Weeks slip by, unnoticed: time refuses to stand still. I’ve always been acutely aware of the passage of time, yet this doesn’t seem to make me immune to the shock of the realisation that a stretch of time has suddenly passed without fanfare. It’s been weeks since I’ve posted, though I’ve been writing almost daily. Nothing fit for public consumption – and I do use the term ‘public’ rather loosely. The past month has been a frenzy of work-related diversions, little bursts of productive energy punctuated by long walks, endless music, and not enough sleep.

I’ve recently fallen into a bit of a musical memory hole, dusting off albums that I haven’t listened to in years. Each song calls forth a memory of a time, a place, a glance, a touch, a scent. It’s odd how seemingly insignificant remembrances can appear to us, so achingly real that we feel them in our very core. A re-experiencing of the past? Or is it just an illusion of the past? When it’s that vivid, I swear that I’m re-feeling my past… but how can that be? Isn’t it really my past as viewed through the lens of the present? But then how can it seem to feel so authentic?

The city is once again covered in an ever-thickening blanket of snow, returning it to its virgin state. The trash carelessly littering the sidewalks and back alleys, the small oil spills and puddles, the crosses laid at intersections where lives were lost: all have been covered completely now. It’s this city’s endless second chance; a chance to start over once again.

For the past several years, I spent nearly every day in a particular neighbourhood in the city. Six months ago, my reason for being there disappeared, and I too disappeared from the neighbourhood. Well, technically, anyway; I’m still in the area twice a week to visit my grandparents, but I never go beyond their home. Further north I had not ventured – until yesterday.

It’s funny; what we do and who we know determines which neighbourhoods we frequent. Any city’s citizens are rarely intimately familiar with every area, every quarter, every street. We have our comfort zones – where we live, where we work, where our favourite haunts are – and we rarely, if ever, leave them. Sitting on the bus yesterday evening riding down Main Street, everything felt normal, banal – until I reached the frontier: the street past which I have rarely gone in the past six months. I felt something shift inside me, a change in my consciousness that was palpable. As the bus continued on its route, I felt myself slipping into a time warp. Looking out the window at these streets which had once been so familiar to me, so quotidian, I suddenly felt foreign and strange. I recognised those streets, I remembered them; I could hear them telling me their stories, stories that I already knew but hadn’t heard in a long time. For the first time in quite awhile, I felt nostalgic.
The bus turned, and we went from one neighbourhood to another. The sun was beginning to set; there was a faint smell of smoke in the air from the odd backyard fire pit. I knew that the last time I had been on that street, in that area, was months ago, in another life. Something totally unprovocative, unremarkable: the fodder of everyday life. And yet yesterday it felt so powerful, almost overwhelming. For the first time in quite awhile, I felt sad.

I do not lead an empty life. I love the people in my life; I enjoy my job; I’m not lacking in passions or things to do or places to go; I’m feeling settled in my soul. I’m relatively happy. And yet, something has been missing. It’s been quietly gnawing on me for awhile. I hadn’t been able to put my finger on what, exactly, has been bothering me – until last night. I got off the bus one stop too late, and had to walk awhile; it was then that it dawned on me. Something so simple and cliched as to be embarrassing to admit: I feel purpose-less. Not necessarily lacking in goals or ambitions; but in a sense of building towards something.

I spent most of my twenties building towards something: building a life in a city in which I hadn’t counted on staying for long, building a life with someone. Relationships are always complicated. It wasn’t just him; I thought about all the people and places that had become part of the rhythm of my life over the course of the past eight years. And when a relationship ends, or metastasizes into something almost unrecogniseable, you lose not only a partner, but a whole network of people and places that you had become a part of, and that had become a part of you. Family and friends, restaurants and parks, streets and homes you visited regularly are suddenly divorced from your reality. Which isn’t to say that this new reality is necessarily unpleasant; it’s merely become a shadow of its former self. A skeleton lacking meat on its bones, a corpse waiting to be fattened up. A life waiting to be rebuilt in a different way. What I had been building for all those years had already collapsed before my eyes; the shaky foundation gave way some time ago, despite our honest efforts. But as I walked through those familiar streets last night, I realised that I had lost something else in the implosion: the main thing I had been focused on for years. My “purpose”.

In the spring, it’s a different story. Whilst the mice play happily wherever it is mice congregate in cities, the underground railroad in the house’s foundation serves as a kind of highway for a different breed of creature: insects and their cousins, arachnids. Last weekend, as I was camped out on the living room floor, I spied something moving at the other end of the carpet – the season’s first sow bug. The sow bug is an insect I’m very familiar with; they could frequently be found crawling madly along the baseboards in my childhood home, having come in with the wood that was brought in for the wood stove in the rec room downstairs. As a child I was fascinated by these insects, watching them “run” – if you doubt me, just try touching one lightly; one wouldn’t think such tiny legs could move so quickly! I also, for reasons unknown to my adult self, had a penchant for flipping the bugs upside down on their hard shell-like backs, to watch all those tiny legs in action. They’d kick and kick with all their might, and after a minute or two I’d rest some object against their legs – a toothpick, the edge of a flyer, a shoelace – and watch those little legs grasp on to whatever was being offered, allowing their owner to right itself. Then I’d let the bug go on its merry way – or, perhaps more accurately, sprint all the way to its family screaming bloody murder in a language I couldn’t understand. It was only a little later, when I was slightly older, that I started to take the bugs outside rather than leave them be in the house; otherwise, they’d just end up dying of starvation (or getting crushed by one of my parents). So last weekend, as I saw that little guy crawling across the carpet, I did what I almost always do when I see an insect nowadays: I picked up a flyer from the recycling bin, scooped him up, and put him outside. (The tricky part is always getting to the door before the bug ends up crawling on your hand. Because whilst I may be a little fascinated by them, I still don’t fancy having them on *me*.)

A few minutes ago I had an entirely different encounter, though in the end, the finale was the same. As Sophia might say: picture it; I was sitting at the computer, the very computer on which I am typing this story, when in the corner of my eye I saw movement. I looked over to my left, and indeed something was moving, rather slowly, across the floor, but it wasn’t a sow bug this time: it was a spider. About the size of a twoonie, brown, ugly as all get out. Sauntering casually across my floor – the nerve!

You see, my interest in insects does not extend to their eight-legged relatives. I’m with the majority of the population on this one: I hate spiders. I have no idea why. Six legs = no problem. Eight legs = OHMYGODGETITAWAYFROMMEI’MGOINGTODIEARGHHH! However, being of a gentle nature, I still recoil at the idea of actually killing one – though I have been known to commit arachnicide on occasion, but generally only when I have no choice; those cases where it’s either me or the spider. (Sorry, fellas: there may be enough of you to rule the world, but in my house, I still reign supreme.) As a child, the sight of a spider was enough to keep me out of entire rooms or sections of the house until I saw its lifeless corpse with my own eyes. Of course, spiders are notoriously hard to catch. (It’s those two extra legs. Damn evolution.) And they hide in notoriously hard-to-get-to places, like under cupboard overhangs and in ceiling corners.
I’ve had spiders drop off the ceiling and into my hair; I’ve woken up in bed to find myself literally face to face with a spider sitting on my comforter; I’ve stepped, barefoot, into a white, cotton-ballish spider’s nest; I’ve washed a spider down the bathtub drain only to have it miraculously hang on to the pipe and then crawl out of the overflow drain about 10 minutes later while I was having a bath… My horror stories are endless. I have done battle with countless sinister fiends and have lived to tell the tales. Including this morning.

So there he was, taking in the sights on my floor, when I slowly, gently came up to him with the flyer. And that’s when all hell broke loose. He scurried off to the safety of the corner. I chased him with the flyer, all the while saying “nononononono you don’t!” We proceeded to do a sort of demented dance for the next few minutes: he, running flat-out along the baseboard, and I, cutting him off with the flyer, causing him to turn round and run the other way, where I greeted him again with the flyer. So we both were running back and forth along the wall. At one point I thought he had given up, as he curled up in a play-dead ball; but no, seconds later he sprung into action again. I’m sure we looked absolutely ridiculous. Finally, I wrested the monstrous little beastie on to the paper and tossed him out the door (there was no time for niceties, he was moving too quickly). I watched him scurry along the stairs, and I came back inside and flopped in the chair, exhausted. Crisis averted – for now.

P, C, F… initials engraved on a two-tiered quartz paperweight. Lists, gifts, transcripts, logs; evidence of betrayal hidden in daily life but left out in the open on holiday. Suddenly no reason to hide? Or were those hints there all along and were simply brushed aside?

With all the information we are subject to every day, all the choice with which we are faced, the bad news with which we are confronted, it’s no wonder we cannot process it all in a day. The scenarios that our brains propose, while we sleep, in order to answer its questions and sort its files, though, are strange and convoluted – sometimes wonderful, sometimes awful.

I mean, what better way to jump-start one’s morning than with some slushy alcohol straight from the freezer? When I stumbled down the hall I was bombarded by white light coming from every direction – the daylight bouncing off of tiny ice particles and rolling snowdrifts in the back and front yards. Pale gray sky, a family of chickadees nesting in the bathroom fan duct, and me: sleepy, ill, restless.

We’re cosmic dust but you’re everything to me.

He shovelled the backyard walk last night; the parting of the snow, à la Moses. The newly-created path looks like a gaping wound left in the some wintry beast. Trees heaving under the weight of the wet slush, accumulated over several months now; some flakes are falling lightly, but it’s nothing to write home about. I wonder if my typing will wake him from his slumber…

Carnaval, mardi gras, Carnaval
Chantons tous le joyeux Carnaval!

The Sunday crush of people will be out there, waiting for us to emerge, blinking, into the light of the afternoon. I will be a vision in chocolaty brown; he, in muted earth tones. We will skate along the river, beneath the high-flying crows calling out to each other, above a free-flowing, organic, underwater world. We will watch other couples skate past us, fuzzy mittens holding tight to each other; we will see small children shriek with delight at the idea of gliding along the waterways; we will carefully avoid the various games of pick-up hockey sure to be taking place, manned by boys of all ages. Revelers from the Festival du Voyageur will spill out from the festival’s various venues in Saint-Boniface on to the icy surface of the muddy water, and mix and mingle with the rest of us who refuse to pay ever-higher prices just to munch on beaver tails and sip hot cocoa whilst perusing a few snow sculptures (impressive and skilfully-executed as they may be). It is a Sunday in February in Winnipeg: the height of Winter.

It’s been so long since you’ve said, “well I know what I want, and what I want’s right here with you.”

Sun streaming in through the slats in the blinds; snow and ice lightly caked on the windows; a rush of warm air pushed through the ancient iron grating on the floor, mere steps away; his chest rising and falling to a gentle rhythm under my arm: these are the sights and sounds greeting me as I wake on a lazy Saturday morning.

Upon waking, the day stretches before us, arms wide open and inviting. Will there be a walk in a park or on a frozen river, the hardened snow crunching loudly beneath our feet? Will there be an undiscovered diner or hole-in-the-wall eatery serving up exotic fare? Will there be a road trip, car full of out-of-town baking and empty coffee cups? Will there be coffeehouses and fountain pens, zombies and go-karts, or cocktails in the evening?