HWY sketches: You feel like someplace else

We spoke at length about our sense of places, the way building's facades tell stories about their days, how urban form provides structure or erodes it-
My feelings sprawled over your landscape in an untidy mess, an uninspired mimicry of rurality- cul de sacs and winding lanes- cheap nostalgia for good simple living and dirty calloused hands, two things you've never had.
Staying smart in the city, focused and sharp in all you do (right.) lay out our lives like a colonial town turned metropolis
grids,numbers, streets
Avenues! Boulevards!
(roundabouts to make me dizzy)
Your roadmap is too worn to read the street names clearly

It's like Vancouver, I guess
You're beautiful and lush and alive
But I hate your fucking yoga pants and the way everything's so far apart
And long car rides
And taking the bus
You know I get motion sickness and sometimes just want to lie still, eyes closed, while I wait for it to pass
But that's not how it works, I have to look out the window and watch another block of detached homes with shitty basement apartments go by
And I get claustrophobic just thinking about the low ceilings which helps nothing.

I was staring at a ceiling here at home in Montreal,
Thinking about the 2x4s that hold it up,
The decades old mould growing under the tiles of my best friends's bathroom
About climbing onto the roof to make out with someboy in the early evening darkness of mid November- it seems like years ago
I was thinking about the way the roof of my old apartment building sloped to the center (and how hot it got on the ground floor in January when the radiators were turned up so high that I slept by my open window)
The crooked floors of my 3rd floor kitchen and the basil plant on the balcony I never could keep alive
And at the end of it all I felt your body, rigid like a steel beam holding far more than it's own weight,
I'm feeling more like decorative wood paneling
Or yellowing wallpaper

HWY sketches: it's not the trip, it's the destination

It's not the destination, it's the journey i thought.
Freeways are monotonous, endless things, all asphalt and white paint, concrete overpasses and worn out rest stops. Playlists of 90s pop for road trips we used to promise we'd take play on and you sit still and silent with too little leg room in a late model sub compact rental car with nothing to do but watch farmland and forests and small towns pass by. Blurs in the fog and the distance.
Airports are cold and sterile even as they thrum and hum and buzz with the movements of people and machinery, activate removed from you as you sit, immersed in the NYTimes crossword or a book of sudoku, craving a cigarette to keep your hands busy, and order a bland sandwich to be washed down with a glass of house red.
The plane itself is no better or worse, really. the air is just as cool but now stale from recirculation, the mechanics of the vehicle and the many strangers are closer, nearly touching you, the plane humming lifelessly, your neighbors uncomfortably close.
Take off is a flash of sensation, a brief moment of feeling that is really just a change in pressure, a bit of vertigo when you look out the window.
Trains are nice in theory, there's some romance to the gentle, steady forward movement and the unfamiliar landscapes that roll by but really who takes the fucking train anyways.
No, there's no pleasure to be had in the voyage and no destination really worth getting to is there. Plane, train, highway,all the same stillness-going somewhere and trying not to move your limbs

On going places, or not really

Complacency and stagnation are just the names I call comfort and home's a dirty word too, I think, a place to be fled once it starts to feel too real, too real like this city is.
Whether running from comfort is a courageous act, a challenge, a way of extracting the best in me or a case of my own half assed pop psychology getting the best of me is what I can't quite figure out.
Vancouver, you're different but familiar. Cooler, not montreal's warm embrace but then again I did sometimes say was suffocating in that city's sticky heat. The trees here are greener-like they've been that way for so long without interruption that they've forgotten what it's like to be cold and fall apart from changes in the seasons. the air is cleaner too, or I'm just noticing the absence of Portuguese barbecue's distinctive nose from my surroundings. I walked the city-once, twice- and no one ever felt I was familiar and so I never felt compressed

running yrself down to empty like it's just to prove a point about how you don't need anyone's help to fill you up again. sillygoofysexdrunkgrinningwide falling all over ourselves grasping clutching at skin that flushes with the blood rush to your head to your core to your fingers i measure the distance to you in street numbers 12th to 21st and three blocks west, alley entrance to the basement suite, second bedroom to the left and we twist and turn and stay up all night and it never seemed like much to you and it never seemed like much to me and it's not much at all anyways is it really but what matters is the rush from holding your breath a little too long, from standing on your head, the heat stroke and the 420 stairs and our bodies pink in the sun, burning so we can't touch.
what matters is we're burning so we can't touch.

i'm lumping them all together.

we slept like knots and i felt every breath wrapped up in each other like ropes which made it easy to forget
that we're more like snakes than ropes when you use your head
am i just a glutton for punishment or do i never ever use my head?

some lies about spring

the pace of your steps and the way the wind gusts, blowing dust and dead leaves just recently released from winter into your eyes are the only two things i can think about. later on it will be with hesitation and regret that i try to recall your facial expressions as you looked at me every few steps (i always looked down and to the left) or where your arms fell and what shapes your hands made.
stupid details i wish i could summon to gleem some significance from because you're so fucking inscrutable the way you just nod when i say nothing. i didn't say anything, forget it. not today.
maybe tomorrow.

physical

i don't have any pictures of us.
and i don't understand why i care but i do. it's not about you, or maybe a little. but it's mostly about the moments, moments i wish i could see again, through the haze of cheap flashes rather than cheep wine.
moments i just want to have confirmed, so i don't periodically wonder whether they really happened. you sitting on my bed in a sweater too big for you, too wooly for the weather. glitter smeared on the sheets and beer spilled on the kitchen floor. i want messy, messy truths.
but it's not more than a little bit about you.

(JUNE)

humming through another mistake and buzzing, wings beat against the cage and you're worn out
wet feet, cold feet, work it out.

a certain violence

a rasp, a grunt, something from the back of your throat. desire by sound, not through your eyes, anger even as you're placated.

ohayearagotowantyousowhatawreckwhatawreckconnectdisconnect

march is the cruelest month

just hold me and i'll make you let me down, just watch how i'm never around

sparks fly but it's still kind of cold outside so bury them under sheets where they'll either be smothered or BURST into uncontrollable flames

how it felt to wake on the right side of the bed, not the left, feet pointed west, not north. I would point to the east, on top of you, sweaty, entwined in sheets and we would lie, breathing heavily, and you would smoke a cigarette before untangling the sheets and it felt sometimes like falling from so high up was a distinct possibility but in the end i descended slowly down the ladder from the alcove.
and we never went back up.
some things only bear fruit worth tasting at those high altitudes, where oxygen is scarce and their maturation slow. there the fruit was ripe long enough for a taste but closer the ground it was just rotten and dirty and oh what a waste.

shake, tremble, keep me up all night. you move to the music but not with it, your motions almost accidental. a haphazard set of motions without sense. a still-not met deadline to put me to bed.

I'm moving to a new apartment next month, and I've decided a few things. I'm going to paint. I don't know what colour yet, i loathe yellow, shudder at the thought of a red accent wall, worry that the cool grey that may appeal to me in theory will make my new home seem cold.... perhaps a fresher coat of white paint, a medium gloss, the kind of paint you find in a new townhome in a modestly priced subdivision. the colour of settling, of sedentary, of accepting some stability and finding contentment in it rather than hunting for a happiness that you can't even really imagine.
And, for the first time since I left my parent's house at 17, I'm going to unpack each and every one of my boxes and put everything in its - in my place.

heY!

forget me, 4get me not
we lay together, let me be a lingering thought
till we lie together, i love you-not

i want your flowers, want your honey, blossoming lust or love or whatthefuck
i want your flowers, not your cherry, sour, to ripe, to rotten

try hard to make it easy it used to be easy to make things hard, worn out without notice, i didn't notice what you wore or where you stood and with whom. does it matter, let's forget.

fucktallupndown and right not left cause i won't forget
one thing but i can't remember (how it felt. )

slouch, stumble, stand smoking in the snow. yeah, walk tall, toes pointed to a slippery slope and down you slide to land in a headstand and red bumps-black bruises up my side. nerves twitching, sleeping over and going numb.

like air

breathing in a cold snap, breathing out, watching my warm
breath condense as its heat dissipates, because it can't last.
i can do this for a few minutes, watch my own breathing,
untill my nose gets cold
and my cheeks turn red
and my fingers go stiff because i lost my gloves, again.
my feelings in winter are a lot like like the air i'm breathing in
and out- not that different from summer nor that different
from fall but cooler and crisper and more urgent. but my
extremities are more like the way i act, cold and stiff, out
of practice. i lost my gloves again and i just don't know
what to say to you.

february takes me over. december's crush is a cold shoulder- a block of ice to cry on. salt stained boots leave muddy marks on the backs we step on, can't step over.

je marchait, dans le froid, sans destination, ne pensant qu'au moment plus tard demain ou plus tard hier que je me blottirait contre lui; pour l'intstant je ne veux que m'empecher de toucher è ce comfort, préserver l'illusion de ne pas en avoir besoin.

and you shake the same today as you did yesterday but tomorrow it will take your body over, it will have spread from your shoulder and your hands will tremble when you lift your arms. for him you cannot move, for him you're nearly you.