in the first couple weeks of my first year of university i saw the in/words office for the first time, and the defunct printer, and the ham sandwich that i think was justin’s. i sat in collett’s crowded 19th-floor office with her and pete, amanda, maria, justin, jeff, mark, cameron. i didn’t think i’d ever be at the point where i’d be leaving carleton. i tried to stay connected while a) being a part of blank page and b) being an isolationist. it wasn’t easy. if i had to do it again i’d do it all the same, but it wouldn’t be any easier knowing what i know now. you always think it will be… but a lot of the time that’s impossible.
i walked out the doors of the carleton university centre a few weeks ago and nearly got trampled by a group of what i can only assume were very important people. it was 7:30 and already dark. a few weeks ago that scared me as much as anything else (because i’m scared of everything). i thought about all the campus tramplers, everyone who’s in such a hurry to get in, get to class, get coffee, get out. not stay. i thought about december at midnight in front of the uc with pete and jon kerr and anshula, and a lot of cigarette smoke and lingering in the vacancy of campus exam period, even though it was cold and we could have gone home. they’re all gone now. i’m still here. it always smelled like indian food and beer, even long after the doors of mike’s place were closed, even out near the parking lot. the combined smell will follow me for a long time i’m sure, reminding me of smoking half-cigarettes in dumpsters, sitting on the laps of different boys sitting on milk crates in the garbage alley, dangling my feet off the ledge and justin walking me to cabs.
if not for justin, mike’s place and the in/words readings, in their many homes over the last three years, i just don’t know. i might be altogether gone, too. maybe not so much… geographically. but i’d have stayed in the west end and took the otrain to school and stopped submitting to in/words. i might have kept writing, because i don’t know if i know how to stop, but i wouldn’t be publishing. last night i was told, jokingly, that i’m just learning to share. there’s more truth to that than i might readily admit. see what i mean?
i read for the first time ever last night. more than three years since that first night at the avant-garde with anshula in 2007. people were nice to me, maybe because they thought they should be, but i’m an okay bs detector. detecting the bs isn’t what’s important, though. it’s everything else. even though it’s hard to tell most of the time, i’m happiest there, or when they’re here, or when i’m somewhere else with them.
at tables
there was that time, and
you’d think at
first it was isolated,
unusual, in the eeriest hours
of the night while
the apartment
slept, while bedsheets
were loved by slow pushes
of breath
it’s just like at tables,
old memories dug
scars into new
wood, attempts to
transcend an
era already escaped
