Summer 2025

The wind smells like flowers. Corn and cherries are for dinner. The summer hits with a heatwave, the hottest I've ever seen it. After that, it rains and the temperatures return to normal. My parents take off for the cottage in Quebec and I'm home alone again. They take me off the door at work. One day I look at the schedule and my name isn't on it. I'm a server again. It took 3 years to get here. I'm proud of the work I've done.

I walk around the mall with my headphones on, listening to some whining boys sing about tragedy and heartbreak, my favourite tracks. I adorn myself with sparkles and fake lashes, thick lines of make-up, highlighting the beauty mark I have near my eye in slick black.

People bug me but there's nothing I can do about it. I bide my time in the mornings and look out the window for signs of life. This summer, my intentions are to protect my boundaries and grow.

Bruises tell a story. Mine are of self-expression and divine self-care. The ghost-girl I dance for is my little sister. Every time I dance, I wish she could dance, too.
I choreographed this routine because this song reminds me of you. Don’t let it go to your head. But then again, you think you’re better than me, so why would it?
Grief moves through the body in an electric way. First I feel fat, wet drops of tears coating my shoulder-blades. Then I feel myself trot across the studio, grab a pole with all my strength, and fling my body across the room in a motion that leads with my hips and everything sparkles as I spin around and dizziness doesn’t exist.

I feel the floor again beneath my clacking 8” heels and land on my tip-toes. Still here.

Clown painting

She used to have this clown painting. She painted the perfect face of a clown, it was yellow and green. It had a big red nose and jagged teeth. I took the painting with me to Montreal and lost it there, it was stolen. I’ll never forget her signature at the bottom, her full name. It is the one thing I regret: losing that clown painting.

She Said She’d Haunt Me

She used to say she’d haunt me. This was before she died. I didn’t know how much death might hurt. That I’d feel my skin being ripped from my bones. It is instant and slicing and death never goes away. But I see her flip-flops, the purple Gumby ones I’d saved, one of the very few things I have left of her, and I think how proud she’d be of me now.

Ghosts

I watched a cloud overtake the sun as I stared up at the sky in a baby pink velvet mini-dress I got at Value Village. I adorned my right ankle with a thin silver anklet before setting off into the day.
That morning was all silence and the scent of gasoline escaping from car’s exhaust pipes. The hot pavement scorched the bottoms of my feet as I scampered in-between lawns. 
I was trying to take a photograph of a nearby cherry tree when a summer wind blew a Jasmine-scented floral aroma in my direction. I inhaled deeply and bent into another position for the snapshot of the pink tree. 
In the late afternoons, I used to come to this abandoned swimming pool and watch the boys skateboard in the emptiness of it. The small pools of rainwater made the skateboard’s trails look like glitter in the sun. Once I found a mixtape at the ledge of the pool. It was labeled, “For the ghosts,” and we listened to it, over and over again. Trying to make sense of the track-list, trying to summon a ghost.

Garden State

There are construction workers filling in a forest with a neighborhood behind my parent’s house this summer. There are large machines and it reminds me of Garden State when it rains.

My coworkers squabble and I tell them they’re like my parents, trying to be funny, but they probably thought it was sad. Which it is. But it’s also kind of funny. I mean, you have to laugh. That’s how I look at it. Life is funny. One second you could be up and the next down. That’s just how it works.

In the stunning early morning silence I practice gratitude and mindfulness and study such things on the internet and in magazines and try to become a better person. Who I am doesn’t bother me anymore like how it used to.

Love

When I say love ain’t shit I mean it isn’t to me. I don’t mean to say that Jesse was a bad boyfriend, he wasn’t. It means maybe I don’t need the type of love that’s always shoved down your throat in your childhood in stories. I don’t need to have a boyfriend again. Tried it and it wasn’t for me.