and you just keep on getting closer.

crystallized from Fake TV on Vimeo.

Hi, hi, high.

Us.

People sometimes forget that every beginning is an ending, too.

The change, the change...it all happened for a reason, didn't it?

I've made it. I'll keep it.

It's you, always.

half the world away

Don't accept anything less than big love. Massive, consuming, fast-paced, scary, wonderful, overwhelming, huge love. The kind of love that makes you want to put post-it notes with sweet nothings written on them all over his suitcase when he goes out of town for a night. The type of love that makes you suddenly understand why your mother has made you take your vitamins and fed you beautiful meals your whole life. Because long days and heavy eyelids don't matter when you've got big love. Nothing can keep you going like big love, because there's nothing in the world like it and once you find it? Oh my god you'll know.

Be-in.

Everyone should know how it feels to stand around in a muggy August hot kitchen, drinking wine too fast, talking too fast, changing songs too fast in the company of friend-love and love-love, wiping the smudged eyeliner out from under your eyes to see, so clearly, exactly where I am.

To be 23 and on my own was great. It was great, terrible fun. And it was what I needed, even when I didn't know that I did.

But to be 24. To be 24 and not on my own is more happiness and more sadness than I've ever known. And everyone should know how it feels to feel both.

Because when I'm wiping the playground sand off my best friend's shoulders as he runs off into the night, chasing something that even he can't say, I wish these moments of swing set park declaration huge, massive, overwhelming happiness for every living, breathing, thinking thing in the world. I watch the rest of them jump off picnic tables and let their feet take them where they're going. I know that just because I've been found...well, that doesn't mean that so many aren't still lost.

But the greatest thing about a love like this?

All it takes to heal the world inside my head is having him, at the end of the night, to rest it on.

It's not what you think.

Given my last few posts on here it may seem as though happiness has, to a certain extent, depleted me of my creative resources where writing is concerned in consideration of the fact that my posts have been...well, virtually non-existent.

But rest assured, my dearest few readers, I'm actually writing more than ever. The novel is coming along at a pace that surprises even myself, the short stories are being banged out on the weekly, the poems don't stop falling out of my fingers and it's all actually getting published. Which, of course, means I can't publish it here first due to the simultaneous submission rules. Such is life, and such are the consequences that I'm more than pleased to live with.

Alas, I am going to attempt to be at least a bit of a better blogger, starting today. Just don't expect anymore boy-directed nihilism, as I'm quite simply and honestly more and more in love with my man with every passing minute.

Real post tomorrow, cross my heart!

Darling.

You're my partner in crime on failed hotel pool romps, with my back up against the brick, spilling pop on city grates during garbage strikes and cherry flavour shot stickiness.

You're the Clyde to my Bonnie (circa Beatty and Dunaway because, like me, you wouldn't have it any other way) in Floridian seafoam green, clutching my pool blue fingernails and holding bottles of wine on my couch. Telling you stories of worlds I've never let anyone understand.

I'm in my war bride dress wearing a half-stupid smile running into my room with you, leaving traces behind that napkins could fix but in the meantime it'll make us laugh, laugh, laugh and I want to laugh with you forever.

We're in a bubble with books about Hollywood vs. Aliens, sunflowers and azaleas on the windowsills smiling at us while we curse my late alarm and break into someone else's place.

And as I sat there with salty hands and cupcake lips, shelling pistachios to the drifting sound of the gates going up next door, I knew in my heart that I've never really loved like this before.

Suburb.

night after a night of falling on
front lawns
in the expanse of this place's yellow lined pavements
and our lips that can't stop touching and pulling
at the throats of all of our friends in our blissful
reveries on the
front lawns
of where you grew up and you showed me
coloured concretes and red-bricked buildings
and birds of your father's
and kitchen sinks, dishwasher fillings,
interrogations lovingly spent over cups of
coffee and I took another sip, saw
into a flash of light, same
colour eyes and I think you could
really love me
after all.

The Sixteenth of July.

I’ve got offices to clear out and debts to call back and coffee change to be handed over to the ones who couldn’t for a second know what I mean about any of it (likewise, I can’t really bring myself to do any of it). To spend any more days, yet another day, with my legs at an appropriate 90 ninety degree angle while sitting and my fingers click-clack-clocking the time away on words just like these words and other words that mean even less than these words, it’s all so unbearably nothing sometimes, isn’t it? Nothing’s anything except pictures printed and pasted on my books of paper while on someone else’s dollar, and where are all of my morals now? The guilt hasn’t set in yet here and it’s been years. But oh, how these weeks sometimes fly.

So last night they watched from the step as I made my stumbling stop carrying bags of dryer sheets and cheap wine, and I expect they saw through the untruths that even now I don’t regret telling. Sometimes the change came fast and sometimes the change comes slow but most certainly of all we must, absolutely must at this point know that it’s going to. It’s going to happen to all of us. Unspoken but not unacknowledged, the awkwardness won’t really go away and baby I’m just a fool tearing all my heart out just for you.

The documentarian to it all, I consider that I may only do what I do because I want you to know that this was a time, is a time, when standing on dark July-hot pavement, covering wine-stain smiles and looking in each other’s eyes was all we had and all we needed. Refilling Evian bottles on broken headphone nights, tales of bike accidents and how someone else has ended up coming along for the ride. We need these moments like the sun needs love to shine itself upon in these recent glorious mornings.

So don’t count it out yet, go back to the drawing board and searching for your replacements as I’ve heard you’ve done so many times in your many moves around these streets that are so much smaller than they first appear. Don’t count me out yet, but when there comes a time that it’s the only thing left to do, just know that I’ve saved all of these words for you.

Help I'm Alive

To give a full and complete rundown of how my recent staycation was spent would require far more time, words and mental capacity than I'm currently willing to give it. Yes, there were the requisite club parties and cottage trips, purchases of $4 stars and stripes sunglasses and afternoons of finishing entire books on city rooftops, meandering bike rides and long-awaited brunches with best friends. So on and so forth. It was all fantastic, obviously. How could it not be when my life so unfailingly is these days?

But the most "unexpected and brilliant thing" also happened (and I quote these words because they're his originally, not mine).

I fell properly and totally, completely and surely, absolutely and fully IN LOVE.

I hesitate to use the above "i" and "l" words because, in my typical Cancerian fashion, I'm impossibly careful with them, likely to the point of often failing to admit to feeling them for quite a while after I actually do. In this case I do know, more certainly than I usually know most anything, that it's it, it's amazing, it's putting an unwavering smile on my face, it's everything I've wanted with someone for longer than I've even likely known that I've wanted it and IT'S FUCKING TERRIFYING.

I've fallen, fallen, fallen. And since this has all transpired I just can't help but feel as though I'm falling down into a crater, and one which is much deeper and longer and farther than I've ever been in before. Then again, I'm not really falling down - that would imply something apart from what it is, which is (again, in his words) one of the most brilliant and unexpected things that's ever happened to me. The clothes hanger stuck in my mouth making me wake up to an eye-roll-inducing expression on those around me tells me so.

I'm letting the ubiquitous guard down. I'm scared beyond any fear I've ever felt and happier than I've quite possibly ever been. I could write more about this, and have in fact done so in my new notebook...shitshitshit, what did I say about the dawn of every new notebook in my life?! Seems as though the transition between that red piece of shit and this new silver leather one has proved my point yet again...

But anyways. Just thought it would be fair to let you all know that my general misanthropy may be put on hold for a while. Or based from how this feels right now, forever.

Ugh, I even make myself sick with this FYI.

Staycationing.

And it couldn't possibly be more magnificent.

Details to follow...

I was born, lucky me.

On Monday my beautiful bike was at last freed from the evil winter imposed confines of my family's garage, meaning I can now go where I please, when I please, at the pace I please (confession: not only am I without car, I am also without license. At almost 24. I know, I know.)

So, yeah. It's really, really, really nice having my bike.

A part of me wishes I could be more eloquent about exactly how nice it is, but that would require me going in to a lengthy and likely boring explanation of my preternatural disdain for public transit/the fact that I walk everywhere and it therefore takes me forever to go anywhere that's not within my 5-block radius of living. Which I won't do, because the acquisition of my absolutely gorgeous and enviable green and yellow cruiser is, after all, merely a footnote to the rest of this post.

I've had no shortage recently of pleasant dates with dudes and whatnot, but last night while riding about town on said bike I came to a really startling and wonderful conclusion which is entirely beyond the messiness of my current dating situation, and it's one that I think worthy of sharing.

Quite simply: there can be no date more perfect than the one you take yourself on.

I did this last night, and feel a metric fuck-tonne better about life as a result. I didn't start out the evening with the intention of taking myself on the best date ever, but somewhere between my amazing and completely uninterrupted by other people/phone checking/book reading/etc. meal on the patio of one of my favourite restaurants and my glorious bike ride over to a fantastically under-the-radar thrift shop (that I never go to because it's just too fucking far without a bike) I noticed that I couldn't stop smiling.

Singing, even.

Yes, that's right. I was warbling along with Ray Davies in the bike lane.

"Victoooooria, Victoooooria, Victoria, Vic-toreeahh"

I most certainly looked like a moron (albeit a moron with really great hair), and I highly doubt my voice sounded even remotely pleasant. But singing along to The Kinks, cruising down College Street (which, I feel it's important to note, was not even close to being empty), it occurred to me that, in the midst of the veritable insanity that is my life, I'd forgotten just how nice being nice to myself feels.

Ah.

"So I ran into him. He was literally metaphorical about you."

The Girl in the Dirty Shirt.

Old favourite Oasis songs and these ridiculously pretty Christophe Kutner photographs (which, FYI, are making me a little nostalgic for my uber-blonde hair) make uneventful Wednesdays far more enjoyable than they would be otherwise. Can this week just be over yet?

If I may be so bold that I just say something

come and make me my day.

The clouds around your soul don't gather there for nothing

but I could chase them all away

Why'd you need a reason for to feel happy?

Or be shining for the rest of the world?

Give me just a smile, and would you make it snappy?

Get your shit together, girl.

You've got a feeling lost inside it just won't let you go.

Your life is sneaking up behind it just won't let you go.

No, it just won't let you go.

Here's what I'm trying to say...

Is would you maybe come dance here with me?

Because to me it doesn't matter if your hopes and dreams are shattered.

When she says something, she'll make me believe

In the girl who wears a dirty shirt

She knows exactly what she's worth to me.

If you ever find yourself inside a bubble,

you've got to make your own way home.

But you can call me anytime you're seeing double.

Now you know you're not alone.

You've got a feeling lost inside it just won't let you go.
Your life is sneaking up behind it just won't let you go.
No, it just won't let you go.
Here's what I'm trying to say...

Is would you maybe come dance here with me?
Cos to me it doesn't matter if your hopes and dreams are shattered.
When she says something, she'll make me believe
In the girl who wears a dirty shirt
She knows exactly what she's worth to me.
And now I see.

Snow White.

Between the pages we've colored of fairy tales (that we've known for a long time are not and never will be true), she asks me if it's the prince who will kiss you when you're already dead that's the one worth waiting for. Dead, in the glass coffin that those who have loved you built, and he'll have enough life in him and love in him to save you both. She knows I don't know the answers either, so all I can offer is "don't build the glass coffin in nights upon nights of convincing yourself that the prince who has no life left in him is worth it. Princes with nothing to give to even themselves...your half-dead self won't be able to save them."

But then, I think another thought and it's down the rabbit hole again, spilling onto the pages as another drink spills soundlessly in the kitchen.

What kind of a prince is the one who wants you when you're dead? You're nothing but doll parts to him, to his kiss, when there's nothing left of you to begin with. And that's exactly why he loved you, didn't you know it all along? When you had no needs, all he needed was you.

So April showers will surely bring something in May, but what? We're not yet sure. For the time being we've got gloomy days of wearing glasses with blurry gazes at smoke stacks, photographs, pockets jingling with change and the change in the weather which has come so soon. We've got empty e-mails that mean more than millions of words. We've got last night's words about beautiful bed frames and driving out of this city in cars that we don't own, with licenses that we don't have. Visa debts, work visas to get, and scuzzy Los Angeleno sunsets playing out of our stereo with daydreams of surfboards and drugs we haven't done yet.

And we've got the sense that maybe neither prince is very good at all.

Played out (and still oh-so true)

"I always tell the girls: never take it seriously. If you never take it
seriously, you never get hurt. You never get hurt, you always have fun.

...And if you ever get lonely, you just go to the record store and visit
your friends."

Words from Almost Famous' Miss Penny Lane and the sky of unrelenting sunshine make all of this past week's nonsense feel pretty alright on this gorgeous Friday afternoon. And a photo of my favourite record store friend, of course, thrown in for good measure.

Careful, careful.

Watching women who's words I walked around with when I was only sixteen years old. I thought I knew what they were talking about then - as it turns out, I had no idea.

So I sit, watching, stringing chains around my neck, not unlike when I disrobed and re-robed in his room six nights ago. I won't admit it (who would?), but I'm also surveying in the moments in between all of this watching...now there are others, with their cellulite-free, tanned asses hanging out on his wall. One with an Eastern European last name that reminds me of a person I'm trying quite hard to forget as of late.

And so it is. Moisturizing my face tonight, watching those women who I thought I understood when I was too young to really know anything, I realized that I've never been 'rejected' because I've never let myself be. Careful, careful, because all of the good advice in the world won't do me any good when I'm up to no good, and it's just far too easy to tiptoe about and play this game with oneself.

So it is, so it is, so I keep watching. If I didn't quite comprehend these questions back then, then there's a chance that I may have missed the part with all of the answers too?

Re: A Letter.

That you sent me on Sunday. I read it as I dodged endless carts of Chinese vegetables that I can never pronounce the names of correctly. And my borrowed fake silk scarf fell from my tangled, slept-on mop of hair right into a puddle…so I made the knot tighter around my neck, and kept the pace, as I always do - but you know that already, don't you?

But if only you knew why I'm walking around like this at three o'clock p.m. on the nicest day of the year yet.

If only you knew about the morning of rain in bed, plain toast, phony constellation t-shirts from 1992.

If only you knew that it's not you.

I can't bring myself to send any of it back. I don't want to have to be the one to tell you. It's been over since the day I left, and I can't go back, can't go back, to the place I was before [insert guitar solo]. Your 14-point Arial words just shake in and out of focus, and from time to time I'll go back to them because I can't even remember what it is I've read. Not making me feel better. But not making me feel worse, either. You're right. It is a shame.

So I've made my bed. I'll lie in it.

Weeknights.

Recounting the drinks consumed, dancing shoes ruined, cab fares home after the separate ways we go. It's a daunting combination of lust, fear, loneliness and too many faces, too many pairs of eyes, too many numbers exchanged, unintelligible names.

Separate ways from our friends, and we all went home with someone in the end.

The laughing hours later about who was seen with who when and what word's been around town since then are so much easier than the long walk home and the carried over daylight from the night before.

But running through parking lots with a windswept umbrella and an empty stomach is harder without company. And once inside I'll listen to her count off the things she got for free. I'll do the same, because it's all just loss and gain. Vacant hearts too scared to be left alone, continuing to count off the minutes that we haven't been home.

We know we'll all go home with someone at some point again, but we lay in our thin-walled rooms tonight, unaware of tomorrow's enemies and friends.

Saturday.

Waking up with the boy I like in my house (n.b. mom: I know you're most likely reading this, and you can rest assured that nothing of that sort happened) was categorically pleasant, as was our trek to a sit-down breakfast place a few blocks away on a bright, sunny, minus-fucking-nineteen-degrees-Celsius Toronto morning. Of course the brilliant idea of his to make our way over to this specific breakfast joint required that we had to wait in line for twenty minutes outside in the horrendous-fucking-minus-nineteen-degrees-Celsius weather to be seated...

But thankfully for such boy the bacon, eggs and toast were excellent. For had they not been, boy-I-like may have quickly and irreparably turned into boy-who-made-me-wait-in-the-cold-for-a-sub-par-breakfast.

Which he abandoned me halfway through, mind you. Waiting in the aforementioned treacherous line-up discussing the weather with a bunch of proletarian metropolitan well-to-do's meant that our strange, pseudo-date time of eating hangover homefries and cryptically flirting with one another was cut a bit shorter than initially planned. He had to go to work, which I could have and probably should have accompanied him to (I was, after all, merely nursing a third cup of coffee at that point), but I truly didn't mind being left on my own in a breakfast joint anyways...so I didn't.

In fact, I think it's safe to say that I don't understand or want to associated with anyone who does mind being left alone in a busy downtown breakfast spot run by charming French people with their thoughts and a recently updated iPod on a cold Saturday morning.

My half hour of solitude in such restaurant turned out to be so lovely that on my walk home I determined that it could be followed by none other than a trip to the bookstore in a similarly glorious state of being by myself. Even the rude shopgirl who curtly explained to my visibly-hungover ass that "some authors are more prone to theft" when I inquired as to why the Bukowski book I wanted was furtively hidden behind the counter couldn't bring me out of my I Love Being By Myself high. I didn't even respond to her in an equally bitchy fashion (which, might I add, is perhaps the second time this has ever happened without first undergoing duress from those around me) and instead thanked her so much for her assistance and politely paid up.

I finally arrived back at The Very Strange Apartment I Share With Very Strange People at some point mid-afternoon only to find...
Broken glass in the kitchen? Check.
Clothing and jewelry that aren't mine strewn about my room in the aftermath of OneHellOfaFridayNight? Check.
Too many empty bottles to even think about throwing in one garbage bag? Check.
A phone beeping with text messages from boys I'd rather not respond to? Check.

$2.75 and a six minute streetcar ride later, I arrived at my safe haven (a.k.a. my mother's home which no one resides in on the weekends). It's not that I needed to escape...well yeah, actually, I think I kind of did. But anyways, thank fucking god for the safe haven. Everyone should be so blessed as to have such a thing.

So I proceeded to top off an already-glorious Saturday with listening to 'Open Heart Surgery' by the Brian Jonestown Massacre on repeat for two hours while staring out the window and timing the streetcars going by, and eating more Turtles than I thought humanly possible. Oh, and I eventually cracked open Portraits of a Wine-Stained Notebook. Which, naturally, merely led to writing (read: self-pityingly whining) in my very own wine-stained notebook about how, while I may be a drunk asshole, I will never be as good at being a drunk asshole as Charles Bukowski was.

Saturday was a brilliant day.

Twentieth.

Warming feet in the tub
stained with hair dye from a new guy
who I live with.
Grey nightgowns, grey ashes into water
PSFT. Psft. pfst.
It’s a good noise we make.

I don’t even like you that much.
Nightclubbing. And listening to
English Girls Approximately
and The Drug’s Not Working
in a full bed at 4 a.m.

Smoking more cigarettes
with people I’ve met
mere hours and days before.

And I don’t even miss you.
Not one single bit.
But oh,
look at you
now.

Best I’ve ever seen.