash until it got dark. As Joe layered pastels over charcoal, he told me about New York in the summertime—the steaming rats in the alleys and break-dancers at Union Square.
“I’ve never really been anywhere,” I told Joe.
“You’ll go places,” he said.
The conviction in his voice and his certainty that I would not live and die in the town where I was born made me cry. Tears led to comfort, which led to a kiss, and before I knew it, we were in the supply closet taking our clothes off.
I wish I could say I felt guilty, but I didn’t. Lying to you was easier than I ever imagined. “Yearbook club today,” I said with a shrug. “Call you later? I’ve joined the swim team.”
You could not hide the hurt, though you tried. Over time, you stopped asking questions. I started to feel dissociated, like I was watching a movie of myself drinking coffee and having long conversations with you. It got to the point where I didn’t feel like I was kissing you. My lips were just moving. I did not want my lips to just be moving with you.
I wish I could remember how we broke up. Was it in the park? In your van? How long did we not talk? Nothing from that period of my life is clear, except that I felt horrible once our lives parted ways.
Joe and I didn’t last long. Our connection was never anything but physical. Eventually, he stopped coming to class and then school altogether. Someone said he moved to Kelowna. Another said he got a job at the pulp mill.
On Valentine’s Day, you left a note in my mailbox that said THE HEART IS A CLENCHED FIST ENTRUSTED TO A NONEXISTENT IDEA. A few weeks later, I saw you walking in Rotary Park. “The heart is not a clenched fist!” I yelled.
You stopped in front of the cenotaph, and when I caught up, you told me I had been your dragonfly—your world was grey without me. We soon went back to driving around together and talking on the phone and drinking coffee at the Husky, but there was no kissing. I just couldn’t. Not after what I’d done with Joe.
After graduation, I left town because I’d been accepted to a French immersion program. There was no way of knowing at the time, but we would never live in the same place again. I stayed in Quebec after the summer because I wanted to have a fabulous life and knew that would never happen in our town. You quit your pizza delivery job in October and moved back to Vancouver for the same reason. For the next ten years, you oscillated between town and city, never sure where you wanted to be.
I SUPPOSE THERE IS NO “GOOD” TIME TO TELL YOU I STILL LOVE YOU.
We hadn’t been in contact for years when you wrote this in an email. I lived in Montreal with a boyfriend who wanted to marry me. I didn’t want to write you back until I knew what to say. I waited too long. Eventually, you sent a message that said, THE DISRUPTIVE AMBIENCE OF THE IRRECONCILABLE SPREADS LIKE SUNLIGHT AND OIL. GOODBYE.
I know very little about your life after this moment. Because you refused to speak to me, I had to make up a life for you in Vancouver. Your apartments were never nice and I’m sorry I couldn’t have dreamed up something better. One was a small studio above a flower shop on Pender Street. You wrote your first novel there, on a typewriter at your kitchen table. The window faced a brick building with crazy tenants who threw knives at each other. I see you going to three different coffee shops, depending on your mood: one is a diner where they serve cherry pie that is gluey from being in the fridge too long. You never eat the pie. You just sit with your notebook and drink coffee and write. The other two coffee shops are independent, run by artists like yourself. I see you at a microphone in front of a hushed crowd. I see a lot of respect and friends who love you.
A few years ago, my mother sent me a clipping from the local newspaper. You’d just had your first book published. I cried when I read it because we still lived thousands of kilometres apart. What I wanted most was to have coffee with you and maybe pull over somewhere afterwards to see if we still felt the same. Instead, I did nothing.
The last time I saw you was in September. I was back in town for my mother’s funeral—she’d dropped dead in WalMart from a heart attack. Feeling nostalgic and too sad to cook, I took my father’s truck and drove down to the pizza place where you used to work. Imagine my surprise when I found you behind the counter. Nothing about your appearance had changed, but somehow you didn’t look the same at all.
“Hey,” I said.
You pretended you didn’t know me.
ONE LAST TIME
LAST FEBRUARY, I DECIDED TO go to Mexico because someone I barely knew died. A twenty-three-year-old musician, friend of a friend from Vancouver who I met at a party once. I thought she was so beautiful, but in a simple way that made some people look at her as plain. After I heard about her passing, how she die
d in her sleep for no discernible reason, I found myself watching her one and only music video on repeat. I memorized the earrings she wore, the mole on her chin, her curly hair, the space between her teeth. Knowing she was no longer in the world felt like the worst thing and I couldn’t figure out why. I guess I saw her potential to be great but knew that instead, she’d end up being forgotten.
I left three weeks later, on Valentine’s Day. The gate was populated mostly with businessmen and couples leaving for romantic holidays. I wondered how they would classify me, if they even registered my existence, and decided based on their gazes, either on their phones or on each other, that they did not. The plane left at three and I tried to hold back the nausea, ignore the high-pitched pressure in my ears as we gained altitude, tried not to think about how scared I felt, losing gravity, regretting the decision altogether.
There was a stopover in Dallas at sunset, an event everyone watched through the terminal window. The sky was all hot coals, clouds on fire, and the entire American Air crew, pilot and all, sat in a row beside me, immobilized, silent. Planes mapped the horizon, landing, hovering; the sky looked magnified and I couldn’t help but think of my mother, working at an airport all those years. She spent most of her life in the terminal café, admiring the mountains, earning a meagre wage to raise me properly, mistake that I was. Before my flight, I stopped to kiss her goodbye and she snuck a sandwich into my carry-on. I love you, I texted before the connecting flight left Dallas. So much, she wrote back.