Mistakes to Run With

by Yasuko Thanh

  As soon as I heard the door click shut I jumped out of bed and started putting things in my backpack: my snorkel, spices, a shoebox full of negatives of every photo we’d taken in our years together, computer disks of my writing, my teddy bear. When I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, my reflection shocked me—I was only twenty-four and suddenly, somehow, I’d grown old. I knew instinctively that this was how I’d look for the rest of my life. But I kept packing, imagining how it would be when Avery came home that night—if he came home—and saw my goodbye note on the coffee table.

  I caught a whiff of my shirt and felt a stab of pain, realizing that its scent—half the smell of home, half the smell of him—would never be the same again.

  * * *

  —

  All I’d been doing was bursting into tears. I cried in the work van. When I revealed to my boss what was going on in my life, he suggested we take the night off. While the others canvassed their neighbourhoods we sat in a pub and talked.

  Now I was in the Swartz Bay ferry terminal. As soon as I saw my father I repeated the performance. Beyond the tears, I felt a renewal. Was it possible that each time I cried it hurt less? Was I getting used to it?

  I’d called my parents and told them I was leaving Avery. I must have, though I have no clear recollection of the conversation. My father was waiting for me at the top of the escalator that spit out foot passengers from Vancouver one after another like a row of toy soldiers.

  We didn’t talk much on the drive home.

  The drive home? To their house. Where was home? I’d lost mine. I’d lost my connection to who I was, as represented by the furniture and clothing and knickknacks that we’d collected over the years and that I’d been forced to leave behind. I was twenty-four years old, had a grade nine education, an insubstantial piece of paper that said I had the general equivalent to my grade twelve, and everything I owned fit into a backpack. But I had a bit of money.

  I stayed with them for two weeks.

  Unlike the earlier time I’d left Avery, staying at Patti’s for a few days, this time I’d abandoned Vancouver. Already—with the Georgia Strait separating us—this move felt more permanent. The larger divide meant I wasn’t coming “home.”

  Whenever disagreements had broken out between us Avery would say “Go home to your parents.” Now, for the first time ever, I’d done that. I’d never phoned to ask them for anything before. I hadn’t lived with them since the age of fifteen. And now, a decade later, they’d taken me in, the prodigal daughter.

  Over the days that followed I watched my parents with each other, the way they’d bicker over the smallest things, and I wondered: Was my relationship with Avery so bad?

  My parents’ house smelled the way I remembered it: food aromas mixed with the lavender my mother grew and which my father wasn’t allergic to. I observed him, his collection of quirks, his unchanging rule, and wondered once again: What’s wrong with me? My mother has remained married to this person. Why can’t I stay with Avery?

  This was a lame attempt at self-comfort. To give myself a false cushion to fall asleep on. The hope that tomorrow would bring us back together.

  I tried to think of other things. Like the biologist at work who’d asked me to join him for a bike ride.

  In the weeks leading up to my leaving Avery, he and I had often slept in separate bedrooms. I could still hear him snoring, but I found myself pretending I was in my own apartment. When I masturbated, I no longer thought about him but about my co-workers. I imagined giving my body to anyone new. How it would feel.

  I approached finding a new home with the same sense of curiosity.

  The Wilderness Committee had said my job would be waiting for me whenever I returned. And so, after those two weeks with my parents, I planned to leave Victoria the next morning, find a place that afternoon, and be back at work that evening.

  When I got back to the city I visited a few rooming houses, including one that accepted only men. Late in the day, I found one on Water Street, right across from where I worked. It charged $375 a month for a room and had security cameras on every floor.

  It didn’t bother me that I’d have to share a bathroom with the whole floor. I’d approach the experience in the way I’d always wanted to travel: on a shoestring budget, exchanging comfort for adventure.

  From the outside I may have seemed directionless, but I knew what I wanted. To get out of the country altogether. And to never come back, as if leaving Canada could transform me into who I was destined to become.

  I pinched every penny. I went without food; I washed my clothes and hair and dishes with the bar soap that could be had for fifty cents in Chinatown.

  I began smoking again that week. I’d been off cigarettes for three years, but my fear of returning to the track no longer lingered in the drags I inhaled with pleasure, liberated. The idea of turning a trick felt different to me now. I even called a girl I’d once worked with, whose escort ad I’d seen, to ask if she had any spare clients, any doubles she needed help with. Had she said yes I’d have turned a trick in order to leave Canada that much faster.

  What I know now, and didn’t know then, was that true change comes from that little fire within us. As a trick had once said, “What you’re running from is in you.”

  Back then, though, I still believed that change was wrought from the outside in. Like forest fires, storms, and acid rain, change was an external authority. The key, as I knew it then, was to exercise the same care in choosing my environs as a prospective buyer debating the purchase of a house on a cliff.

  Now I know that true change means we’re no longer mutable from the outside, staying ourselves no matter what the weather. Less like clay, more like bamboo, swaying, not breaking, in a stiff wind.

  Back then, I was trying to cobble myself together out of bits others had thrown away, with a box of mismatched tools.

  I’d revoked reminders of my old self. I’d renounced violence. I worked in the perfect environment to politically charge high heels, makeup. In a world where children starved and bombs fell, the vanity of combing one’s hair, the patriarchal bondage of close-fitting clothing entrapped others, but not me.

  With a gusto reserved for the born-again I stormed the annual general meeting of a large logging corporation. I boycotted McDonald’s. I became a vegetarian.

  * * *

  —

  First week of September, 1996. The air had cooled and amid the green leaves a few had turned orange, clinging to branches in the breeze as if there were a point in hanging on. Six months earlier I’d moved into a housekeeping room in Gastown. Now I was about to call Avery from the parkade next door. Cars roared in and out of that cavernous, yellow-lit space, mocking my own stasis. Would he hang up? Or feign friendliness so he could kick my ass? I wanted to believe I was doing well, but my summer alone, the clubs and one-night stands, had been anything but fun. I wanted to tell him how long those months had felt, how I’d crank up reggae in my little room, spinning until laughter and tears made me stop.

  What I ended up telling Avery was that old friends had made me think of him. He asked me if I was happy.

  What could I say?

  I’d always thought happiness was a kind of completion, the circle’s end after you’d made your way around. Happiness the byproduct of achievement.

  I’d left Avery, started a new life.

  Isn’t that what I’d wanted?

  Why was I miserable? So lonely?

  I’d pegged happiness wrong.

  * * *

  —

  Twenty minutes later Avery was hugging me right off the ground, smelling of cologne, wearing a brand-new tracksuit.

  Then I saw the rundown East Vancouver house he’d moved into: cockroach infested, bathtub ringed with black grease, laundry basket overflowing, Molson-can crack pipe on the kitchen counter, flats of empty beer cans on the bedroom floor, flies everywhere, mice-chewed pizza boxes piled in corners, a photograph of us at Playa del Carmen tacked to the wall.
I knew what it meant now, that brand-new tracksuit, the cleanliness of his skin. I knew how far he’d come to get me.

  * * *

  —

  The house in East Van wasn’t a place to buy a plant and place it on the windowsill, to buy vegetables for dinner, to raise the blinds. It wasn’t a place for sunshine, for watching the blond-haired neighbour boy ride his BMX, for lying back on a couch and flipping the pages of a magazine. It wasn’t a place to dream.

  “Like old times.” Avery threw the cars keys on the fridge. He twisted the top off a twixer of rye and chugged, held the bottle out to me.

  I felt needy, and yet superior, in my ankle-length skirt, my patchouli oil perfume, my long hair parted down the middle and worn loose: a New Age woman living by morally elevated rules. I’d been reading Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Italo Calvino. Writers my new friends had introduced me to. I knew that I’d left him, I’d squared up from the track, because of a compulsion to matter. Was I “making a difference” now?

  I stopped myself from apologizing for not being “socially significant” enough, for the mess that surrounded him, for having left him when it was obvious he still needed my help.

  He hugged me and said, “I always knew one day you’d leave me.” We stood there in the kitchen doorway like that, hugging each other, for a long moment.

  Later I told him about one of my co-workers at the Wilderness Committee, an Australian woman working her way around the world. “I really admire her,” I said.

  I told him I might travel with her.

  I told him we’d talked about pooling our money to buy a sailboat.

  I told him that I wanted to travel, too, even if it meant travelling solo. That I had the address of an orphanage in Chiapas.

  Hot Suffocation Hell

  “I need to do this,” I told my friends. I was twenty-five. I’d saved less money than my Australian co-worker but was more motivated to leave Vancouver as soon as I could. In the few months since Avery and I had been back in touch we’d been drinking together, smoking crack. I knew I was screwing up, that I had to leave town for my own good.

  I romanticized the healing powers of movement, of what I’d learn eating breakfast anywhere, spending my day anywhere. Living simply, needing little, leaving no footprints. I’d backpack through the dust of Mexico, then Central America; I’d make it to Peru, ride on a cayuca down the Amazon, penniless and happy, relying on the generosity of river people to survive, surrounded by pet monkeys and brown slippery children. I’d hop on planes, pick up friends on rattling trains, address book swelling with numbers. The experience of lovers meeting once then never again would burn bright in my memory like a thousand tiny fires. Moving beyond selfishness. Rejoicing. Being free.

  In December of 1996 I caught a one-way flight to Mexico City. From there I took a subway to the bus station and bought a cheap ticket to Oaxaca, planning to stop there for a few days’ rest before heading to Chiapas. On Oaxaca’s Pacific shore, in a town called Zipolite, Kyle waylaid me—his smile, his sea-green eyes, his hands as solid as the wooden table he placed them on.

  He was an American anthropology major who spoke fluent Spanish and German. He was also bipolar and paranoid. Two years earlier he’d left his San Fernando halfway house and escaped across the U.S. border on a motorcycle. His charges stemmed from an armed carjacking that he described as a “misunderstanding.”

  One day, early on in our relationship, we sat on the beach and watched couples smoking weed as the sun set. Kids laughed in the turned-over cavities of fishing dories. Catholic schoolgirls pulled at boys’ white shirts with hungry hands. There was an edge here in Zipolite. Cars trying not to run over the junkies passed out on the street. Drunks scaring tourists for cash. People with the crazed kind of eyes seen on born-again Christians, both full and empty.

  Kyle invited me back to his cabana to smoke a joint. His beach house had a lime-treed courtyard furnished with gnarled, bleaching driftwood. The river stones placed among his exotic plants glowed like cairns marking a path on the moon. Ghost crabs skittered across his garden like alien invaders. He was only renting this home; he planned to build another on an arid slope by the tortilleria. He’d bought the land by saving his construction wages, putting it in a friend’s name since foreigners couldn’t own ocean property. I had yet to discover that he could memorize languages as easily as phone numbers and that he’d slept with every beautiful woman from here to Mexico City.

  He talked about the expansive coral reef, the exquisite delicacy of purple sea fans, his love of the sea. Then we walked along the beach, our bare feet slapping the wet sand like paddles. It was easier to walk on the hard pack than on the shin-deep flour, but I was intensely aware of the sucking sound of each step—shloop, shloop—as incoming sheets of seawater tried to glue us in place. The moon looked silly, the shloop was silly. His arm around my shoulders swept a wide circle, keeping others back. I felt giddy in his embrace, swaddled and safe.

  * * *

  —

  To get to Kyle’s plot of land, el terreno, I had to take a camioneta to the post office then walk up a steep path to my left, following the smell of cook fires and the recorded sounds of Los Tigres del Norte. There Kyle would be, digging holes in the earth with a small shovel.

  We’d been together a month, maybe two. I’d bring him support beams he’d prop up with an assortment of rocks. The frame measured six hundred square feet. Balanced unsteadily on the roof, he’d bark contradictory orders. Later we’d drink mezcal as fish cooked slowly over the coals.

  Kyle—to love him or not. His full lips were always smiling, even when his eyes were worried or sad. His stomach was so lean that I could fit my fingers in the washboard spaces when he held his breath. It had frightened me at first, when we met, how hard he felt, like something not human, too perfect to be real.

  He had an immense capacity for forgiveness; I could call him the vilest names and he’d carry on without a blink as if he hadn’t heard.

  I’d also seen Kyle rigid on the bed, catatonic, unable to speak for fourteen hours, muscles flexed to maximum capacity, eyes wide open like a doll’s. He’d put his hand to his neck to find patterns in the beats of his pulse, an emotional tension within him making the exercise vital. People wanted him dead for secrets he knew: he said they’d planted spies in bookstores, cafés, taxis. He recorded his findings in a spiral-bound notebook, writing in code. His pseudo-research gave him a connection to a world larger than himself and a lifeline to place: for this I envied him.

  I admired his ability to produce psychological fictions and his insatiable hunger for anything extraordinary. He was dying to be impressed.

  And Kyle could give me what I wanted, even when my desire swung between two extremes: I wanted intimacy but needed detachment. His compulsive need for closeness, his fear of committing, and his manic depression helped forge a bond that felt familiar. I loved how, without believing in what I wished for, we could talk about going to Mexico City and then back to my home. “I think I can get used to being a Canadian,” he said.

  I wondered how long I’d find his vulnerability endearing. I’d gotten into the habit of ignoring his delusions about the Illuminati and about his teeth growing too big for his mouth. Six months into our relationship I began to flirt with other men, fantasizing that someone besides Kyle could be that magnet, first pulling and then repelling me.

  Sometimes I dreamed, not about Kyle but about someone who looked exactly like him, holding in his arms a curly-headed toddler. Seen this way, Kyle resembled the capable, altruistic doctors I’d had met on the beach, young and handsome, on vacation with their European families.

  Or I’d dream that he was calling my name. It would be morning, with few people on the road, the concrete bricks of the eastern wall yellow with sunlight, the air still cool, not yet water-thick. He’d be standing there dusty and alone at the gate, wearing his navy blue T-shirt with the white V-neck, holding his luggage, a bleached lock of hair hanging over one sunburned cheek. H
e’d have lost his red coral necklace. I’d hear his voice echoing as if from another dimension. Yet I’d feel no urgency to respond; I’d pretend it was a lullaby, letting the sound soothe me.

  Even when he wasn’t sick, paranoid, or hearing voices, I found myself thinking, Why me? We lived as opposites. He was wide awake when I went to sleep and still wide awake when I got up. He claimed he was guarding me. He held my head and put me to sleep with bedtime stories about poisonings. When he was manic I wouldn’t wake up, preferring to curl into his rigid embrace and float away from coherent thought.

  The severity of his bipolar disorder meant he lived on two planes at once. I thought my low self-esteem could be as dangerous. He wouldn’t let me leave el terreno because he wanted to protect me from demons. When I tried to go he said, “I can’t let you leave. Don’t you understand?” He looked at me as if I were a child. “It’s for your safety.”

  * * *

  —

  We’d lasted this long—six months—because Kyle wanted a traditional marriage and children and I knew that with him I’d never get either. His protective hands, his eyes wrapping me in their warm clutch the way a spider cocoons a ladybug, his confident voice insisting on all the things he could teach me. When we tumbled into bed, breathless as wrestlers, it was compelling and passionate—because I never knew where I stood or whether he, or I, would be around the next day. He drew out of me that self-sacrifice essential to any worthwhile relationship, his needs drowning out the annoying buzz of my own. There was an element of desperation in our attachment, like the shloop of wet sand sucking at our feet.

  Still, I could play at being the good wife even while breaking away from the role. Together we were the kind of couple that made people stare: good-looking, confident. His studied nonchalance, his exquisite symmetry, fulfilled my need for adventure. Our sex, as often as seven times a day, didn’t involve true abandonment of oneself in another as much as constantly skirting the line between love and hate, making it so primal, so animal. Had we been animals we’d have already eaten each other. This consuming appetite, this desire, translated into something that felt, at least in the moment, more pure, more true than anything I’d had with anyone else, and kept me coming back for the easy way our bodies moved together like swimmer and river, our hair twining, hands clutching. I’d ignore his putdowns and affairs in exchange for what was immediate and simple and perfect, precisely because it could never be as complex as love. I felt absolute sacrifice and longing when he was inside me, longing even then, a longing that became only more profound over time.