Walk the Plank

This is an excerpt from the fiction novel I am writing. You can find other excerpts under my category of ‘fiction’ to get a through-line of the story about Sam. This scene is after she has found out her boyfriend has done something, well quite shocking and terrible. To find out what that is you’ll have to read the book when it’s done.:) 

She has returned to her life but she is in a different place. It’s as though someone had done renovations while she was away and hadn’t told her. That window shouldn’t be there should it? She leaves her suitcase on a kitchen chair, unopened.

She looks around her apartment and feels ill at ease. She wishes in this moment that she owned a pet who would look at her lovingly and connect her back to how it was before with a plaintive meow.  But she knows the self she left with is no longer within her and was in fact obliterated in one moment by her boyfriend. This is what an atomic bomb of the heart feels like. Flashbacks speed through her mind like thousands of YouTube videos of her life played at warp speed: She hears snippets of his voice, tastes their last dinner together, the ting of a coat hanger as it hits the back of his closet, the flight home, of which she can remember nothing except the white glow of rupture. Her throat tries to swallow. She notices a change in light from far away. How long had she been standing in her hallway with her coat on?

Just go to bed for Pete’s sake!  It’s her father’s pragmatic, slightly irritated voice that snaps her out of her reverie. She also hears her cousin’s voice, who is studying to be a doctor, and possibly the smartest person alive,  say in a cheerful, but calm manner:

“Likely you are just in shock. Drink a glass of water and try to get some sleep for now.” 

Had she lost her mind?

She takes her cousin’s imaginary advice and crawls into bed and pulls the pillow against her chest to dull what feels like leeches bleeding her out from the inside, draining her, waiting for her to slip away entirely, until she is pale, and translucent with only white platelets left  struggling to fight the shattered debris of her emotions.

It’s okay honey. 

Her mother’s voice, smoothing her temple, stroking her hair, pulling the comforter over her shoulder. She cries then, silently, with no strain, acquiescing to her grief with no commentary. She is flatlining. She is not home. She may never be.

No Mom, it is not. It is not okay. 

Caught in a kind of purgatory, she knows before her tears will subsist that she will not be the same. Having walked to the end of the plank and had a gun pointed at her by this relationship she will feel a need to find a gun herself.

And she will want to point it at someone.

Losing connection, finding love, healing with butter: My affair in Paris

I am not supposed to be in Paris. I am supposed to be in Vienna. There should be a lullaby-sounding Austrian voice asking me if I would like Grosser Brauner with my breakfast? And another voice discoursing on the superiority of coffee in Europe. Which I would agree with wholeheartedly.

Lufthansa, in a shocking display of disorder and randomness, was quite certain I was going to Vienna via Frankfurt.

“I am going to Paris, trust me, I would know.” In a last-minute flurry of quiet chaos, I boarded.

A French voice prays quietly, the sound echoing in the still, damp air: Notre Père qui es aux cieux, que ton nom soit sanctifié, que ton règne vienne, que ta volonté sit soit faite sur la terre comme au ciel.  I find myself going through the old famliar motions even in another language. I know the timing of this prayer by heart. I feel tears coursing their way down my cheeks and I am helpless to stop them. I think the woman beside me knows her fellow pew sitter is not intentionally attending noon mass  but since she is a woman of faith assumes there must be a reason nonetheless that I am  there and a reason that I am falling apart. She turns away, kneels, and holds her rosary close to her lips.

I joked to my friends that this was my Eat Pray Paris journey but as I leave the church and stop at the first boulangerie I see, I realize it is, in fact, my second croissant of my first day in Paris and that it might be mostly Eat Paris and less Pray Paris. Healing a broken heart via butter is highly underrated.

Each day, I cannot wait to devour the city with a kind of hunger I’d not had for anything in a long time. Unplugging from my digital life allows a tidal wave of emotions to pour in, and it’s as though all of my senses are suddenly freed to focus on being versus tweeting to someone out there or engaging with the digital ether and not the tastes in my mouth, sounds in my ears, or colours before my eyes.

I am besotted with real life. I let my iPhone die and walk past the lobby computer on my way out the door to the waiting street life. Love seems to be everywhere and it comforts me; the sweet expressions exchanged mid-bridge, or on the train, or ambling through the Jardin des Tuileries…I send tiny prayers to each of them for their love to blossom.

Walking becomes my healing mantra. Walking in Paris isn’t like other cities; it is an entirely sensual experience. It requires all of you, and I am happy to give over my self completely. Coming back to Paris as a grown woman, a madame versus a mademoiselle, I see the city with such different eyes.  Francis Bacon once wrote that “Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.” As a solo traveller, I become a kind of voyeur,  lost anonymously  in the crowds or sitting  at a sidewalk cafe, watching Parisians rush by on bicycles, expertly navigating the traffic with a kind of insouciance that says, this is perfectly natural and yes, I can look this fabulous while doing it.

I take the train and bus and often have no idea where I am going or if I am on the right side of the tracks. It doesn’t matter: why I am here is not to get to a physical destination but rather an interior one and a train going one way or another will not determine where I end up.

 Since I also happen to be on assignment to write about Paris for a travel website that wants my ‘top ten’, I use this as my only itinerary and I decide to write it from the point-of-view of a female, solo-traveller–what else?–and first on the list is antique jewelry shopping. What I am really doing is searching for a ring. I decided before I came to Paris that I would commit to my own life, in a way I had not before, having allowed my self to be swept up in others’ dreams and desires that left me bereft of my own.

Sometimes rituals are needed to give substance to transformations: Paris is a good place to marry your self.

Luckily, there are amazing shops that have been around for a few hundred years that carry every kind of ring imaginable; some of the stock would cost you the price of your North American house, but if you can afford it, there’s baubles that were around during Madame Bonaparte’s time.

I walk until I can’t walk anymore. My feet are burning, on fire with blisters, and no, it isn’t because I am wearing heels, but rather that each street, and around ever corner, there is another beautiful story I cannot stop myself from experiencing.

It is hard not to eat on every street so I opt for coffee instead of more buttery croissants. I’m not always successful; pain au chocolat winks at me from every window, and every bite is so delicious I  succumb to its flaky, sweet, sticky, charm.  I can also drink coffee all day and not feel remotely sick as I would from my Canadian coffee. I take a shot of espresso with nothing in it. Voila! Another few miles are left in me after all. When I can walk no further, I stop and have a single glass of wine and take out my notebook and lose myself in writing longhand. My wrist asks the question, what is this thing between my fingers? at the beginning of the week but by the end has remembered the exquisite pleasure of writing on paper.

 Reluctantly, I take a tour out to the Champagne region. I say reluctantly because it is difficult to leave the one you love at dawn, crawl out of a warm bed and into a dark, cold van, and I did not feel happy about leaving my beloved Paris even for one day. We pick up a couple a few miles from my hotel who are agreeable enough, but I cringe a little at the thought of several more couplelanders crammed into the small van together for a day but to my delight there are no more stops and we drive out into the country to immerse ourselves in a day of champagne. We go from high to low, field to bottle, and even stop on the Avenue du Champagne for one of the most caloric lunches of my life. I drink Bollinger like it’s an everyday thing and I think: I am distilling this moment to keep in my mind forever.

In my last days in Paris I am aware of the time passing, slipping through my fingers, and I hold onto each moment the way you hold a loved one’s shirt to your face, breathing in all of them to the bottom of your heart. I’ve found a ring and like the way it catches light, refracting the sadness I came here with. I let go and embrace what was asking me to grow; like vines just beginning, I could see the work I needed to do now, and what fields I would leave to grow wild. I will always love the passionate bloom, but had to release the thorns that I’d held so tightly for so long.

If I lived here the rest of my life it would not be enough time to love it as completely as I need and want to. Until next time Paris, mon cheri.

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Muse

Darling, I know I said I would stop

writing poetry for you

but I cannot.

Instead, I’ve stretched out a hammock strung between

my words so you can let yourself come and go

whenever you need to–

there’s no hurry in this place

no one else

knows the way to it, remember?

Not even a thousand promises broken

like glass strewn below your feet will hurt you

nor fire blown out of mouths in the night

or punches full of fury, a knife against your throat–

nothing will impede you coming to this place

when you need to escape the battle.

Come,

lie down and

be with me –

I won’t look if you want to be a secret

but will cherish the worn shape you make there

after you leave,

happy my words gave

you rest.

Spend on love, keep your money and hold the marriage

For the first time in my life I have an amazing sound system in my car. In fact, I may go deaf over the course of the summer. I’ve been blaring the new Madonna album MDNA so loud it’s bending the windows. I’m sure some teen next to me is thinking, ‘rock on Grandma’ but I don’t care.

Listening to the lyrics on this album can sometimes feel like a punch in the stomach though as Madonna works out her anger, sadness, and remorse about her marriage to Guy Ritchie.  I watched (through the lens of marriage-obsessed media) as this highly independent, financially secure (understatement), incredibly talented woman walked down the bridal path for the second time and lapped up their whole romantic story.

Their love was one born across a table in Sting’s house who hosted them both at a luncheon. It was love at first sight apparently. Then they had a traditional romantic fairytale wedding complete with Scottish castle, church, and haunting moors. Cue music.

However, I knew there was trouble in that marriage when on her last album she wrote  ’Miles Away‘  and ‘Devil Wouldn’t Recognize You‘. But I wanted to believe in the fairytale…Oops, that fairytale just awarded Guy Ritchie one of the largest settlements in divorce history. Ouch.

Madonna is mad. Just listen to Gang Bang.

You can hear plainly in this album Guy Ritchie must have had an affair. Then soaked her for all she was worth. Marriage, it’s a beautiful thing right? Sometimes I guess.  Maybe because everyone wants to remain in the bubble, the marriage dream, the happily-ever-after dream they don’t look at what is really going on in their relationships. There’s just so much…..to lose.

The bigger the bubble–bauble?–the bigger the bang when it bursts.

I watched a Goldie Hawn interview recently (who is famously unmarried to Kurt Russell) and she said something that really resonated with me: “I want to be free to choose and I want the person with me to be free to choose. Every day of their lives. To wake up and go to sleep making the choice to love that person and fully be in it.”

Choice. I wonder, do we lose some of our choice when we get a big fat diamond ring on our finger? As a woman, is this idea even relevant anymore? Do we need to show the world our emotional collateral? ‘Look, see? Right here on my hand, there it is folks!’ Apparently it is very relevant, because Pinterest is a living experiment of the fairytale very much alive and well and pinned to the hearts of hopeful women around the globe.

My favourite song on this new album has to be  Love Spent where she writes with a frank, bare honesty about money and its  tragic place in their marriage. I suppose money doesn’t buy happiness after all, go figure.

I want you to take me like you took your money
Take me in your arms until your last breath
I want you to hold me like you hold your money
Hold me in your arms until there’s nothing left

So, from a sanctioned marriage with a priest, Madonna gets fleeced and now has a broken heart and when asked by David Letterman if she would marry again she flatly responded:

“I would rather get run over by a train.”

I feel lucky that 2011 emancipated from my need to ever be married. I’m all about Goldie’s philosophy, and having choice. Personally, I think women have earned it. I know I have.

Love You to Bitts!

Everyone should be required to see Burlesque. Why? Because it is how women should be enjoyed. Oh stop all you who are getting their backs up right now–ask yourself, how good do you feel naked in a room of people you’ve never met? Then get back to me.

Because Miss Rosie Bitts feels flipping fantastic and you can tell, from her delicate, nuanced fingertips to her swirling pasties to her sweet little knees and jaw dropping fanny. She isn’t perfect. By any stretch. She doesn’t fit into society’s current image of beauty–skeletal, emaciated, hungry. She has glowing white soft-as-petals looking skin, an ample, luscious, bodacious bottom, and a sensual contoured tummy with perfectly rounded size B breasts. No double D, no fake tan, no visible signs of a body tortured at the gym.

She sang and danced and flirted and owned that room.

My favourite part of the show was a moment as she exited, when she stopped by a full table  and gently grabbed her own bottom right cheek, gave it a good shake, something as women we are loathe to ever do, and then she squeezed it, lifting it up like it was a banquet of gorgeous delights. It wasn’t hard and taut, it was soft, pliable, kissable. She then winked and gave a delighted giggle and disappeared backstage.

I smiled, thinking, now there is a woman who owns her body and loves being in it.

As women, we’re schooled that if you want to be a feminist somehow you have to look the part, just as surely if you want to be sexy you have to look the part. Why can’t we be both, and just be ourselves?

I think of all the men who’ve told me I could lose a few pounds, offered me ‘helpful’ fitness advice, mentioned my love handles and not in a loving way and think back on my own complicity in that vicious beauty cycle, and now wonder why I wasted so much time giving a shit about whether my ass was right for the relationship. The relationship clearly wasn’t right for my ass.

Instead of trying to fit into a certain size to be accepted or despairing my pear-shaped body, I felt free when I watched Rosie, as she sashayed with a charm and sensuality that would  stop a locomotive, I realized she had a beautiful pear-shaped body and unlike me, owned it like it she was Helen of Troy.

Rosie Bitts is like a PSA for self-esteem. She makes you love yourself. She makes you want to get up and shake your bits like they’re gorgeous. ‘Cause they are. I want to say thanks Rosie for awakening my inner burlesque.

Now, I just need to find me some pasties in this town…

I snuck a picture with Rosie and her feather fans--would have loved to have taken more photos but Rosie should really be enjoyed in the moment!

If you want to learn more about Rosie, see a show, or take a class–yes, she helps women love their ‘jiggly bits’–check her website out.

Creativity is a person

Henry James puts it best: ‘To live in the world of creation — to get into it and stay in it — to frequent it and haunt it — to think intently and fruitfully – to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation — this is the only thing — and I neglect it, far and away too much; from indulgence, from vagueness, from inattention, and from a strange nervous fear of letting myself go. If I vanquish that nervousness, the world is mine.”

That place where the world is ‘yours’ isn’t exactly as easy to get to as just focusing on it. It’s more like open-heart surgery with soup ladles. It’s a little barbaric at times. It’s a gnawing kind of pain, when you can’t find your way into or out of the creative process within. The truth is, it can get ugly in there.

But in polite society our creativity should be served up neat and tidy, like a lady’s gin and tonic after  dinner. Creativity is enjoyed by everyone–universally, from living rooms to dark theatres–and yet, try to be creative, just go and try to be genuinely–uniquely–creative amidst people that do not value where their art comes from or whence it goes when they are done with it.

Go on. I dare you.

Right. Who are we kidding here? Creators are often vilified in our society.  Treated like second-class citizens. Wild cards. Loony. Dangerous. Unreliable. Cantankerous. Catalyst’s for chaos. Bohemian. Maybe even a little dirty. Suspicious sexual predilections. But worst of all they are highly unpredictable.

“Oh, c’mon now, we don’t think that. We love creative types!”

Sure you do. I hear it in the way you say ‘artsy-fartsy’. I hear it in the way you say ‘she has to always be different doesn’t she?’ with a tense laugh. I see in the way you roll your eyes at footage of some young performance artist, as though by their very nakedness you are free to be more confident in your closeted life. I feel it in your condescending sympathy for the squalor they live in, tsking in a sad way that is actually a sigh of relief mistaken for compassion. I see it in the way you fund the arts.

“Creativity is awesome!” you espouse.  At a distance. Framed on your wall. On paper between your fingertips. Rented from a movie store. On a stage with curtains that come down at the end. In your ears at the end of wires.

But god forbid some struggling young artist gets in your face with their 10 ton shithouse angst about the fact their college just cut their program or the theatre they just secured their first job in is closing or the grants that their parents used to have to make films with are gone.

Forever. 

The bonus is young artists can congregate online and have some voice but it isn’t loud enough yet. Each and every young artist is going to have to ‘vanquish their nervousness’ and yell like hell into the bullhorn of creativity so that all those people enjoying their work so very much will understand that our culture is in fact killing the very thing they find so precious in their lives.

Cecil Beaton once wrote a kind of call to art that I  have pinned to my fridge and I quote here to remind young creatives struggling in a world of complacency and disaffectedness:

“Be daring. Be different. Be impractical. Be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace. The slaves of the ordinary.”  

Creativity is a person. It isn’t a thing. Support creative arts, support students who practice art, and our culture just might survive with some light left in it.

Image courtesy of Brendan Doyle

If you would like to participate in and support the Communication students at Camosun college (where their Applied Communications program is set to be cut), the hashtag community is  #savecomm.

Gin, The Passion, and Reclaiming Doubting Thomas

St. Augustine's, using large format, around 1992.

Jesus dying was a big event in my Catholic household growing up. Mostly, I was relieved that Lent was over and my mom could drink Gin again. I was always one for theatrical events and our Church was a busy little powerhouse of theatre during this time. First of all, the ‘Passion’ was read. Now, if you’ve ever been to a Catholic Easter service you’ll know what I’m talking about. It is the long version of the tale of the death and subsequent resurrection of Jesus. On two occasions I fainted during the reading of it. Likely due to tight-fitting polyester circa 1974 and the fact that the betrayal of Jesus was just too much for me. Why did Judas have to act like that?

In a family as big as mine, Easter egg hunts were not easy. First of all, it was aggressive because despite the fact we were celebrating the resurrection of Jesus, my brothers would scupper down my entire basket happily whilst I kept looking for hours on end, calling out, ‘has anyone seen MY basket?’. I remember once I was underneath the dining room table, squinting in the dark recesses a mile-long, when someone leaned under and said, ‘You will never find your basket’, with a mixture of glee and satanic edge that made me burst into tears. I did find it eventually but it was as I suspected, pillaged already.

Life at the bottom of a family of 13 prepares you for a lot of life’s dubious encounters down the road.

Always a sucker for drama, I think Easter is the ultimate performative pageant in religion and I loved the lines of candle holding altar boys (no girls when I was little, nope, too important a job for girls), that paraded down the aisle with the priests’ in their Easter costumes, the Archbishop sometimes bringing up the rear of the procession white hat and all. I always felt we should clap when they entered, I mean, wow, this was a serious troupe of performers, let’s show some respect!

Easter morning breakfast was similar to Christmas morning breakfast in the mayhem and smells that happened only a few times a year: orange juice with cheap sparkling wine, bacon, and scrambled eggs. For dinner we had a giant ham and I liked to wear full length dresses to these events for lack of a ‘real’ party to go to. My brothers cocked eyebrows at me and I’m sure often wondered, ‘where did this one come from?’.

The tale of Jesus’ resurrection likely predetermined some of my more puzzling attachments to boyfriends in my adult life. I was sure they would change their minds, get a job, finally divorce their wife, or even, tell me their real name. Sigh. Believing in the resurrection my mother would whisper to me during mass, requires faith. But, I would whisper back, there’s no proof. She would smile benignly and say, ‘Margaret, don’t be a doubting Thomas’. For those of you who might not know, Thomas was the apostle who had to stick his hand through Jesus’ side to see if he were really there or not after he ‘rose from the dead’. Being a doubting Thomas was akin to being an axe-murderer in my mom’s mind. So, I tucked away my rational misgivings and plunged deep into the story of miracles.

Nowadays, I keep one eye open for a Jesus to appear, the other firmly fixed on what is actually going on. It is highly likely, as my brother Alan will attest, that I’ll fall for the resurrection story again, but in the meantime, I’m going to celebrate the Doubting Thomas in me and ask for full miracle-making proof up front before I believe.