budapest

this was never something i intended to share, but after feedback from my wonderful writing class at ubc and understanding that humans must share in order to heal, here is my non-fiction writing piece i developed during my first term of university. i feel like it requires some sort of an introduction, but i would not know where to start. it scares me to release this into the world, but it would be a shame for this to gather dust in the depths of my word documents.

~

                                                                                                                      

Budapest: Or, Why I’m Really Happy I Didn’t Kill Myself in Grade Nine

            The metro in Budapest, if you can call it a metro at all, is the second oldest metro system in the world, and appears to have not been refurbished since its construction in 1896. The yellow car rattles through the infinitesimal underground veins, scrambling its contents who white-knuckle the hand-holds to avoid being thrown around the car haphazardly. I sit on a bench, my butt grazing the edge of the plastic seat, eyeing up the stops listed overhead. Traveling to an eastern European country while dealing with anxiety is not the best idea, but when I decide to do things, I tend to skyrocket into them blindfolded and crossing my fingers.

Emerging from the underground to the darkened February Budapest streets, I am struck. I feel the people and the buildings and the rushing streets pulling at every organ of my body, the sound emanating from my chords a music I strain my ears to hear. My feet are fresh from the cobbles of Paris, my jacket a Christmas gift from last year in Canada, and my toque has rested on the stone walls of a castle in Edinburgh. I breathe in the lights and the smells, notice the people who rush with heads bowed, the beggars with hands upturned, the children with eyes resembling my own.

            Following the directions to my hostel I got off the internet, I find myself wandering further and further down a darkened alley. Signs for 500 forint falafels cry out to me, and I pass a group of tall, dark-haired men. My palms begin to sweat, and I feel the walls of my heart tighten. Fear has a way of grabbing hold of me: wrapping skinny fingers around every inch of my body and squeezing tightly. I walk onwards, and the lit-up sign advertising my hostel pours ice-water relief through my veins.

            I’ve never been one to lie in bed on my first night in a new city, so I pull my shoes back on and venture into the now pitch-black winter streets. It helps to think of myself as a Viking explorer. The street names employ what seems to be an entirely different alphabet, and the bones of each passerby are arranged into the most foreign of formations. My apartment in Paris and the familiar French-speaking western Europeans seem extremely far away. Traveling alone terrifies me when I think of how I could so easily disappear. I could slip off into the swaddling blackness of that side alley over there, curl up against a disintegrating red-brick wall and fade into nothingness. It would take them a while to realize I was even gone.

~

           

When I was fourteen, I wanted to jump off the Lions Gate Bridge. I don’t know why, only that there was a kind of thick cotton inside my brain I could not escape. The world felt inescapably small inside my head. When my parents found out I was taking sharp objects to my forearms, they panicked and sent me to a therapist who talked a lot about healing crystals and trauma, and had fluffy brown hair that curled around her head like a halo. The problem was, as a working class family struggling to rent a rancher in North Vancouver, my therapy was the government-sanctioned kind that’s unpredictable and generally ineffective. My therapist moved to Squamish.

           

When I was fourteen, I wanted to jump off the Lions Gate Bridge, and I hadn’t even seen the world yet. I hadn’t seen the way the Seine bends around Ile St. Louis, or the way the Eiffel Tower sparkles like diamonds are falling from the clouds, or the way the Széchenyi Chain Bridge arcs over the Danube like waterfalls of tiny lights.

~

           

When I awoke on my second morning in Budapest, I wrapped a thick scarf around my neck and emerged from my hostel into the frostbitten February morning. Fog had descended upon the city, wrapping Gellért Hill in swaths of cobwebs. The hill rose up beyond a bridge westerly of the one I had crossed the previous night. Before traversing the Danube once again over the Liberty Bridge, I ducked inside the Great Market Hall. The hall is a vast building, a product of the imagination of the first mayor of Budapest and built in 1897. Windows lined the tops of both walls, and merchants sold their goods in rows on the first and second floors of the gaping space. Scents of paprika and candied oranges filled my nostrils, and pastries glistening with glazed sugar watered my tongue.

           

I hiked Gellért Hill that morning, stopping at the cave church inside of it, within which an old Hungarian man handed me a tour guide headset with wrinkled hands. The cave was cool with the spirit of Saint Ivan. It is thought that Saint Ivan, a hermit who inhabited this cave, used the thermal springs adjacent to the dwelling to heal the sick. Perhaps he could have soothed my throbbing fourteen-year-old forehead, when the pains shot through my scalp and down my spine.

           

The top of Gellért Hill is crowned with the Citadella. I stand beside it and look out across the city I have climbed, scanning the Danube from east to west and imprinting the tiny white-washed churches and buildings and monuments that sprawl as far as I can strain my eyes to see. The ethereal morning cobwebs have begun to lift, revealing the details of the parliament building and Buda Castle, the Cinderella turrets of the Fisherman’s Bastion, and the string lights of the Chain Link Bridge. My cheeks burn with cold, and my fingers are numb as I descend the winding path to river level.

           

Most European cities I visit on my year of travel are divided into north and south, east and west, or right bank and left bank by a river. In Budapest, the Danube splits Buda and Pest in a wide snake; in Rome, the Tiber flows between Vatican City and the Coliseum; in Berlin, the Spree winds through the war-torn capital; in London, the Thames is connected by the Tower Bridge; and in my hometown of that year, Paris, the Seine separates the artsy right bank from the literary left bank. My brain is divided into sickness and health, sadness and sanity, impulse and clarity. All the times I stood on top of the world, on top of a hill by a citadel, on top of a volcano in Edinburgh, on top (almost, I couldn’t afford the extra euros to take the elevator to the very top) of the Eiffel Tower, I built another bridge across the hemispheres of my psyche.

            And at night, when the cold hands of sadness wrap around my fingertips, speaking of my fourteen-year-old self and suicidal tendencies, I look for the lights strung across the span of my bridges, looping in lit-up parabolas over the black water of my divide. Sometimes I manage to cross to the safer side, and sometimes my bridges collapse.

            All I know is I am thankful I never collapsed when I was fourteen, and had never seen the world.

Late July

I walk out onto the porch and see you there, and the air smells vaguely of thick honey - the kind my mom buys at the farmer's market that's infused with lavender. I have always associated summer with dusks like this one - that warm, thick scent to the air - as if the very tendrils of atmosphere are licking the bare skin of my legs beneath my cutoffs. The comfortable warmth wrapping around me as I walk home after dark, my shoulders bare. It's late July.

You inhale as I sit next to you, three inches of space between our thighs. I ask you what you're up to tonight.

"Dunno. Gonna head down to the railroad tracks. Jessie's having a thing."

I wish my stomach wouldn't convulse every time you said someone was having a thing. I wish my palms didn't go cold and fill with moisture. I wish my head didn't feel light, disconnecting from my neck. I wish I could move my hand from where it clutched the top step to wrap around your bare shoulders. I ask you what kind of thing.

"You know. Just a thing."

And I did know, but I didn't want to. I hated myself for knowing, and more so, I hated myself for permitting you to leave every other night to the railroad tracks that July.

~

It's May, and your cheeks are mascara-streaked. Graduation hangs huge and foreboding above your head - more like an expiry date than a doorway. I see the fear in your eyes as I open our thick maple front door to you. A garbage bag is slung over your shoulder, swelling. Edges poke at the black plastic, and I make out the spine of a book . Your spine is hunched, curled in on itself beneath the weight of your load. You hair is swept up into a bun on the top of your head, pieces coming away around your ears like a blonde halo, back lit by the five o'clock sun. You come in without a word and I carry the bag up to my room.

My mom asks what you're doing here.

"She's gonna stay for a couple of days."

She asks why. I feed her lies. My words hang thinly in the air between us and I see in her face that she doesn't believe me.

That night, your bag lies half-unpacked on my hardwood bedroom floors. My curtains are open and the oak tree across the lawn sways in the eleven o'clock breeze. I see your knees, scraped, and your palms, blistered from climbing its bark. Your hand plays through the darkened air, greyish light catching your skin from time to time as your fingers dip and twist. I ask what you're doing.

"Go to sleep, Katie."

~

It's the second week of June. You've been staying here for six weeks now, your garbage bag curled up in a corner of my closet, long forgotten. You graduate next Friday. I see the fear wrapped around your lips and inside your eyes and buried deep within your stomach. I ask you what you want your future to be like, one night, when we're sitting out on my lawn. I'm drinking iced tea and you're drinking a beer because my dad treats you like an adult.

"Well, Katie, I'd like to live in London. Brick Lane, you know, loft apartment. A nice guy, he has thick-rimmed circle-frame glasses and a beard. I want to sing. I think my voice is okay, and singing makes me happy. Aren't you supposed to try to be happy? I don't know. It all sounds like a pile of bullshit to me, but I can't exactly write that in the yearbook. I mean, what's the point of illustrating this idyllic future, this perfect man, these two and a half kids, this apartment with its imaginary claw-foot bathtub and authentic hardwood flooring? What's the point of it all? As if imagining it will somehow make it real. Well, Katie, I'll tell you what imagining's got me. A big pile of disappointments and a bucket load of expectations. And empty promises. To myself. Which are the worst kind, really. I know I won't end up spending my Saturdays walking through Hyde Park pushing a designer stroller while I put together perfectly engineered melodies for my new album that will undoubtedly go platinum in two point five seconds. That's not my life. We're all given a life at the beginning of this whole shit show, we're all given a script. And I've read mine from top to bottom. And I didn't like it. I tried different accents, different inflections. I've even added some small print in there, some actions. Done my best with what was written for me. But I'm no magician, none of us are. Don't believe those bullshit 'coming from nothing' motivational stories. That's what their script was, part of the larger plan to make us believe that there isn't a script, that we are in command of our own destinies. Well, I'll tell you something, Katie. Keep believing. Keep believing in the plan. Because I'll tell you what - when you stop believing, when you stop mapping this imaginary future out and stringing the lies you tell yourself on the cord you wear around your neck - well, when you stop all that, you'll be happy you were weaving a rope. Because you'll need something to get you out of here."

~

So it's late July and you're sitting on my porch while my mom makes dinner inside.  I ask if you're eating with us.

"Thanks, Katie bear, but no thanks."

You ruffle my hair. I cut it two days ago. Chopped off my long brown curls into a boyish. short back and sides thing. You said it made me look older than sixteen. I hoped you were right, because I've been waiting for some sign of womanhood to land upon me. You always seemed like some exotic, uncageable creature. But looking at you now, your face bare and your body small and feeble beneath your old tank top and cuffed shorts, you seem so human. I guess you always were. But the bravery you had, and I use past tense here on purpose, it made me think of you as something greater than that. The idea of you I harvested helped me forgive you, I think. Forgive you for the convulsions in my stomach every night you didn't come home. Forgive you for the sweaty palms and disconnect I felt whenever you said you were going to a thing.

~

Yesterday we went to the beach. We shared a basket of fries drenched in ketchup. The sun blistered our skin and you dared me into the swelling waves. You floated on your back for a while, your long hair splayed out around you. I tried hard not to picture you floating like this, your lips bluish, your face whitened, under more dire circumstances. But what you said to me that night before graduation gives me nightmares almost every time I close my eyes. I wonder if you know that.

~

"Want a cigarette?"

You hold one out to me, the slim stick between your thumb and forefinger. I say sure, all nonchalant, and hold it between my lips like I've seen you do. Your thumb flicks the flame to life and brushes it against the end. I inhale as it burns reddish orange. I pull it from my mouth with two fingers and exhale in a gasping sputter. You laugh as you light your own, and my face reddens. Somehow this makes me angry.

The cigarette isn't at all what I'd expected. It tastes like ash and chalky bitterness, and it scratches my throat on the way down. But for some reason I'm compelled to inhale again and again until the sky darkens and I stub it out on the deck like you do.

"Katie, I gotta tell you something."

You tuck your hair behind your ear and turn towards me. I notice the hoop pierced in your cartilage and the streak of rose by the nape of your neck. I say yeah.

"I won't be seeing you again."

I ask why, knowing you won't answer.

"I can't say. You'll hear about me, don't worry."

~

I don't know why I held out a sliver of an inch of hope that when you said I'd hear about you, it would be under better circumstances. Maybe you'd have moved to London after all and released a hit single and were going on tour. Maybe you'd written a book. I don't know. Honestly, I don't know.

But I sure didn't expect to hear of you like this, as I dropped my bowl of cheerios to the carpeted floor, as I saw you light up on the television, your graduation photo above your name. And behind that, a train stopped on the tracks. And behind that, a conductor being interviewed by a man in a nice suit. His brows are knitted together. I think he looks gravely sad. Maybe you'll haunt his nightmares now, too.

you at sixteen

I find myself thumbing through the ghosts of you

And all your had beens and almosts

Until my mind is numb at one a.m. 

You will always be a half-finished masterpiece to me

For I cannot understand the lines sketched across your skin

Without having witnessed your preliminary drawings

When your canvas was washed

Clean

Vices piled up around you like cigarette butts and you

At sixteen

Your eyes burned red 

I try to imagine you

Halved

Prior to your emergence from your chrysalis

I fail

For suffering feels unnatural on you

Foreign

Alien

I know you must think the same of me

Me

At fourteen

A girl you will never meet

Perhaps we are all half-people

Snippets, cut off at each end

Our pasts a vague and distant mimicry 

Of our present selves

An echoing of gulls against jagged cliffs

Our futures memories of tomorrow

Pretty in how we imagine ourselves to be

Picturing you at sixteen is futile

As attempting to return to fourteen year old me

I must see you for all your half-finished beauty

My eyes awash in your effervescent shades of topaz

Without searching for the scratched out graphite beneath

You at sixteen died with all those birthdays

And it is enough to be in these parentheses

To know you now

You at eighteen

honey air

the air is thick like honey syrup and we are slaves
to the pull of the sun magnetic upon our icy winter skin
limbs stripped from jeans, extricated from blankety wombs
we run and spill out of our underground caverns to the rolling hills of emerald
the trees still barren, signs of winter's cruelty
the sun azure in a way that makes my bones ache for oceans
my lungs are filled with sweetness and a vague nostalgia
for nights like this eight months ago
walking home in the warm darkness I remember
pavements just like these
and nights I breathed freedom like it came naturally
and days we laid on blankets like this, wrapped up in a comfort
of warmth and togetherness
there is a part of summer that breeds unity
he laughs as he bounces the baby on his hips and she glances
up from the novel she is reading to smile at him as he flicks
ash from the end of his cigarette and
the bare skin of his back is to me while his fingers strum a guitar to
the tambourine player's beat
and breathing comes easy
when the air is thick like honey syrup and grass is cool beneath our feet

lighthouse

And it was almost like a thin lined reminder

Raised a near invisible inch above the flesh of her

A tribute to her humanity, she felt warmth of life stuff in currents through her veins below

Beneath the origami paper thin webbed as if by a spider so easily broken by the slightest bend of a fingertip, the slightest increase in pressure

Almost immeasurable
Nearly undetectable

She thought of this often, the power entrusted in her entirely undeserving hands

Her fingers shook too violently, as tremorous as aspen sometimes
And it was during the earthquakes she was reminded of it, the searing release

She knew now the chemical equation that was missing from her, the adrenaline and endorphins that calmed her shaking hands like the warm breath of a mother stroking the hair above her ear

And she remembered it, as distant a memory as it was now, fogged and creased around the edges as a wallet sized photo kept in a jacket pocket too long, crushed beneath receipts and spilled chewing gum

But it was there, still, she realized
A partially obscured lighthouse beacon and sometimes she felt herself running towards the crags of the rocks it stood upon instead of obeying the warning it screamed

And she sometimes felt she craved sharp edges more than she needed the gentle ebb of the sea

afraid of the dark

I'm afraid of the dark
But not in the ways you would expect, no I am not afraid of unnamable monsters that lurk between floorboards and bedboards, of hidden spaces closet-black, of tree-skeletons projected like black and white movies on death-pale carpet, no
I have no fear of the unavoidable, of my vulnerability to circumstance and night predators
I do not tremble by cause of fear for the unknown, the concealed, the shapes that shift unnoticed across walls paling in moonlight
For my fear lies instead within me
Under the layers of skin in the half-light through the window blinds
In my eyes filmed over with night stuff
In my hands that reach for something they recognize in the blackness
My terror is in me, in my choices influenced by the shadows of midnight, puppeteered by a loneliness that develops like a sheet photo in a darkroom sometime around two a.m.
And this is the fear of it, when all is stripped of ghosts and shadows and tricks of light
How does one prepare oneself against their own slight of hand?
How do I run from a thing which will inevitably be neither in front nor behind?

airport

Eyes searching scanning pointing finding 'we still have two hours'
ten languages bleed into one

Backpack heavy it weighs him down hair long and unbrushed skin penny tarnished

Limbs aching shoulders heaving face drawn and tired she sits because her anxiety put her here hours early

Man in business suit duty free liquor in a sealed plastic bag I wonder if he'll be drinking alone

Italian family swelling and overflowing speaking loudly they love one another

Middle aged man one sleek black briefcase long handled I wonder if he's flying home or away if he has two kids in pajamas waiting for him at the top of the stairs

He is old, his back bends like a willow
Too old to be flying alone

Were all caught between staying and leaving, here and where we're meant to be I wonder who is going home and who is running away

her bones

She held the fire of a thousand frustrated suns in both her eyes, irises opening and closing again like butterflies and I am still as I watch her because her lifeforms are too much for me

She is the swelling pregnancy of fire between her fingertips, ash dispensed from broken lungs

She is flame crushed beneath a dying humanity and I crave to know the way her skin aches to release the taut elasticity inside of her

She is falseness stretched to cover her like sheets and I breathe quietly in the moments I can hear her speak

She speaks of skin like it is the very stuff that cages her body and I pray for the light that breeds inside her bones

Her bones are so beautiful in their cracking fragility and I know she wakes empty and aching

A dull sensation insatiable in its honesty and I see she's on her knees

I see her knees they're bleeding now and still I find her so very hurtfully beautiful

I see her skin paper thin like butterfly wings

Fingerprints tattooed as if someone tried to finger paint across her canyons and

I am breathless underneath her beauty

It is far too heavy and I am far too tired to sleep my darling

But maybe I can find vacant relief in the way your bones crave to release you

building blocks

maybe we're all just children with fingers itching to build towers out of
wooden blocks
seeking inspiration in the dull moments lying on the carpet staring into space
wondering what it would be like to be tiny as an ant, fibres of the floor magnified with our eyes so close
we try to recognize perspective but get so wrapped up in our skewed thinking that the world revolves
around our tiny lives
like the moon following us outside our car windows
we believe the weather must echo our feelings and get angry when the sun is too bright for our rainy insides
but our towers get knocked down and others' are built up all around us
and maybe if we admired our collective greatness the downfall wouldn't feel so unbelievable
unbeatable
I know I'll build your tower up
before it has a chance to fall
I know your architecture is a work of art and mine is faltering
trembling like aspen and yours is strong
secure in its concrete frame
and I know that makes me happier
knowing you won't tumble like building blocks
at the slightest clap of thunder
because I love your tower
more than I love mine

Suitcase

The suitcase is sitting across the room beneath a strand of Christmas lights
It seems as much as I try to build a home I'm always just a visitor
Maybe a lifetime of rented houses taught me to never take anything as permanence
But distance forces attachment from my hands like it's a glory I will never taste
Passing through folded clothes like the places in my heart left untouched
It's better this way
I tell myself and half believe it but all I want is somewhere warm to call home
I'm done with planes and staring out moving windows and feeling half empty
And mostly the goodbyes
Because even hellos are tainted by their bitterness and I can't arrive without a return ticket
And all I want to do is unpack this suitcase
And unravel all the tightly wound clothes like those parts of me but I'm not done
There's too much to see and I can't see it all
So I'll be a nomadic lonely satellite until this suitcase bursts and my heart overflows and I fall back into you
Until I figure out where home is supposed to be

futon

Best friends dead ends leaving in the morning nine hour flight across the world from you
In your eyes green like deep forest trees sun hitting leaves like leaving you
Fingers touching futon covers spread across fold up mattresses compact like suitcase on the carpet
Across the room distance separated like a split screen between us

Three a.m. alone and breaking darkness crushing barely breathing missing you
And everything futon beneath aching bones I wrap myself up in mattress sadness
Covers stretched beneath empty palms sitting up clock ticks by pipes groan empty blackness

Nervous flutter she's like you were on my futon in my eyes a begging need
Awkward tension I'm a child and she's separated fingers meet knees brush butterflies but is it just
Needing someone across from me
After all emptiness is bearable when shared with somebody and she'll never be you

Visitors

I sit here and I'm watching the sun set over Montmarte in the way that it does 

Shaking its head 

At the depicableness of those below 

The ones it has risen above again and again day after day and it continues this way 

Shaking its head as it slowly 

Bleeds into the buildings that are bonafide postcards ripped from the shaking hands 

Of beggars 

Postcards that coat the walls of us, 

The visitors

We are not permanent, none of as are, we are simply visitors 

And we pass through in and out in and out 

Through the doors to this place where dreams come to live and die with each 

Breath of the sunset 

We are beggars with postcards in our shaking hands pleading can someone show me where this place is because it sure isn't here. 

It is and it isn't because this is a funhouse mirror and what you see is never what you get 

I got lonely and I know that it's because there are lonely places deep inside of me 

And my mirror will always reflect lonely wherever I go 

And my lonely is framed by beauty but that doesn't decrease its gut wrenching singularity 

And none of this is permanent

We are scuffed 

Leather boots and cigarettes 

Burned down to fingertips and 

We are frozen hands and wine-stained lips and 

We are empty kisses and cold apartments. 

We are searching for that scene in that postcard that we will never find 

Because the directions they give us are all wrong 

Because they don't see it the way we do

The way you do, 

The way I do

We live in pockets, 

The hotels of the city nestled safely away 

In slate grey attics as the dusk descends upon us 

And we slip down creaking staircases 

We are buried

In the hidden parts and we pass through silently but you 

And your vastness and your leather and fur 

You and your champagne and 

Saint Laurent you are just as temporary as we are 

You just can't see it yet

And maybe 

When temporarity is staring you straight in the face, 

Maybe then you will see it but

I don't care because I see it now

I see the dying in us 

And I see the heartbreak and the lonely and 

I see joy in emptiness and peace in melancholy 

I see the way her eyes shine bright 

And youthful in an ancient way 

I see fire in the depleting tobacco 

Between your fingers

And maybe we're all just passing through

 But I would rather be a fleeting sunset 

Than an ever present winter moon

Remember

Try to remember
Knitted sweaters so big they drown you and your terrified heart
Red wine stains on the living room floor and the pile of corks that remind you of her
Webbing words together through the throes of midnight
Try to remember
The aching beauty of discovery and the way the rain sounds on your window pane
The feeling as a new train pulls into the station
Or the first sip of tea after a too-long day
Your own bed beneath your tired bones
And having someone next to you
Please try to remember
When your irises close against the day and every inch of skin is hurting
Remember music threading its way through your psyche
When you think nothing can touch you
Remember how it feels to be touched
Remember roaring fires and crackling record players
Remember christmas lights and happy days
Remember the slant of light just before the sun says goodnight
Remember chocolate and giddiness
Remember butterflies and feeling safe
And above all remember
We're all under the same sky and distance is always relative
Please remember this too shall pass

Aching

There is a certain and definitive helplessness in the dull ache of aloneness, that shadow that caresses the isolation of my skin, fibres reaching, always reaching. There is a pain, consistent and unavoidable, in the weight of miles pressed like bricks on the walls of my chest. There is a dishonesty in the brightness, lies embellishing the truth with crinkly wrapping and bright lights. There is a stripped down truth telling on nights like these, just me and the sky. There is an inability to communicate with the stars when they are wrapped in cotton clouds, opaque and unforgiving, uncaring towards the ache I feel. There is a distance up here, nestled in my pocket six floors above the street. There is an abandonment in the waiting, in the half-living. And it’s not permanent, I know that. It makes the helplessness all the heavier, the temporariness. Because amid the chaos, amid the empty-feeling and the aching is the guilt. The invalidity of the ache resulting from the beauty of the burning. There is a beauty here, between the layers of painfulness. There is an aching beauty, a startling glory which makes the hurting all the more unlivable. I’m here in all this grandeur and all this beauty and it still hurts. It hurts despite the beauty and despite the carpe diem and despite the glory. Because some nights I feel I’m just a shell up here, a shell unworthy of its ocean. And sometimes I resent it, the surrounding dishonesty of forced perfection. Sometimes I fall in love, but some nights I just fall. I’m still falling.

On Empathy

She had always been hyper-sensitive to it: the crushing imminence of suffering all around her. She had always noticed it: the slope of a stranger's lips in the downwards arc of sadness or the lonely man on the bus home from work reading yesterday's paper like there was no point in news because it wouldn't be good. At least if it had already happened twenty-four hours ago, there was nothing he could do about it. She noticed the people in Walmart with grey hairs underlining their Nice'n'Easy box dyes, shopping carts pushed slowly across the cracked linoleum floors under the manufactured brightness of the overhead fluorescents, a stark contrast to the eleven p.m. darkness outside. She had always noticed the sadness of the world, and she had always created the worst fiction out of possible stories: she had always imagined the people driving at three a.m. were either leaving their families or had no family to go to at all. She hated the failure of human trial: the girl next to her at the hostel kitchen who looked barely sixteen and hadn't been taught how to cook noodles, and whose fried egg stuck to the pan and crumbled into pieces as she tried to scrape it from the metal. She felt the heaving sigh of the earth in the pointless labour of existence, the threadbare families on the Parisian streets, scrounging for change with hole-ridden gloves as the carefully plasticized businessmen strode carelessly by. She had always noticed the unfairness of it. And still, she was not depressed, not so profoundly sad as one might expect of a person with this seemingly pessimistic nature. Her internal happiness was a contrast to the profound sadness of those around her, and so when she felt their suffering as she watched them struggle, she felt the reverberations of  secondhand melancholy like cigarette smoke wrack her insides, shake her bones down to the core. And in these moments, she was overcome by a crushing emptiness, like a vacuum had sucked the joy from her lips. But the extremity of these feelings: they were the reason she knew she wasn't like them. The reason she knew she wasn't sad, not deep down, not irrevocably, not internally. Because their darkness slipped into her as wind flows down the pressure gradient, high concentration to low concentration, their particles seeping into hers. And although it hurt her, although she wished sometimes to be sterile from it, to be sheltered from their pain, she was okay with it. Really. Because she knew that pain shared is pain less concentrated and she hoped her happiness would seep into them by osmosis the way theirs had into her.

Racing Morning

She sprinted towards the hills rising swollen and pregnant with thistle and overripe blackberries, her determination creasing the space between her eyes. The sun was not yet risen but she couldn't quite tell, the clouds swaddled the sky in grey-soaked cotton and hid any brightness from view. Beneath her, the New Town's lights were still blinking through the early morning darkness and she felt caught in the limbo between night and not quite waking. She was racing the sun; she wanted to see it rise above the extinct volcano as if it were acknowledging her presence, as if the brightness would blind her like the fireworks over Montmartre and it would all make sense. She wanted immediacy, she wanted the suddenness of beauty to stun her out of the cotton wool fog of greyness that she had been wading through for years. She wanted the sun to be brighter than gold, and she panicked as she thought she saw the darkness lightening. She was at the foot of the hill now, the winding path snaking like an unkept promise to the rugged tower of broken lava rock. She walked faster now, her lungs accepting the cold air, in and out, in and out. She remembered the last time she had been someplace like this, the last time she had seen never ending fields strewn with tall, dying grass and the way the clouds enveloped the landscape. She remembered that place, months ago, a different season, the height of summer. She had been with them, and they had laughed and ran and rolled through the dead grass and rocky paths. She was alone now, a singularity in a world of pairs. She walked slower as the realization settled upon her like gravel dust. She could handle being alone, liked the way she wrote her future like she could decide which adjectives would loop together to form her life. She liked the way the air felt around her, clean and open wide like possibility. But she hated the moments like this, the ones bursting with nostalgia, the inches between the seconds when she needed somebody, someone next to her to fill that open space, someone to save her from simply talking to the wind as it ran long fingers through her hair. So she climbed faster towards the crest of the rubble, to the spot where the clouds seemed to be breaking like hardened magma to reveal the brightening sky. She had missed it, she thought, the sun already risen and her hopes for sudden beauty dashed. She breathed heavier against the sharp incline, losing her footing on the rain-soaked grass and slamming her right leg against wet rocks. She looked upwards toward the taunting cliffs and her cheeks flushed rose.

           And then she turned around, catching the breath escaping from her tired lungs faster than the sun was climbing in the sky. She saw the sea, stretched out like surrender to the way the clouds were still heavy like a blanket. She saw the islands, far off and broken up like jigsaw pieces scattered by the wind. She saw the city, geometrically architectured and punctuated by the castle crumbling to the left and the pillars of the national monument dwarfed my her position on the hill. She noticed everything quickly, all at once, then little by little, gradually, her eyes registering every detail of pleated landscape and gold-shedding autumn tree. She noticed the swans, crisp white by the shimmering loch, the way the crows (or were they ravens?) arced and swooped against the sky. She noticed the varying shades of green and yellow in the grass. And she realized that's the way it was with beautiful things. She realized the sky had been lightening like a watercolourist adding water to his paints, the fabric of the sky slowly being washed out from the indigo of dawn to the azure of morning. She realized it was a process, this beauty. It didn't happen with suddenness, with a breathtaking moment of realization.  It took hours for the night to bleed into morning and she realized darkness had so many layers to shed before light. And she saw the sun, peeking out from a rip in the clouds. And she wasn't at the top yet, but it didn't matter. She was breathing and the sun was rising and the landscape stretched around her and she had made it. Not to the top, but here. She had made it here and she was alive and it was okay. She was okay.

        She climbed to the top and the wind whipped her face and sucked tears from her eyes and she climbed down somehow more whole than he had been before. She was no longer a shell of failures and fading scars and rising loneliness. She was no longer a strip of tattered fabric racing the sun for a place in the sky. And she was no longer empty. She skipped at one point, running down the steep slope, her black sneakers hopping over rocks as the smallest thread of laughter escaped her lips.

highs and lows

I am all at once breathless from the sheer beauty of everything around me
And fighting for breath in the chaotic whirlwind that has been the past two months
It's all little things
It could be worse
Alone, these things are manageable
Trivial, almost
But piled up on top of each other and on top of me
They seem insurmountable
Inconceivable
Giving up seems reasonable sometimes
When little failures add up and I feel like everything is too hard
But all the little moments of breathless beauty
All the little moments of satisfied happiness
Of I did it
They make the lows worth it
Because at the end of the day I am alive and I am writing this and I am happy
Deep down, in those internal caverns where it really matters
I am happy

Daylight

We climbed the stairs like pilgrims to my temple and my tears were still inked in salt
They infiltrated my cavern with light held in the pockets of the bubbles in the sparkling wine they poured
Into glasses with the fizz of comfortable things like the way she sprawled on my mattress
Comfortable things like barriers down music up sufjan dancing in melodic circles around the kitchen light our warmth
Fogging the glass window
Looking out over the rooftops of our Paris
Behind which the moon was almost full
Almost
Like I was almost happy
Almost perfect
They way Paris is almost perfect
But they were here and they were laughing and oldies warmed the stone floor of my studio like hot coffee and we spoke and we laughed and we cried and we held on to each other like we are holding on to Paris
And the stars shone barely visible the way the Eiffel Tower hides beneath fog like it's bashful
And I saw the way her eyes flicker the same as mine when we speak of love and being fourteen
And they left three bottles of cheap wine on the floor and everything feels warmer
It's like how everything feels easier in daylight
They are my daylight
The way the moon brightens the lives of stars

Stars

I live in an attic under a slate grey roof that skims the sky of Paris with its fingertips
And the hallway leading to my front door is peeling and the pipes snake like
Creatures out of the damp-smelling walls
And my sink is plugged and my fridge is sparsely furnished with three eggs, tomato-basil pesto, butter, avocados, oranges, lentils, and milk
And my apartment is cold in the morning when the sun wakes me with its stabbing brightness
And the construction workers down the street pound away at the resistant pavement with power drills and sledgehammers
And my stone floor is unforgiving to bare feet out of my shower in the middle of my kitchen
Yes, my apartment is fourteen square meters and I brush my teeth in the kitchen sink
And for some reason the savings I gathered last year living in my parents' house have all dissipated into the expensive Parisian night and I am getting by but just barely
And yes it's scary and lonely sometimes and full of bursting disappointment and sometimes I feel failure like I have yet to accomplish anything at all
But sometimes I look out my window at the densely packed rooftops poking the sky with their attic windows and I gaze at the orange glow of the streetlights and
I have achieved this
It's not perfect, nor is anything worth having, because nothing real is perfect and what good is an empty, perfected fantasy?
All this is real and flawed and scary and exhilarating
I am here and I am breathing and maybe my cold little attic is just a pocket in the Parisian sky
Maybe the lifeblood of the stars I see when I'm falling asleep that seem close enough to touch is dripping in through my cracked window and infiltrating my ears with the kind of stuff that births creation
Maybe I'm close enough to hear the clouds rub together in a symphony of almost-rain that swells the pregnant sky with threats of a deluge
Maybe I'm becoming less scared of downpours
Because all this is temporary and soon my attic will be a memory and all these nights will be strung together like bottle corks and all the faces and midnight bottles of wine and laughter reflected in the shimmering canals will all feel like dreams in an attic almost touching the stars and the moon and we will all feel like a perfected fantasy
All this is beautiful and I'm trying to hold as much beautiful as I can between my trembling fingertips as I beg to touch the stars
And we talk of possibility like we are dancing on slate grey rooftops to the sound of the clouds
And for a moment we are the rulers of this city up here in our attic kingdoms
For a moment we are more than overdrafts and feeling scared and feeling empty
For a moment we are full of sky

Concrete

And you're upstairs in your glass castle looking down on us like we're specs of dust on your chrome appliances

Your chandelier hangs oversized and overrated from your vaulted ceilings void of warmth

Diamonds glisten against the black of bone-chilling emptiness

You pour your wine and you look down on them

Neatly packed dominoes, a row of sleeping bags like chrysalises 

Bled together like a friendship bracelet, woven for warmth

You can't smell the acidity of ammonia dripping down the drain beneath your feet

The drunken snores of sleeping men awaiting death like a sentence

It's cold down here

It's cold down here where concrete is a mattress and the city is unforgiving

Cold walls threatening, angry like the winds that chill us without fake fireplaces roaring with forced heat

An illusion like the security of your gold plated kingdom

Because stripped down naked to the bones of your existence you are no better than them

You are a breathing producing consuming machine

Just trying to imprint your footprint deeper into the earth's surface

The only difference is they aren't scared to face the reality of concrete,

The lifelessness of architecture

The flatline of a manufactured city's still heartbeat when the power is cut