April in Portland

Trigger warning for depression/anxiety... stream of consciousness, I wrote whatever came to mind.

I don’t go out much. It comes in bursts like ravenous binges... At home, I hide – in rooms: I hide my feelings; I hide from people. And then, I go to a new city, and I binge on going out. I want to walk down unknown streets, and see different buildings, different people. I stuff the buildings and the people into my face like food, because I want to take it all in. I don’t really know what home is... I think home is a feeling.

The rain-soaked streets call for my feet, and the stones glisten so black I want to touch them through the soles of my shoes. I’m out of my mind for once and it’s a nice place to be, and the cars zoom by and the buildings rise towards the sky and I know I’ve spent my whole life feeling like a hostage to life. That’s what we are, hostages... I know I’m afraid to live and I'm afraid to die... so I spend a good deal of time worrying about both.

Homeless people snatch my attention, not because I’m afraid of them, but because I see the broken bits of myself in them. I could easily end up homeless; I’ve lost jobs because of my depression and anxiety. I know this. One man slow dances a junkie’s waltz by himself while another holds onto a shopping cart filled with junk, but that junk could be the world to him. I give them bits of money when I can. One woman with glazed, baggy eyes chatters with an invisible soul, - invisible to us, but perhaps her reality is reality? How could we know? Trash pours onto the streets and people sit in it - they don’t know what else to do.

Anyway, I feel more comfortable with hobos than the people with perfect jobs and kids and retirement funds and mortgages and family dinners and gender reveal parties. And more than the homeless people, I love the pigeons, they walk with such purpose amongst the food carts, daring and dashing for greased-out crumbs to sneak in their beaks. Their eyes dart like madmen’s and I admire them: they can fly wherever the hell they want.

I like the streets because otherwise I just see time. I want to think of time as it is in my mind – I can go back and forth and it pours in different lengths, sometimes it spreads sideways. Time is subjective, even if it’s measured evenly; when you are sad time barely moves, and when you are happy it falls through your hands like sand. But time also scares me, because it moves on its own. In this way, I enjoy the streets, because they are a semi-distraction from time, which taunts and haunts me – as days and months and years stretch out before me like dead, cold cement. I imagine myself in front of a firing squad over time, and I never know what the squad will fire at first, or next – my looks, health, or mind, and this is how aging feels to me.

Sometimes I've wished to die young – only if it's sudden, and yet, I simultaneously realize I am afraid, and want to live til I’m 90. At times I want to fall in love, yet I never want to talk to another person again. I want to travel everywhere, and at the same time – I want to hide in a room.

I have been walking to this same huge bookstore every day. The sign is faded in that ugly way signs fade, where they go kind of yellowish. When I walk in the door, it smells like books... of course it does. But the paper and ink smell like other people’s thoughts and feelings - and for a change I’d prefer that to my own. The books tower up to the ceiling, reaching, and in a lifetime you could never read them all. I want to climb into a book, and become words – someone else’s words... and maybe one day, someone might pick me up, blow the dust off of me, and love me, in spite of my yellowing pages and splintered spine.

I want to know the hope people feel that makes them want to get out of bed and exercise, or have children, or dance at a party and all that typical garbage. I wonder why I’m writing a piece like this. Exposing my own thoughts isn’t safe but I still do it, because I think it is the only way... and I know life isn’t always safe... if you open yourself in this way, people attack you. The worst is when they tell you what you are feeling when they don’t even know or understand you. I think though, sometimes you must walk down the darkened street people tell you to avoid, and I believe self expression falls that way as well.

I avoid men’s eyes on the street and most of them pass by me like bland sandpaper. The women passing by seem to represent what I long to be, young and beautiful, or what I fear becoming as I age, thanks to a lifetime of body-shaming media that has taught me to hate myself in every possible permutation. But all these people, they have souls and thoughts and consciousness – yet they walk as if in shells.

As the people walk by on the street, I wonder why my mother had me, or why my father seems so content with building a house, and doesn’t hope for more – some otherworldly more. The-wanting-the-eternal-more sits under my skin and unravels and itches at any given moment, making me uneasy. I hate myself for my depression, because it feels self-absorbed, but I also see a world in pain that makes no sense to me; I feel helpless and hopeless with hurt for that too. External life seems like a see-saw hell show and people who appear content - are they the confused and the crazy, the illogical – the ill-lucid?  It's not me – with my antidepressant prescription, surely. I want to say life’s pointless, but sometimes I feel things that tell me it’s not.

So, I just order my coffee, and shut up.

Part 1: The Train Station Steps

I loosely based this short story off of two older men who lived in my hometown and happened to pass away early last year. They were both homeless (one for 40 years, the other for over a decade), and both said a major underlying reason for this was that they didn’t want to live within the confines of ‘conventional’ society. It should be noted, however, that the vast majority of homeless people clearly do not want to live this way.

Part 1:

Michael stared remorsefully at the glossy wood of the front door. Clutching his laptop bag with one hand, he turned the creaking brass doorknob with the other, to re-enter the outside world for yet another day of... something. His body moved mechanically, predictably – closing the door behind him, bent knee down three steps, and keys slung into greige overcoat pocket. Gray pebbles glazed with slick street ice dazzled under morning sunrise, and his click-clack trek to the train station began. A pack of bubbly blonde school children loomed ahead, rolling in their own world of laughter and pushy play, and Michael’s brow furled as he tried to remember if, at some point long ago, he was anything like them. The elusive illusion of freedom dissolved from school days to college years to middle-management fears so that laughter from his own mouth seemed foreign, or at the very least, forced. Forays into romance were short-lived and sparks died as soon as they started to fly. He was alone.

Crossing the main road, cars crawled towards the intersection, all going somewhere with seeming purposeless purpose, simultaneously interconnected and disconnected, with zombified drivers gazing vacantly ahead. Paycheques dictated the drive, and people threw themselves languidly into a predetermined hierarchy of bosses and managers and to-do lists. For what? Michael himself was languishing under this same structure, in the mix of why-bother existence to pay his mortgage and climb towards someone else's version of success on an uninspired, undesired imaginary ladder. All ladders, if you were ‘lucky,’ merely led towards retirement: a wrinkled face you could no longer recognize, perhaps the odd buffet-ridden tropical vacation, and impending, unspoken... death.

As he approached the pockmarked portico of the train station, Michael noticed a dark figure curled up against a column, swaddled in sooty blankets. A pang struck, for things could always be worse: he had a roof over his head, and while days were doldrum-infested, he lived comfortably. Reality smacked him in the face, and he dug into his suit pocket for his wallet to pull out a tenner to put into the cracked collection cup next to the hobo’s nodded-off head. A mangled rumble of limbs made Michael pause, bill in hand, and a glint of dark eyes emerged from within the mess of blankets. The hobo was awake.

Michael was not prepared to hand the homeless man the money while he was awake, as he felt chest-gripping discomfort at any public display of charity - some unspoken code of vague embarrassment - although he wasn’t sure why. Society commands that those visibly in need are invisible, and the middle and upper classes, when face-to-face with such poverty, are never quite sure where to look, or they risk confronting the possibility that they too, if raked by ill-fate, may one day find themselves shivering under a frigid overpass. Mail-in donations and faceless food drives were one thing, but on an individual level, Michael squirmed. However, the bill was already out, and he wordlessly knelt to place it into the dingy collection cup.

A gnarled hand gently wrapped around Michael’s forearm.

“Thank you...” The man spoke softly, and the wealthier man started in surprise. Perhaps Michael was expecting a slurring wino’s gurgle, and he winced at his own misdirected preconception. He looked away, ashamed, yet still aching to make a quick escape.

“You’re welcome,” he stood back up, then added, with a tinge of guilt: “you must be very cold.”

“Horribly...." he paused, "but I’m just passing through here. I’m looking for my younger brother,” The seated man tugged off his threadbare toque to uncover a mottled mess of smoggy grey hair. Judging by the thick lines slashing across his cheeks, he looked a lifespan-ravaged 70 years old.

“Ah well. Good luck with that...” Michael started, gripped by a spell of awkwardness and wanting to get away. The older man eyed his laptop bag, and Michael pulled it more tightly towards his slightly pudgy middle-aged torso, then felt a heightened stab of shame

“You going to work or something?” the homeless man asked casually. “I’m Bud by the way.”

“Hi Bud. I’m Michael. Well yes, I’d best be off.”

Bud offered a snaggle-toothed grin and pulled a half-smoked cigarette out of a crumpled packet, “You like your job, eh?”

Michael gulped.

“Uh... no, no I don’t at all actually.”

The hobo threw his head back and roared with laughter, lighting his cigarette, as burning paper and tar mingled in the air.

“I could tell. I could tell,” he added, slapping his blanketed thigh.

“You could?” The younger, clean-shaven man asked, a little stunned at being so confronted.

“Oh yes, you look a miserable thing. Say, why don’t I buy you a coffee with this tenner. You can just go in late. I’ve got to get out of this cold for a bit.”

Astonished, Michael nodded wordlessly, while Bud neatly rolled up his grime-caked blankets and tucked them under his arm. A pair of fat-coated pigeons bustled past a nearby trash can, giving low throaty coos. Opalescent feathers shimmered amidst winter air as the birds' pinprick pupils darted to-and-fro in search of rogue coffee shop crumbs; they were simply trying to make their way in the world too.

Michael looked down at his work cell phone and silenced the the ringer, almost... almost reconsidering.

And off they walked.

http://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/peter-verin-uvic-s-reluctant-philosopher-king-dies-at-71-1.7101837

Lost Cause

I've not liked any poem I've written since my cat died...and I've been through a long spell of depression... my brain doesn't work the same way? I don't know. But at least I wrote something...

Midnight

In a city that closes down at dusk.

I hang on the mind’s window ledges

Like an onyx spider dangling

From a spindly web of gauze.

Shell-shocked and cell-locked

By my thoughts – a lost cause.

Mid-flight,

Insanity spreads its wings,

Becoming the mundane.

And hope?

A cigarette flame, its ashes to ashes

Twist and turn to rust, turn to dust.

Smoke-fuelled, hope dissolves like whispers,

Drifting through dead air.

The knife always slashes.

The axe always falls.

Misanthrope -

Yet one part scarred romantic

Though clearly that’s in vain.

Asphalt

Suffocating with bleak swells.

Grotesque raucous families

Congregate on sunshine-y days

And seem not to obsess with churning guts

Over life’s decay while I always dwell.

I do still laugh at strange things.

My own fault?

I ended up here,

I don’t know why.