I don't know what the fuck I've been doing these last few days. I don't know how to explain myself to anyone. I think I just wanted to lose myself completely. Be swept up and ripped apart into a thousand little pieces. I don't know why. This should be because I've been sick of myself. I haven't been until today. I have not been this sick of myself in a while.
My last post might be the thing that permanently taints the friendships I have with the two people that post was about. I don't know why I showed it to R.C. It wasn't a sex thing. She asked if it was a sex thing. Truth be told, I think I just wanted to be honest. We have been incredibly honest with each other. It seemed like I could say anything to her, and she was saying anything to me. I guess I just wanted it off my chest. That's my best answer. Something about the fury of these nights has made me want to get rid of everything. I don't know how I'm going to face Moopy and Mortle or whatever the fuck I called them in the last post. I got to. I hope they can forgive me. I will be fine if they don't.
People are getting worried about me drinking again. I hate being that kind of guy, the one with an ambiguous, screwy relationship with substances. I mean, I am in that kind of crowd, but I seem to be that kind of guy. R.C. is getting worried about me. We're not even a week into what is now a bonafide situationship, and we've already had the "I'm worried about you. You have a problem" conversation.
I keep calling the business with R.C. a hook-up, but it ostensibly is not. At least not anymore. It started as that. It always does, but it's been established I do not have the type of brain to handle that. So, we have been nearly every day this week together. Neither of us has jobs. I got terminated from my practicum (another fucking story you have barely been let in on), and she graduated from university and is waiting to move to Montreal for grad school, where she is going to do research on the phenomenology of autism. She is so smart. Like, insanely smart. Conversations very quickly enter the abstract with her. She is very into Sigmund Freud, the existentialists, and the German Idealists, Hinduism, and Christian mysticism. She talks with rapid-fire and machinic precision about everything. She's a few years older than me, enough for her to feel like there's a bit of an age gap (she's 25 and I'm 22). She'll talk with an almost jarring sense of decorum (she's often refers to things as "good fun" and responds to things with "I suppose"), but she has this strange sense of creole slang, where she'll combine millennial phrases with zoomer ones. She's known to fuck with indefinite articles, hitting the classic "I ate a food" every once in a while in the same breath as "Type shit" and "Hype as fuck." Talking to her is always really fun. She knows a lot about a lot of things and is unafraid to talk about all of it. She brings as much erudition and energy to a conversation about being a self-proclaimed Christian as she does to being sex-positive, which she is adamant do not contradict each other effectively on the ground of because she said so. She plays Dungeons and Dragons with these girls every Tuesday. She once made out with me because I told her I used to get high 90s in chemistry class in high school. She loves drugs and Car Seat Headrest, and on our second date, she told me that she would trip-sit for me. That was the title of the still-yet-to-be-released Wattpad I have yet to finish about this year, which has so far been the craziest one yet. I think of her telling me that often, "I would trip-sit for you." It makes me think of the song "Sing Me Spanish Techno" by The New Pornographers. It's an eclectic way of meaning to be tender. There's been a lot of that recently.
When they sat me down last night ('they' as in E--- and her) and gave me the "You should go to therapy because you're acting erratic and reckless again, and this is recurrent in all the years we've known you, and you have demonstrated nothing but willful avoidance of your very apparent emotional problems. The medication is a good start, but you have to keep going. We think too highly of you to say nothing about it" conversation, I totally froze for what must have been like an hour. I just laid on the couch they were sitting across from and stared at the ceiling. I don't know how to narrativize the next few moments. They said I should stop doing that. But R.C. was really sweet to me. I feel like I don't deserve it. She just held me and told me everything was going to be alright, that I'm loved by so many people, and that I am a gift. She kept telling me that. "You are a real gift to this world. I feel really lucky to know you." I don't know why I didn't start sobbing looking back. I kept wanting to bust out the L-word. I kept wanting to leap into the threshold the L-word crosses, and just fall into it. I wanted to close my eyes and freefall into the void of the L-word and feel the wind as I descended blast against my entire body. I want the darkness of my eyelids and the darkness of the void to be indistinguishable. I want to not care about the possibility of the void being bottomless, that I could fall forever, that we could fall together forever into the void. I want to scream as I see the last bit of light above me get smaller and smaller. Scream for freedom. I am free now. I am finally free. I told her it resembled the mental movie I play in my head every night. I told her, "This doesn't feel like a hook-up anymore." She said,"It doesn't." I asked, "What are we going to do about it?" She said, "I don't know." I told her, "I don't know, either." Then, as far as I remember, I fell asleep. I woke up beside her some time later, maybe around 5 a.m. "You seriously need to check if you have sleep apnea." I went back to sleep. I would have spent the rest of Easter with her if I didn't have brunch with my family. I drove her back to her house, and she confessed to me that she felt like she's in love with H-----. She didn't bring this up carelessly. It seemed like she was trying to check in with me. She immediately asked, "How you do feel about that?" And I told her I didn't know. I feel like three things about it. She asked, "Positive or negative valance?"
"Positive and negative."
We passed a gas station and an apartment complex. The sky was clear blue. I thought of Montreal.
Earlier in the year, I was a videographer at a music festival. I was recording an interview with this interview with a pretty big Canadian Instagram account. I'm going to refer to him as John because that's his name. I'm trying to think of an American analogue. He's kind of like Dril, even though that's a bad comparison. He was doing this thing he called a "drunk PowerPoint," which was effectively stand-up where he got drunk and read off slides in PowerPoint. J---- and I got there late because it was entirely uncertain whether or not we were going to be able to make his show given another show we were filming across town. When we got there, he was talking about Montreal. Canadians talk about MTL the same way I talk about New York. It's the only true cool art city we have going here. John was talking about the romance he had for Montreal because of the novels of Mordecai Richler, who he read in high school. I read a bit of him in my second-year of uni. When I first met J---, I told them my name was Mordecai because of him. Montreal has Jewish people and Haitians. Jazz and improvisational noise music. Community theatre. Classy hockey teams like the Habs as opposed to their sleazy regional neighbours in the form of the Ottawa Senators. They have public arts funding, and their students protest when they hike tuition, unlike the bootlickers here in Alberta. Montreal has Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Yves Engler, Leonard Cohen, Tim Hecker, Vice magazine, and Mac DeMarco (Edmonton's own), before most of those things moved to New York. R.C. is moving there in August. Her friends are worried about her because she apparently doesn't deal with change well and has never left Edmonton before. She's going to be at Concordia University. She says I should come and visit. She has family out there. She's French Canadian, which I always forget. As a teenager, I suspected I would get with a French Canadian. But I always imagined her hair to be black. R.C.'s is a dirty-ish blonde. I don't know what we would do. Walk around. Take the train. Get high again. Look at the bright lights.
Sometimes I imagine us years from now, after this coming summer, meeting again like the characters in that Tom Waits song "Martha." She'll be dating some very cool non-binary person. She'll be a PhD candidate. We'll talk about our summer together. We laugh about all the people we used to know. She'll ask me if I still know everyone, and I'll tell her what I still know of everyone. J--- will be teaching in the UK. J----n will be in Montreal, just like he always dreamed, and she'll talk about how awesome that is and how proud of him she is, and how she wishes he would reach out more, and I'll tell her I do, too, but that's just him. He's busy. We all are. She'll say she misses those days - these days right now. I'll tell her I do, too. "You remember how miserable I was then," I'll say.
"I was, too. At least we had each other."
Last night, J----n was confirmed a Catholic. The whole church held candles at the start of the liturgy. The archbishop said at the end of it to remember the image of everyone around us carrying candles throughout the hallway to the chapel in times of struggle. The next morning, I drove home to Red Deer. The sky over the QE2 was pale and blue, as if it was as tired as I was. A sore sky with crust still in its eyes. I drove home on the barren highway, this time not speeding like I usually do. Nothing was rushing me. I had nothing but time to think, and I was thinking about next to nothing. My chest was sore.
