when the weather ...

when the weather changes back and forth as fast as it has been, my sinuses cannot decide when to function. as a result my nose gives up at the most inconvenient times, and i spend the mornings trying helplessly to stop the bleeding. * * * i have this habit of going out in the rain to develop photos while leaving a kettle to boil dry on the stove. walking up the stairs i can smell the damage. walking into my apartment i know my roommate has already passed out in the room beside mine after drowning in a bottle of sub-standard sherry. * * * i tend to avoid silly western superstitions, such as opening an umbrella indoors and the reading of horoscopes. i prefer the lucky numbers i used for childhood team sports, although i rarely make reference to them today. my grandmother came to this country approximately thirty-five years ago, she brought with her five children and superstitions of a foreign continent. from across the ocean i've come to appreciate her ginseng roots and orange peels that are older than she can remember. * * *i've been dropping things everywhere lately. food, names, coins, people. i try to recall whether it was hansel or gretel that left the trail of bread crumbs behind themselves. (i don't even know if i am referring to the proper tale.) i think subconsciously i want to leave this place, but won't let myself go. there are holes in my pockets where the anchors fall. cracks in the sidewalk from where they land.

i am ...

i am living in the wrong city. or i am not living in the right city. there's a difference between the two.growing up i lived in four different homes. in the first; on a wall in my bedroom, my father painted a mural of disney characters riding inside a school bus. he tells me he used to paint scenic winter watercolour in college. the house had a piano that only my sister and i played. those sharps and flats now accumulate dust and age. the strings have not been tuned, nor played in years. my father used to do tai chi on saturday mornings hours before the sun decided to rise. i want to learn tai chi. as for the other three homes. i never lived in them long enough to see grass grow or leaves fall. the nails never popped, the floors failed to creak at night to tell me bedtime stories. so, in many ways, they are insignificant. forgotten. and irrelevant.

city s...

city squares, sharing earphones, fighting over the window seat, baseboards lined by books.i keep my expectations at the lowest possible levels. i do this to avoid disappointment, i do this because my life has become plastered over the walls and other people's lives with it. i've slowly learnt to expect nothing and have become willing to give (almost) everything to the next stranger. the phone doesn't ring, and i am not surprised nor disappointed, because this is of course, expected. at the corner of elgin and sparks street, across from a post office, beneath an irish pub named for a famous père de la confédération, lies the imperial barber. a place where civil servants and beige trench coats sit for the same shave their great-grandfathers received so long ago. he goes there for a haircut. he goes there because the original wainscoting smells of history. he goes there because hair is all he can cut.

when i wa...

when i was fourteen, one night in march, at an arena. my friend and i were equals in the food chain while standing in a room. we knew each other, despite he being nearly a full year older than i was. that previous september, we met the people in that room, and one another, all at the same time. over the years; the paint on the walls slowly peeled away, and the hockey players at the arena aged into higher divisions. later that night people were gathering to leave. the doors needed to be locked, windows closed, lights turned off. a long pause. a light remained, a door unlocked, and the draft from the bathroom knocked paint chips off the walls. a long pause. he went into the bathroom. she had tied her belt from the top of the bathroom stall door frame into a noose. the noose was secured with the brass buckle that came with the belt. my friend and i never really discussed what happened. she disappeared. and several years later we would leave that room behind us. now all that's left behind are miniscule paint chips, burnt lightbulbs, worn hardwood floors and a bent door frame.it's three a.m. i should be sleeping, and this is what surfaces in my mind.