willful nomad

I was drunk on the bus on a Sunday. Just enough homemade plum wine had left me heady, and I was mostly alone on the quietest route in the city. The bus driver thought it funny that his quiet boring route was also, for me, the most convenient.

Just enough plum wine on a Sunday makes for great dinner conversation while you're surrounded by your friends. At one point during the night, I asked if I could help with anything in the kitchen; I was told that I was being the entertainment and was thereby already helping. Hmmm, must have had more to drink than I thought.

But riding alone on the bus once the party is over is an entirely different story. It allows for more contemplation despite the driver's desire to chat about the injustice he faces for having to work while his friends watch the Super Bowl.

My time here is winding down. And I don't mean this in an existential, "I'm going to die next week" sense. I mean that I'll be leaving the city I've called home for five years because sometimes, instinctively, you realize it's just time to move on. The city of Victoria is a worn shirt, softened and familiar, but the elbows are threadbare and I can see through it when I hold it up to the light. It doesn't fit like it used to.

There is something sad but freeing when you realize that what you're doing doesn't really fit anymore. When the friends you love you still love but you know you need something new, and it feels like the only way to stay as close to those friends whom you love is to put some physical distance between you. There need to be opportunities for new conversations, a different experience to process and talk out over the phone or during trips "home."

What really saddens me, though, is seeing the need to move on and ignoring it, only to realize much later that the best time to leave has already passed. And I wonder if it ever gets to the point where it's too late. I've seen this happen with cities, with friendships, romances... and I wonder if this is all really arrogant, deciding for people that they've missed their best chance at escape, or that there is even anything to escape from.

I love my friends here. Without them, I would be lost. And it tears my heart out a little every time I start thinking about leaving them for my next adventure. I know that, thanks to modern technology, I'll never be more than a keyboard away from their wise counsel, but that'll never replace face to face contact. I also know that, if I were to postpone or cancel that adventure, it would be their wrath I'd be facing.

So I'm going to spend the next few months letting things flow through me as much as possible, letting the experiences come as they may without trying to interfere. I'm not going to worry about what my friends will think when I shamelessly tell them that I love them, or worry that we're not packing in the proper events and fiascoes before I leave. Things will happen as they may, and I've been discovering lately, the very best events and fiascoes happen entirely by accident.

i want to be in india; i would have stayed forever...
but i had to come home to find myself first.

i had settled in top side of the double decker,
pulled my scarf around my chin and
plugged into headphones to listen in
on two dead men talk about what the
world was like before the flood.

she checks over her shoulder but
doesn't notice me staring till after she's
ducked down to pick up the butt of
someone's discarded cigarette.

grey hair matted against a grey day she
meets my eyes and looks away, embarrassed
at having been caught by an onlooker
from the dry side of another rain streaked window.

He sat down next to me because I was the smallest person the bus and he had luggage. Turns out he wasn't much bigger than me. He struck up a conversation even though I had my earphones in, asked me what time it was because he didn't have a watch. I told him it was midnight, but I only knew that because that's what time the bus was supposed to leave the station we were at.

Normally I get really cheesed when people talk to me on the bus. I consider my earphones to be like some kind of forcefield. Only this guy was just so damned nice that I couldn't not keep talking to him. He said he'd retired his watch when he retired at 65, three years a go. I laughed and said I'd done the same thing with my watch even though I myself wasn't retired. Said I was a student, and he asked me "in what?" I said English, he said "oh yes, me too." "Where did you study?" "Darjeeling."

I hadn't wanted to say anything. Truly he had almost no trace of an accent, and I listen for these things. Intently. Like, it's almost creepy. But he certainly looked Indian. Told me he'd left India in '65 and had never been back. When I asked if he'd lived in Victoria the whole time he looked shocked and said "oh, no..." He'd left Darjeeling to become a lounge singer in Vietnam. That gig took him to Hong Kong, Bangkok, Honolulu, San Diego... Said he played a guru in a movie in LA in 1971 before moving to Montreal, then on to Toronto. He laughed about being a little Indian guy singing Frank Sinatra, and I couldn't help but giggle with him.

He asked me if I wanted to write, and I said that I'd do anything that would pay me to travel and write about it. Told him I'd been in Delhi for the summer, and that I'd loved it. I couldn't believe he had to ask me what it was like there. He told me that, if I wanted to be a travel writer, all I had to do was start writing and I'd get famous. He must have sensed my skepticism. He said, "no, really. I can tell by the way you look and how easily you say you want to do it. Like you mean it. Just write and you'll be famous."

I stood up to get off at my stop, smiling ridiculously. He asked me if I wore the chelwar and camise when I was there, agreed that it was better that I had stuck to Western clothes. I grinned and said "I'm really glad I met you, Colin." He said "you know, that's how these things happen. They happen magically."

He was no more than 5 foot 3, little brown guy who had sung lounge tunes all over the world, much to his stepmother's chagrin. He told me to write write write write. Said goodbye as I got off the bus. I said namaste.

it's quarter after five and still light outside.
one more winter ending.
i made it.

i really do have to stop
biting my nails.

in a dark bar lit by candles and christmas lights
you sip a glass of wine.casually flip me the bird
when i tell you i'm going back to delhi.

the crescent moon hangs off your cheek
like a tear.below eyes that seek mine
but to meet them is to be sucked into space.

i get the feeling i've happened to you before.

please, let me let you down from that hook you're wriggling on.

you can look me in the face, it's okay.

and those two friends you've brought along--fear and worry--
no offense, but they can leave.

i won't lure you into those familiar ranks,
another straight woman's life compromised by a young girl's unhinged smile.

instead, i'll set up shop across the table in that petulant place between
acceptance and resentment (they make better friends and bitter enemies);

i'll drown my mouth in a martini, bite the glass instead of your bottom lip.

would you play the movie,
project it onto a sheet hung from trees
or a blank wall in your living room,
knowing that every run through the reel
decays the film a little?

would you pull that photo from the box,
revel in an image,
knowing the very light that allows you
to see it will slowly fade the colours?

teeth break under the force of words crushed and restrained

a jaw bent and determined to withhold the flood of what would only emerge
as a long and wordless howl

because keening into an echo is merciless mimicry

like words scratched backwards into a forehead

pictures of limbs taped to the skin of a stiff and awkward body