Waving Not Drowning

She's been away longer than she was here. So strange. Home. How that changes. At some point two years turned into twenty and the old neighbourhood is now unrecognizable. Everything's smaller, less foreboding. Even Mr. Robichaud's hand hammered lawn ornaments seem tiny. Spent, worn, rusted out. Marnie's old house feels minuscule, a bungalow on a postage stamp lot facing an overgrown, decommissioned public park. Barbed wire fence and tagged clapboard demarcate what was once their secret hideaway. Where Do Not Enter meant Come On In. Flashlights and stolen magazines, hooch water concoctions and bottle upon bottle of dry roasted barbecue peanuts. So many memories here. Whatever clarity she had is obscured by nostalgia. When something begins it also starts to end. She read that the other day and can't shake it loose. Why bother starting anything if there's no hope, no possibility of infinite happiness? She longs for the old days of pure potential wh...

Bleary eyed and shuffling with the sound of roller bags and flips flops snapping at her heels. Early morning flights make her queasy. Not enough time to wake up and get sorted before she's out the door, under fed, discombobulated. Triple checking to make sure her phone is charged. That it's with her and not in the cab. Again. Mike continues to threaten her with idiot strings for the case, like the ones she used to have on her mittens as a toddler. Keep it tethered to you, at all times, he says. She can't abide by the workmanlike construction clip he wears on his hip like some contractor on site, precariously dangling off the wide open precipice of the fourteenth floor. To coffee or not to coffee, that is the question. Rather, the ensuing result will be an extended bathroom break. Is there time before boarding? What's the aircraft? A 67 or a shitty dual prop, with cubby hole toilets she can't stand up in. Hence why she no longer wears heels while flying...

It's driving her crazy, this weird humming, high pitched wail coming from the front door. She discovered it coming home late one night, climbing the stairs to her darkened porch, waving her arms to trigger the world's least responsive motion sensor light. She could hear this whinging, like a pitch pipe stuck between tones, ebbing and flowing. At first she thought it was a distant siren, or someone's smoke alarm going off next door. Then it crescendoed to a keening wail from the depths of some tortured soul. Kat freaked out, shoulder checked frantically, fumbled in her bag for her keys, dropping them on the ground. She managed to muscle her key into the lock and had to body check the door to open it. It was like entering a total vapour lock. Kat found this house online about 4 years earlier, on a spontaneous trip back home over the high holidays. A need to get away from her present craziness and bask in the familiar yet equally crazy energy of the big city. It's an old t...

A certain stirring lingers deep in her gut. Nat can't shake it but for the life of her she can't name it, either. Hour after hour of plugging straight through and now she hits the pillow at night and wakes up oblivious to her surroundings. At least she's sleeping. Deep, dreamless exhaustion. If only she'd strung herself out like this months earlier she'd have saved herself the anixiety of insomnia and long dark nights of the soul, counting down minutes til sunrise and the dawn of a new day. Another cycle completed. The world keeps turning regardless of how mired in stasis Nat is. There's hope in that, she thinks. She charts the shape of the moon. Full, half, quarter, crescent. On cloudy nights she draws the curtains and drowns herself in Rachmaninoff, headphones cradling her ears on the pillow. When sleep won't come the music lulls her into a semi catatonic state. Nat's not sure it's restorative or meditative but it drowns out the interior noise whic...