“Late afternoon, another day is nearly done
A darker grey is breaking through a lighter one
A thousand sharpened elbows in the underground
That hollow hurried sound, feet on polished floor
And in the dollar store, the clerk is closing up
And counting loonies trying not to say
I hate Winnipeg.” — The Weakerthans, “One Great City!”

  1. It begins as a fragment, or a scattering. There’s nothing finite or concrete. Except blue. There wasn’t even a sky, it was blue that filled up everything, engulfing everything. I was tiny and laying down in a wooden sleigh that my grandma was pulling down Martin Avenue — just off of Henderson Highway — returning from Elmwood Park back home in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I was puffed up, immobile and snug tucked in a jacket twice my size, I was around two or three-years-old. Minus forty degrees celsius with the wind chill. My cheeks are burning red, yet numb. During one of these sleigh rides my grandma managed to get herself locked out of the house, she climbed through the window, impressive for a woman born before the depression. Those are not the details that are being recalled, they’re just what’s been told to me afterwards — the appendix of oral tradition.

What is emboldened, though, is the singular and holistic blue of the sky. It felt cold — as if I misremember the blue of the sky being the cause for the temperature, as if that was the air itself.

There are memories which came before, sure, like the weirdly grass-like carpet of my childhood living room. To become exceptionally intimate with the floor, crawling and drooling around on it until I’m no longer allowed. I close my eyes and ask myself if there’s a recollection before even then, something can be recalled more along the lines of mysticism — a memory that existed before I did. Echoes from the womb.

Closing my eyes, trying to write these memories down fresh, trying my best to be still — still. I can’t help but think back to the coursing waters of Red River. So violent and yet so remarkably inviting, isn’t it? The repetitive motion and sound she makes as time passes by. Like an old friend — the troubled one — asking me to join him. To be back among the obscure poetry and overdoses, which were performed with precise and calculated measurements.

The eyes are the windows, sometimes locked, always made from glass — still fragile, easily shattered and broken into these uncountable shards. I know I will get hurt if I try to repair these pieces, an impossible Kintsugi.

There is a rhythm and a melody from this childhood, an undeniable memory that lingers underneath the break. Vision of myself, maybe a little older, walking alone for the first time towards the torrent. Strangers behind me become bystanders watching cautiously. The riverbed is filled with embarrassing point-and-shoot photographs, maybe at a nearby zoo or park, where I’m wearing mom’s heels or kissing the neighborhood boy. All still so loud, somehow.

Do I hear it, the waters still? Splashing up against itself. My eardrums are aching, soaked, and drenched from the foamy stream. Holy waters that are washing over me, oh God, oh God, oh God. Shaped like death in super-symmetry. Still shaped like teeth.

I open my eyes back up again, maybe I’m still asleep. Maybe I’ll wake up from this and still be a child by the river in the park. Turn to faith — God knows. This is reopening the warped pages of a photo album and pouring salt on them, previously packed away in unmarked attic boxes instead of thrown away. Why, exactly? I’m still not sure. I look through:

Delicate — still delicate — like a scientist’s attempt at measuring the speed of the leaf falling from her tree. This incomprehensible dance that’s performed so many times, selfishly for my own sake. If I’m going to be honest, we tend to forget why we’re here — still.

The actual, tangible memory still eludes me. Countless others do as well. It’s easier to surrender to the present, opening my heart instead to what’s in front of me, right now. Trying my best to open my eyes only if I can’t see the sky anymore, only if the darkness gets too overbearing. I’m too weak to find a reason to forgive.

When I was a bit older, my grief-stricken grandmother was seeing a new man after my grandfather died. He wasn’t a wolf, or a lion in sheepskin. His name was Rex, and he was a dinosaur! — enjoying walks by the river while flying a kite. I used to love kites. I used to be in awe how people were able to craft birds from just paper. As though we were all doused in mythology. Effortless.

Rex would take me at night where innocence is the smell of spring. He would tell me that God allows us a blank slate. The budding flowers were the fresh laundry for the soul, cinnamon and cardamom seeds filling the nature’d air from lower-class open windows. The scent of silent early mornings when the cars are still asleep, hibernating still, where all I could hear was the waters.

I asked him to teach me how to make my own kite. That wasn’t a conscious choice, because I was the age where I was alive but still stuck asleep. Because how was a boy that young supposed to know what lack of anger management means?

But with a warm smile — the one I think I remember — he’d hoist me upon his scaled back, and for a moment I could fly over the waves of what I thought back then was the ocean. (I still do.)

He’d take me into the small shed, behind the house where grandma resided alone. The manor he was trying to steal from her palms. (Grandma ended up selling it so my mom could pay the bills, now.) And Rex would get the paper, the bright reds — the ones I remember plastered with Mickey Mouse’s face on it. I loved the craft, I hated the ripping, the messing up. When my kite got stuck in Red River Birch. Though he hated my mistakes more.

Because the fingers of a four-year old work about as well as their head. And even if I can’t remember the details, I still wake up some nights, with unexplained cold sweats & tears so wet I lived in constant fear I’d flood the house. I never asked for the details. I never will. The truth is my grandmother probably doesn’t remember anymore, twenty years after. I don’t remember seeing Rex again after that.

What I do remember is I used to love flying kites.

I used to be in awe at how easy it was to craft breath into a structure — but don’t think that means I’m fond of history. I wish he didn’t tell me that when I look up at the night sky, I can only look at dead stars. Instead I fell in love with how I could, even for a moment, hold a bird in my hand while on the back of a dinosaur, again.

A few years after that, I remember walking by Red River in Elmwood Park by myself. Alone for the first time. The distance between there and my home shortened with each passing year. I had recently learned in textbooks about Louis Riel — founder of the province of Manitoba, and leader of the Métis people of the Canadian prairies. It was there the plans of resistance against the Canadian government began, only 130 years ago, Red River Rebellion. It was there I once found my Métis father drunkenly asleep on blonde sands, by whitewater tides. He was soft & puffy, like a drowsy cloud. This was my birthright.

I do try to, instead, remember the times where Dad and I would play — locking hands with each other before he would bend my arms incongruent until I yelled mercy. Mercy. It would put hair on my chest, and he would tell me to turn to faith when things got hard. Giving me piggyback rides only to stumble and fall over, giving my toddler-face carpet burn. Indian burns. The apocryphal of oral tradition.

Just a few steps further, there was an unusual break in the river. To think this is the same water that washed the blood of Red River Colony. An unwavering water, still in the moonlight. Innumerable rocks blown by winds oblique, the same limestone that will create these empires, the rainwater pitter-pattering.

Turn to faith? Scripture is written by flawed men with flawed thoughts, each line a water dropwaterdrop in the river, each line is a verse that flinches in the sunlight. There is no truth that cannot be undone by another truth, no honesty when the waters begin to overflow, no logic that can be pushed into our illogical system. Where the soul of the water slowly steps towards the still-dry land. There’s a fierce hunger that lays among the dead night sky above, that on rare occasions, bends downwards into the hubris of our kind.

There is an unusual break in the river, the same water that’s been running through here for epochs. When it begins to stop moving, is the river broken? Innumerable rocks slowly eroding into nothingness, the same limestone that will remain after these empires are gone. To think this is the same water that will eventually become me.

I had recently learned in textbooks that he was sentenced to death by hanging for treason, even though the jury recommended mercy. Mercy. I had recently learned when my father lashed out, when he left for weeks at a time, when he lost his job, it was probably my fault.

The author must admit to himself that there is — still — such mundanity and forgettable moments. Every daily walk to Glenelm Elementary, trekked in black snowpants. Every replay of the two towers falling on the CRT television with my pregnant mother holding me tight. Every fast food dinner from Zax Drive Inn, begging to play the 25-cent arcade game while waiting. Every dwindling visit from grandma. Every drop-off to the babysitter that forbid air conditioning during the summer, nor let me drink any water. Every playdate with Brendan and Christopher, just the next door over, the boys who were never allowed to come over. Every moment spent with my newborn brother, cooing or crying. These are the places where I existed physically — not just as apparition in hindsight.

The routines that bleed and blur, barely remembered in spite of happening hundreds of times over. Begging to be glossed over for the sake of something more profound — in harmony-unison. An attempt to forage a meaningfulness from misunderstood hardships. Good damage rather than just damage.

The author stands, instead, on the other side of the river. Where you stand here as well. Unable to cross — too foamy-quick, too sunken-deep. You watch the river engulf the blue of the once-infant sky, swallowing the shade whole. Where a fierce hunger — a force that lays among the night sky, should on rare occasion, bend downward into the hubris of our kind.

Fire within our flesh is a mere kindle for the emotion that sends us wayward, a humble sacrifice for the dead stars above. An attempt to stamp-out and beat out the self-aggrandizing spirit. We watch him continue to sleep along the tide, wishing for a flood to make the fire subside.

Where, too, Red River Birch stands tall. Her trunk is tattooed with gashes, and the colossal debris that heavyweights onto her crossed branches. Insurmountable. Why doesn’t she shake off the weight — on her arms — that stunts her growth? Or the dozen nests that lay inside the scores of her crevasses?

There is only fine soil surrounding her — Her brethren swept away into the waters. She instead subsides — not pressing the seaside for any sort of answer. You can’t help but wonder what exactly really matters. The author as well.

Martin Avenue was mostly composed of parental arguments inside home. Scribbled out from old journals: apathy breeds from the fermented rage within the seeds inside the fruit of the developmental age.

Mom’s breath smelled of alcohol — of course it did. Artisan bitters and gasoline, the pickled carrots from an organic addict. The stems of leaves from autumn, wine-tasting events gone sour, fraud in stupor. There are only stale-made bread-pieces and butter that still remain.

There are sheet notes that correspond with damaged & plucked heartstrings, dancing on top of linoleum floors & the mistaken lyrics that I sing. Playing the speaker loud enough in my vest-pocket bedroom for distortions to drown out the soaked words hurled from the living room, still green-carpeted.

Music wasn’t loud enough. I snuck outside through a hole punched in drywall, wandering towards the garden flowers as night darkened — nature that was endlessly deaf and brutally happy. Flown through the cold winds of a quivered arrow, gooseflesh filling lungs and air. I can’t scream. I can’t tear the seams from infinite ends. But finite brisk holds mutiny against a childhood lacerated by slurred speeches and forgotten birthdays. The untrue myth that houseflies only live for a day has frozen my mortality.

I look up to the trees above the garden. Skyscrapers stretching out with spider legs. I count the branches of trees off my childhood street like those dead stars in the sky. As if each branch represented every possible future. Looking back towards a home where war and peace mean the same thing. The tacky “For Sale” sign would appear on the lawn just a few months later, it was the beginning of the end. No child could escape Exodus. 2003.

I count every sibling exasperating, count every 10-year-old overdue library book in my palms. Count the limbs off our bodies like a crying coroner in the back of his last-day wedding reception. Count the fingers off a veteran’s hand until they finally add up to ten again.

I’m too weak to not forgive, to find reason to apologize, to find reason for not saying “hi” anymore. I lost the ability to give up a long time ago. The flood begins, again. Blue subsides to grey. Everything washes away downstream, another fresh start, another blank slate. He promised to hurt me only enough to shake the stardust out of my eyes and onto paper. The good damage. Into the wild, again. I still muster my red cheek to turn to faith.

“How then am I so different from the first men through this way? Like them, I left a settled life, I threw it all away. To seek a Northwest Passage at the call of many men. To find there but the road back home again.”

— Stan Rogers, “Northwest Passage”