September

It’s September which means back-to-school and orange and red leaves. Work dies down. My intentions for fall are to spend more time alone and save more money. My friend does full moon rituals. We carve out our manifestations on a page and light candles during them.

Self-love

You can’t fake being healthy. Either you are or you are not. I’m bargaining with death again. I’m old now and you can see it in my face. Maybe I’m not that old but I’m not young anymore. 

The streets all stay the same but I don’t. It feels as though everything has changed. I am not the same girl, cluelessly chasing what I thought was love. I have higher standards now. I have inner peace.

Different things are important to me now. Instead of loving someone else, I love myself. That means more to me. 

Not everyone

It rained the day after what would have been Emma’s 32nd birthday. All day, the 24th, was sunny and hot. Her birthday was on a Saturday this year. 

I think there aren’t enough stories about women who save themselves. About strong mothers. About survivors. About women who don’t fall in love, get married and have babies. I think it should be less about love. Not everyone finds love. 

Help/save/fix

I tried my best but you can’t help, save or fix someone.

Abusive relationships: a theme

I don’t know how I ever got into an abusive relationship in the first place. Domestic violence was never prevalent in my home growing up. Guess the men I chose were scum.

Nico took cash from my wallet when I was sleeping. After that, Miguel tried to smother me with a pillow. He verbally and physically abused me. Even Jesse ripped a nightgown off of me and was also verbally abusive before he overdosed.

What I have to say is about it is that I’ve never been more prepared to deal with whatever comes my way next. I’ve never been stronger.

August

It’s dark at 8:45 pm and the mornings are cool.

Being human is disgusting but it’s also miraculous. It depends how you look at it. 

I work hard so that I’m true to myself. It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of me, but the dialogue I have with myself does matter.

I skim through books on boundaries and assert mine when necessary this month.

I get enough food, sleep and exercise and this is what allows me to be content. It’s not about what you do, but your attitude about why you do it. 

Blessings

Maybe the reason I wrote this blog was to explain myself. I wanted to be clear about the truth. I wanted to defend myself. It’s not that I care about people understanding but my side of the story is important. I didn't mean for Jesse to die, it just happened.

On the patio today, running my section, I thought about all the things I’m grateful for: my job, all my new friends I met there, the staff party coming up on Monday, where I get to see everyone in their street clothes. I am counting down the hours. I think about my apartment, beautiful and safe. I don’t think I’ll ever get robbed there. I think about my parents, my cousins. How lucky I am to have them. I think about how privileged I am to be a Canadian; how much that means to me is unmeasured. I count each and every small and large blessing that was given to me and I cry and thank god.

July

Through the screen I see fireflies in the garden. My mother says they’ve been there for 6 weeks but I haven’t noticed them til now. My favourite song is about drowning and my nightmares are of getting robbed. I’m in a hospital, all the pictures I’ve ever taken are spilling from a box on the floor as I’m trying to collect them. I wake up to the same thing every morning. 

Glow

Driving on the highway in Quebec, I see the sunset reflecting orange on a building and I think it might be the most beautiful thing I’ve seen. 

Remember me like this:

I was surprisingly nice on the street today. I smiled at people, usually I only smile at garbage men and the homeless. I even let a car go. I never let cars go. The medication must be working.
It’s a beautiful day but this city means nothing to me.
You have “no” written all over you and you never wanted to think about me again for years. It personally destroyed me. I wanted to kill myself in Ottawa. I wanted to kill myself in Toronto, too, but cars yield to pedestrians and the world goes on another fuckin’ day. I am crying in the back of a cab. I thought I could lose you a thousand times over but I was wrong.
Driving in a car and I’m pretty sure I want us to die. The Gatineau hills roll in the distance. My nightmares are of lakes full of sharks. We burned our hospital bracelets. Spent all day taking things for granted, including you.
I went somewhere today. But I completely forget where I went. I guess we’ll never know.
You are what I don’t want to write about, you liar. He couldn’t have done it without me. The precision and grace in which I was fucking with you was noteworthy.
“We’ll be happy in no time,” I say, as we do another line. Tell yourself you won’t be high forever.
I made a list of reasons to live. Brace yourself for impact: he is in love with another girl. This swallows me. How silly of it for me, to imagine what it would be like if he were in love with me instead.
She will make you pay. But not with money. Can you afford it?
I don’t want to waste my film on you. That’s when it occurred to me: life is the saddest thing. Passed out under an overpass, one day she’s going to have to deal with it. Lying there with you made everything seem okay. I get night terrors if I think about you now. Remember me like this: wanting you. Love like it’s easy. Do you ever miss a version of yourself you abandoned? “I knew you would come back to me,” he said, “I just didn’t know when.” I was 20 when I found out love was a gyp, so why did I continue to chase it blindly? People will never forget how you made them feel.

Julia's party

When I got there, I knocked on the door. No one answered. I knew they might be in the backyard so I traipsed around the side of the house and saw them all. I walked up to Julia. My hair was cut now, it had been so long since I'd seen her. She didn't know about Jesse, my dead boyfriend, about how he overdosed and died in my bathtub, about anything. It was almost safe. We embraced. There were children running around with water balloons, a plastic blue pool. We threw the dog the ball into it and he chased it and I tried to get a picture. Julia and I hung out in the bathroom while she was getting ready, doing her make-up. I watched from the toilet. She talked about her new husband, how they got engaged and they're moving to Hawaii. It was her birthday. Later, Kel arrived.

 
She was the life of the party. She hugged everyone and everyone hugged her. Kel has always been popular. We talked about how we hid Brenda's bike in the tree that one time we stole it from her. It was good to catch up, it was the first time we'd been at a party together in our entire lives. Which is odd, seeing as we sort of knew the same people in high school. Misty was sitting with her tattoos, blonde and loud in the corner. She said my name. I liked her. She said her pets might be cooked by the time she got home, because it was hot and she lived in a small apartment. Kel and I talked into the evening. All day, I had one mixed drink that Julia made with soda and syrup. I was driving home.

 
When things got more personal and rowdy, I left. I wish I’d taken more pictures of the sprawling yard, the chainlink fence, the kids and their denim shorts. The memory seemed sufficient enough. The long summer days twist into nighttime and I disappear into the car, start the engine, and take off into the black parking lot.

Patterns & schedules

I like patterns. I like calendars and schedules and plans. I like distance and space. I want my creativity to be the centre of my life. I want my projects to flourish, my habits to develop, and my craft to sharpen. I want ideas and hobbies. I want art to be filled into the places I’m missing pieces in. If anything, I can create beauty.

Discipline yourself by challenging your negative thoughts. You don’t have to believe everything you think.

Grief

I had a friend who told me to get over the death of my sister. At the time, my immediate feeling was defence. I am over it, I thought. Later, I thought, is that something you get over? What happens when it's over? You're all of a sudden happy? But grief is more complicated than that. Grieving is lifelong but it transforms and it isn't always sad. Life will always go on. 

June

I watch the news headlines tick by on the local channel. They speak of hope and doom. The summer has arrived smelling like lilies and honeysuckles. June greets me with open arms: the sun in my face, something I take for granted. All the regulars show up at work. There's Adrienne and Percy, a father-daughter duo who are going to the fine art museum in Montreal. And the McCartney's fruit people, who give us blueberries and don't take menus. I bring them all to their usual tables.

A nine-year-old drowns at the beach and life just goes on. No matter how unfair life can seem, you find a way to muddle through it. We are all trying to cope and that includes me. You can't pretend that bad things don't happen but you can find ways to make the best of it. Maybe summer brings out a certain sense of optimism in me.

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.

Unrequited love

It’s a theme in my life, unrequited love. Always gotta fall in love with the most unavailable people. It is never good timing and it never works out. Maybe I do it to myself on purpose. Maybe I choose the ones that are difficult to challenge myself with a complex puzzle. I do not recommend. It is not filling the empty hole in my heart. And it is not getting me anywhere. It is further confirming my belief that maybe I’m just not meant to end up with anyone. At all. Ever. Maybe I’m just not built for love, marriage, a relationship. Maybe I'm just meant to be alone.

On death:

This is what they don’t tell you about death: you will miss them for the rest of your life. No matter what. 

Justice

A man was in prison for murdering three women in Arnprior. The news reported he died of “natural causes” in jail. But really he was murdered in jail because he killed 3 innocent women. Maybe there is justice for women.