Confessions—May to September

It’s June after all & you’re young / until September

—Ocean Vuong, “Because It’s Summer”, Night Sky With Exit Wounds

May 6th

Last night 

Outside, it was quiet. The rain enveloped the scenery, making it seem closer, softer. Inside, the lights were dim, and conversations were overlapping. Warmth seemed inherent to the place, to fill everyone’s body, tinting the surfaces and windows with orange. The restaurant was comfortably full, bringing together people usually isolated in their singular existences. The back door was held slightly open, and the damp night air drifted inside—a reminder of the primal world. We cannot stay much longer before it calls for our return. We left, carrying the restaurant’s warmth with us into the night’s stillness, acoustic music leaking out the door. We did not talk on the way back home.

This morning

It is time for us to venture back to where we came from. Solitude dooms us when we forget how to trust someone other than ourselves. It is difficult to remember that tracing back our steps does not erase our growth. It does not make us become who we were before the leap. Yet, being swallowed back into previous nothingness does not feel less cruel or salvageable than the first time. It is easy to make the same mistakes twice. There will be other beautiful things to notice and other people to hold. There is no trick to surviving the passing of time—there are always things left undone, no matter how long we remain at the same place. Feel this singular life as it coils around itself. 

June 20th

I lay between the view through the window—trees slicing the blue, their leaves swaying in the wind—and him. His face asleep, his body surrendered to mine. Our hair curled and still damp from sudden summer showers. With a tilt of the head, I witness either the sun or his face, my existence held between two fleeting beauties. Deciding is not a choice but a quality of existence; I must choose one or the other and, in doing so, ignore either the sun or his face, for a moment that stretches into an entire life. Making this decision, I assert which one I cannot exist without. The sun glances against his skin as I look at him, and it is there that I find the answer.

July 11th

A few hours before he left this city, we were in search of a good crepe on Mont-Royal Avenue. He was chattering, seemingly trying to elongate the sidewalk beneath us, to elongate this moment in time as we wandered along hand-in-hand. Distracting himself, grasping each second tightly—I was indulging him, walking almost sideways to have a better view of his face. Maybe, in laughing along with him, I was mimicking his desperation, his desire to distance us from the fact of his leaving—the play proving we shared this heartbreak. I still haven’t figured out if it hurts more to know when it will end or to let it end unexpectedly. Knowing ruins the near-endless possibilities held in the not-knowing. Not knowing rewards the wait because it remains unconscious until the end comes. Knowing the end is going to come, I can do nothing but wait, and in thinking about the wait, trap myself in it. He ended up buying himself a crepe with vanilla ice cream and pistachio bits on top. When I asked for a bite, he was protective of it, but finally caved in as he always did, happily. He told me he could have gotten me my own crepe, but I didn’t want any crepe; I wanted his. It tasted better because he chose it and held the plate as I took a bite. After, we wandered aimlessly. The sun had not yet set, the day was not even over, establishing no visible finality to his departure. Only by naming that evening our “last” did it differ from previous ones; only by our shared knowledge of its imminent end. Until all colour drained from the sky, we pretended that the idea of forever was not inconceivable, that we could make it real by sheer force of will, or by another requited but unspoken feeling.

August 1st

10:57 am, I sat on the front patio after breakfast, freshly caffeinated. It was difficult to extract my body from the bed despite the sunrays wafting through the curtains, or maybe because I was not prepared to be part of a new day. I tried to anchor myself in the familiar by watching replays of childhood cartoons on my grandparents’ television. Staring at an empty point in space, swaying among trees and sky.

Here, in this stillness, the world waits for me to unravel it. I yawn, and it yawns back in my face, sunrise-like eyelids closing tight with pleasure. I don’t know what language to speak to this world; maybe I don’t need to be understood to follow its rhythm. Sometimes I so desperately want to be left alone that I am rendered breathless, not with anger but with shock, by the world’s perseverance. It takes me back in—I cannot say no to it. I am continuously trapped by its uncertainty and freed by its steady renewal. Awakening to memorize each fold of the morning light. I want to notice its shadows on the gravel as they appear to me, and let them fade into the afternoon.

September 21st

Mid-September morning, peel the second skin off my face. To look truth in the eyes. Nighttime is for sleeping, nothing else. My hair now reaches below my shoulders. The same fears. The same gemstones around my wrist. I wear brown to blend in with the ground. I changed coffee beans and no longer wear perfume. On my walk home, Big Thief plays in my headphones as the landscape turns golden. My heart falls away like tree leaves; slowly, then all at once.