Goodbyes

The first thing I immediately think of when I hear a beautiful song or see a beautiful sunset is my sister. My mind goes blank and instead I think of whether or not she'd like the song, if she were here. Instead I think of what she might look like, if her hair would be long and blonde. If she'd have long legs like me. I try to smile through it but what fun is there in goodbyes?

Dandelions

The bright yellow dandelions turn into white puffs in a matter of days. It feels like I just noticed them. They line every street. It means summer is coming. I buy myself new hair clips to celebrate. They are neon pink, green and orange. Summers are always prolific, with adventures packed into every day. Walking around the city, photoshoots on the balcony, drinking Shirley Temples at the bar late at night, stuffed into a booth with all my friends. 

They say you need sixty minutes outside every day to “recharge”. I heard it on the radio. I spend a lot of time trying not to worry about the inevitable bad things that will happen, like the death of my parents or my own death. I know what happens when you die. All your friends and family are sad forever and your body gets either burnt into ashes or buried six feet under. I don’t believe in an afterlife, heaven or hell, so I don’t think I’ll reincarnate into a butterfly or anything like that. I believe your memory is then trapped into the brains of the loved ones you left behind, alive on earth.

I like this for myself. I even made sense of death. 

Transit-way in Ottawa

For my entire life, Ottawa had a bus called the 95, which took riders from Orleans to Kanata along the transit-way, snaking through downtown. 

In 2019, the city of Ottawa took our precious 95s away and replaced them with a bunk light-rail train that keeps breaking down in the snow. Everyone in Ottawa was reeling over this. The LRT had problems with its doors, cracked wheels, and derailed more than once. 

The sad part about the whole thing is that we used to have a functioning transit-way. We were all used to commuting from suburbia to downtown on the 95. You could catch the 95 at almost every station. It was so fast. 

The present LRT system does not work. The city should admit its fault and bring back bus 95. The train is nothing but a giant disappointment. 

Note: I do not take the train. I am editing this to add that. I recently saw an interview on the news where this guy my age was saying the train is useful. Maybe I don't know anything.

I never thought about drowning or overdosing or dying in a car accident; in fact, I particularly recall thinking it would never happen to me. Until it did. I’m begging for mercy on the ground to a god I can’t bring myself to even believe in let alone pray to. When the misery of death takes over everything, I lerch toward religion. I find solace in drugs. I tried every form of escapism I could: I shaved my head and moved out of the city. I had the hardest time with the second step of grief, which is anger. I was angry at everyone, everything. Things were triggering. I went crazy in Vancouver and got hospitalized and diagnosed. I went back to Toronto and fucked that up, too. With my tail between my legs, I came home to Ottawa. That was in the spring of 2018. The next five years were disastrous. So many irresponsible, bad things happened on account of my behaviour which was appalling. I’m thankful to say I’ve changed. I look in the mirror and I’m proud of who I am now, something I haven’t always been able to say. 

Angels

When it rains, I think about Emma, Jesse and Phil and I am somehow put to peace. That is, my sister, boyfriend and friend, who have all died tragic deaths at a young age. “That’s how angels work,” my friend points out, which both breaks my heart and makes me smile all at once. 

What I think justice is

Serial killer Robert Pickton seriously injured in Quebec prison assault, the headline on the news reads. My father explains that they torture you in prison. He says Pickton, a terrible person, probably wishes he was dead. This makes me feel relief for the women he killed. Everyone can rot in hell for all I care.

Homage to graffiti

I used to paint on billboards and highway signs and concrete with spray paint when I was a kid. “I’ll never fall off,” I’d say to myself, tiptoeing around in the street at 3 am. Falling off, in graffiti, means to not be up. 

There isn’t anything else like seeing your own name in ink on things in the city. It’s better than everything. I’d try to get the drips just perfect as I squeezed the marker. I’d come home with paint under my nails and sleep all day. I was 18 and everything was chrome and black. I spent afternoons walking around with my friends under bridges or over train tracks, looking for our next spot. Spots. It was all about spots. 

Graffiti became entangled in the nature of my very being. For a while, all I cared about was getting up. I met all the players. It’s truly a boy’s sport, however, here I was, impressing all the guys with my insane spots and almost stylish tags. Letters and fonts took over my thoughts. I have always loved words. Now, I barely write graffiti anymore because I sleep at night and it really is meant to be done at nighttime. I could never forget all those summers we ran in the city, driving by our own hits with stars in our eyes.

Summer starts

It smells like lilacs outside when I roll the windows down as I’m merging onto the highway at Bayshore. The patios open one by one. It’s the first few hot days of the year. The begonias bloom as the weekend crawls by. I am poised and waiting for summer on the ledge of my seat. Just being outside in the sun seems to mend broken hearts, including mine. 

I wake up before the sun. My dad always says, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

Make no mistake: no one here is happy. In an emergency, you leave the house in the same way. You don’t panic and forget to lock the door. You don’t run down the building’s stairwell hoping the windows aren’t about to shatter. You take your time. Maybe it’s the same thing with the rest of my life. I make calculated, measured movements. Something I don’t want to change.

The Industry

I’ve worked in restaurants my entire life. My first job, I was 16, serving cake and pizza at Cosmic Adventures. I was a birthday party hostess there for 6 months before getting a lip piercing and quitting to go work at the A&W in The Gloucester Centre. I was there for 3 years, I even left and came back. 

After that, I worked for Starbucks and after that I worked in my first real restaurant: Kelsey’s at Elmvale, which was bulldozed to make condos. I was a hostess for a year there. The boss of Bigg’s hired me over Christmas to serve evenings, he took a chance on me, so I put it in my resume and tried for a real serving job after the season had ended.

Broadway at Innes & Cyrville hired me. It was my big break. My first real serving job, where I really learned the ropes. I served 2 illegal poker nights, on Mondays and Tuesdays, and then 2 karaoke nights: Fridays and Saturdays. My shifts started at 6 pm and I got home at 3 am. Cindy, my old boss and I used to sit at the bar after work, drinking and smoking cigarettes, just the two of us. I did that for about 6 months. I saved so much money. I moved to Toronto and lived there for 2 years, serving out of a European-style bistro boasting over 100 beers on tap. My boss didn’t have a thumb. It got cut off in an accident. Despite that, he was a good man.

Finally, I returned to Ottawa. I worked in a few more restaurants and coffee houses before settling in at my current breakfast diner in which I hostess and serve. I’ve been there 2 years. It’s something special to walk into work like you belong there. I’m so lucky to love the work I do. I was born to serve. Even when I was a little kid, I wanted to be a waitress. It takes a certain kind of person. It’s physically and mentally demanding and it’s menial. But I need waitressing to calm my busy mind. 

Non-fiction

Trust me when I say, the guilt ate me alive. It wasn't the first time the mother of his child tried to attack me, but it was the last. I expect never to see her again. Ottawa is big enough of a place. It was at his funeral, the one I barged into with two of my girlfriends, only to see Jesse laying in a fucking casket on the other side of the room. "You killed him," she screamed as she charged at me but his dad was standing in-between us and he held her back. My girlfriends and I promptly left.

I had gone to the flower store earlier, and I had said, "there has been a death," to the man who was running it. I plopped the white flowers down on the ground of the funeral parlour before we exited the room. It tortures me, what she said. First of all, no I did not kill him. I stuffed the drugs in my bra the night he died. I cut him off. It's a truly horrific thing for me to recount, now that I'm thinking about it. But I can't stop thinking about it.

Do not blame someone else for your happiness or lack thereof. 

My past

Driving up Ogilvie, I go past the car dealership, I go past the pharmacy that used to be the corner store. I drive past businesses trying to sell you things. I slip into the parking lot. I step out of the vehicle. I consider the way things were vs. how they are now. For one, I am not the most nasty drug-addicted wench one could find in Ottawa, anymore. I do not like to lie about my past. I used to be a drug-addicted wench, in the most heinous of ways. I have had a wild childhood. I grew up way too fast. I didn’t plan it, just happened that way. 

It’s not necessarily my fault, because things in life happen that are out of your control. I admit I could have made better choices. But I didn’t. And yet here we are. I am alive and for now that seems to be all that matters. It could have been me, who overdosed and died, but it was my boyfriend instead. Something I cannot get over. Something I must justify by quitting drugs entirely, starting over completely. So that he could know that he saved my life, not the other way around. The world is an awful place. It’s full of bad people and horrifying things. When I was with him that summer, all I saw was good.