Younger Me

Kees.

I just got to see a picture of you when you were 17, back in 1984.  You're with two of your brothers and four of your cousins.  All of you look so fresh faced and young.  You, in particular, you look handsome, surprisingly so.  You look strong, you look confident, standing there with your arms crossed, your chin out and a real smile on your face.  You look like you'd been having a good day.  I can see a little bit of narcissism in you.  You look proud to be in front of a camera this time. In that black teeshirt, deliberately without a corporate logo on it, the tight blue jeans; your uniform, you look honest and real.  These were the clothes you wore that you felt defined you.  You were sure of yourself.  You had conviction.

I wish you could have held on to that bravado, Kees.  I wish you hadn't let things bring you down.

You see, Kees, you are incredibly intelligent there.  You house amazing thoughts and stories, a lovely gracious talent that only needed to be realized... BY YOU.  Yeah, you had bullies in your life that tried to stunt your growth, and in a large part succeeded.  You were still living with them and their voices reverberated in your head all the time.

But those bullies, Kees?  You have to know that THEY ARE JUST VOICES.  They are just sounds from the outside, like thunder, or the hockey game coming from the tv set, or a dog barking in the distance.

You don't have to let them in.

In fact, those voices?  You shouldn't let them in.
Shut the door and enjoy that angelic music that is playing in your head, those wondrous lyrics that form like crystals in your mind.

But don't hide behind that door to wallow in that pain, Kees.  You're not going to do it alone.

Instead of falling for everything those liars ever said, look for the people that will build you up.
Find your tribe, find your supporters and support them as well.  They are out there.
When your father offers the opportunity to go and visit Irving Layton, take it.
He will be important to you later on.  In fact, every writer and artist and creative person will be important to you.  Because those are your people, Kees.  That is your world.  Be in it.

Make the world outside you as beautiful as it is inside you, Kees.  Listen to yourself, heed your deepest yearnings and let them ignite you, let them motivate you.  You want it, and you know you're destined for it, so work your ass off to get there, so you can be happy and know without a doubt, that that happiness is YOURS.

I'm telling you this now because I look back on the mistakes you've made in your life, and how some of them have crippled you somehow.  Don't let them, Kees.  They are on the outside.  They have no place in your life.  Regret is a useless thing, but it's still something that we carry, like an evolutionary leftover that remains a part of us, like an appendix or a tailbone.  Yes, they are part of you, but they serve no purpose.  Let only the functional things rule your life, Kees.  Let the healthy things point the way, because Happiness can be yours.  You just have to be careful, and work towards them.

Love;
Your 50 year old self.

(excerpt from a work in progress) Anachronism

The sound of the humming tea kettle reminds her of W.’s apartment, when they would be going through his belongings while waiting for the water to boil.  W. will be moving from his house to a nursing home soon.  A stroke had struck him and left him feeble in mind and body- a loss of independence and appreciative thought.  After  a lengthy stay in the hospital, he’d had a pronounced loss of functioning especially in his thought.  

It annoyed her, the purging of his possessions that they were performing.  The apartment would not be able to store all the things that W. had in the house and possessions would have to be sorted and either handed out or kept, but Vi still loved going through W.’s things with him.  His life was a deep reservoir of experience, and his house was steeped in that history, a literal novel of meaning.  He lived in a state of anachronism too, with the mix of ancient things with current things.  Vi found his bathroom especially comical, with his newly acquired electric shaver with its robotic green eye charging as it sat on his bathroom shelf next to strange ointments in tiny corked glass bottles, their labels browned with age.   Working with W for the past three months, Vi had fallen in love with the house and its ambience of nostalgia.  She would stand in any room and sense all the colours, flavours and aromas of time, the time of W’s long and rich life.  So every closet was being opened, boxes brought out and their contents scrutinized.  W. had always been a meticulous person- one could see it in his mannerisms, his careful scrutiny of everything before him and the stacks and labels that went on every box, yet it was apparent that he had lost the thread of syntax with which he had arranged it all.



Yesterday, she had been going through boxes lifting objects and papers to bring to him for him to decide whether or not he would keep them or put them in another box to be given away.  Out of one box, she pulled out a piece of pottery that looked like it was from another world.  Vi held it in her hands for a few moments and immediately its beautiful designs and colours touched her.  It was a small globe with a spout at the top, with exotic curves upon it surface.  It looked iridescent, yet it was not, its colours only made it seem so.

“Oh, this is beautiful,” Vi said “Where did you get this?” She hands the piece over to W and he held it, looking it over with a look of consternation, as if trying to divine its name, rolling it around  by the tips of his fingers.

“Is this mine?”  he said. Vi laughed, but knew how saccharine her laughter was.

“I would hope it is.” She said.  W laughs with her, but his laugh too is short and distracted.  He is bent on determining meaning from the pottery piece she had put in his hands.  His face then lights up.

“It was my wife’s.   She brought it to me in the...”  his eyes looked into middle space as he paused to retrieve a word. “the plaza- not the plaza, I’m trying to say.”  He drops his hands into his lap with the pottery piece in it.  “Oh, what am I trying to say?”

It was like this for most everything they would look over.  he would hold them in his hands and  sometimes the osmosis of meaning would come to the object he is holding, but generally he would dismiss them, not knowing why he had kept them, not knowing why he would keep it now. Some of the things that Vi would bring to him would astound her with their historical significance and beauty and she felt deeply sad and powerless when she placed it in W’s hand and watched his brow wrinkle and his eyes narrow as he struggled to read this new artefact of his distant and ever falling past.  At times, W could relay a story about what he was holding in his hand, but his narrative would meander from tangent to tangent to the point where he would be completely lost , having forgotten what he was originally talking about, forgetting what he had started with.  He could never bring a date to the object he held, could never attach a timeframe to his stories, as if the memory hung in ether, like an apparition or a vapour. Vi would follow his narrative as well as she could, but would only frustrate herself with the lack of comprehension.  The story would end, unfinished like a trail overgrown in the woods.

The rain came down in a thunderous applause; an assault on the heat, a culmination of humidity.  The clash of fronts, a polarity of temperatures, thermal opposites.  The sky released the pent up rain like an orgasm of water on the earth.

I don’t know what sustained me in my last relationship. I think it was the long, protracted depth of masturbatory dreams, the absolute coziness of schizophrenic delusion that she loved me. I could sink deep into that, to lubricate my life to slip through the roughness. But in the end, I was blind, and not moving where I wanted to go, I was not even conscious of direction. I was static. I’m static even now, trying to move out of her gravity.

When I was younger, I took some cannabis pills that a friend gave to me. It was the first time I ever had even remotely related to marijuana. I waited for something to wash over me but nothing happened. I waited, eyes skyward, but no ascension came. It was just me watching the zenith rise away from me as I fell into numbness. I wanted a flood of feelings, I wanted immersion. Why do we need the feelings? Why can’t it all be good feeling? And why the avoidance of the cold darkness in life? What am I so afraid of? I don’t know. All I know is that I’m writing this to glean nothing more than an admission of the truth I’d always known.