start on over

i feel like i've accomplished nothing of importance today.

i drank three coffees while yelling at the television [which was showing dawson's creek- heck yes i still watch that show when and if i can]. i helped morgen and kate move stuff from his old house to his new house with the use of a shopping cart from the not-so-local a&p. [on our way there a man on a bicycle asked us if we knew where to get good weed]. i cleaned fro two hours, erasing the crumbs of a wet, rainy and slightly frayed week from the floor of our living room and the sole section of carpeting in our house. i listened to a cd melissa gave me, singing loudly and off key with the superbly bad emo-kids- later on i switched to morcheeba, tracey chapman and u2. i baked banana-walnut-chocolate-chip muffins. i made fried rice [sort of] and ginger orange-esque chicken. i added six rows to the ugly blanket.

my first thought on waking was that in a week i'd be at home.

my second thought was that i'm finally- without a doubt- free.

everybody's got to leave the darkness sometime

there's something magical about walking in sunlight filtered through trees.

i walk home through the glebe, the dappled light playing across my shoulders and leaving after images on my eyelids when i walk across intersection after intersection with my eyes closed. the breeze ruffles my skirt and hints at winter.

when i get home the stove is covered in soup and there's a message from kevin on our machine, asking me to call him back.

it makes me sad that there is no tree outside my window.

because we all need a little more room to love

i feel trapped in something i don't have words for. i want to squish mud between my toes, let my hair hang long and dip into paints while i cover pages with lines of all the contours i see in life. i want to spread purple where no purple should be and try to capture in an image what no words could possibly describe.

i wish i knew why you were staring at me, twisting around while water steadily dripped from the tip of my nose, finding replenishment from my soaked scalp.

i wish i knew why i couldn't meet your gaze.

cross the street from your storefront cemetary

ever had one of those days where your toes stay numb no matter what you do?

i'm drinking reheated coffee from one of kate's mugs that i have adopted in lieu of the forgotten favouite-coffee-mug-of-life. i've got good- or bad, depending on your taste and my general mood- music travelling across the room and i'm trying to wade through petrarch's the secret, secretly hoping for a distraction that would merit this procrastination that has plagued my every movement today.

the sky looks especially like home right now.

we'll all float on ok

when i walk into peter's house- i'm greeted by a large-ish pile of shoes, the sounds of spoons clanking off of each other and the indistinguisbale smells of a million and one possible things, including but not limited to cake and drugs.

things started slowly last night, spinning from small two person conversation in the kitchen with the cbc blaring in the background to a trish with no shirt on spinning in her socks admist a giant throng of people busting every kind of move to extremely bad mid-nineties dance music in the livingroom-converted-to-dancehall section of the party.

i looked for tuesday all night and eventually found her in the kitchen in the form of a mixed tape i was in charge of flipping over and moments of stealing drinks from evan.

arriving home at four thirty in the morning, my legs stiff, my fingers numb and my sober mind trapped in a semi-drunken body, the taste and burn of all dressed potato crisps on my lips, the smell of marijuana in my hair and modest mouse ringing through my head, competing with thoughts of building a man out of carboard in the experimental room, i finally feel as if the year has started.

i finally feel like diving deep.

god grant you one wish

the mailman knocked on our door today as kate and i made lunch, apologizing that he couldn;t see out mailbox. we laughed and smiled and pointed it out to him and received our mail from a man grinning sheepishly.

later, in the basment of big bud's kate and i are looking at signs for businesses. one says business hours, with spaces to fill them in. kate scoffs at the sign and says that her business hours are 'open all night.' the man behind her- slightly older but a groovy ex-hippie kind of older- laughs so hard that he nearly drops his basket while kate turns a peculiar shade of crimson. he thanks us for the laugh as we sheepishly run away.

later, alone in the house, i bake cupcakes while singing tunelessly along to morcheeba, getting ready for the party at peter's hosue tonight.

catch you on the flipside.

sweet josephine will you follow me home

i miss home.

not the building, at least not really, although i do miss the way i can walk there with no lights on, with my eyeballs out and not really run into anything unless it's one of nim's babies.

what i miss is the way it smells. and the sounds that my brother's bed makes when he rolls over the floor above me. and the sounds of people running up the deck outside. and i miss the sound of people's voices. i miss the way mom moved around the kitchen, and the way tom sits at the table to read a newspaper. i miss the birds. i miss the trees outside. i miess georgian bay being a three minute walk away.

to distract myself, i'm going to the laundromat.

after the bars turn out their lights

last night kate and i strolled the neighbourhood, looking through people's trash.

i watch her, out of the corner of my eye. she's wearing jeans and a simple green shirt. earlier, we'd gone to the grocery store and she'd carried nothing but a small black purse made of fake- albeit good looking- leather product.

when we pass by the anglican church, i remember that i'm not wearing a bra at the exact same moment that we realize that there's a gospel choir comprised entirely of caucasians singing their hearts out in the giant interior of the church.

today i walked home with my hair loose over my shoulders. like petrarch's laura, my hair was whipped into knots of golden hue, but no pearls appeared and the wind came from a bus rather than a river. later there were shingles falling from the sky, and one lone large maple leaf on a street with no trees at all. i wasn't expecting anything more.

i want a way to capture all of this.

when she goes to work you can hear the strings

my room here is tiny.

after my parents lost the first house i ever remember living in, we moved out to the country to an older farm house. there were three bedrooms upstairs and a room downstairs that my parents used as thier sleeping quarters. kelly and i had to share a room, but eventually- given that we were angsty pre-adolescents- i took over a different room and my older brother moved to the basement.

the room i moved into was tiny. an entire wall of it was comprised of windows- three windows. there was enough room for a single bed and a dresser and a very small night table, and that was it.

i loved it.

i have much the same kind of room now, except that it's actually a wee bit bigger than my first tiny room. there's enough space for a custom built single-esque bed, a bookcase and an improvised desk. i have approximately two square feet available to move in.

i'm as happy as a clam.

if we break before the dawn

somewhere- i'm not sure exactly- i came to the realization that ottawa is a city obsessed by shawarma.

maye it was when i was trudging to class on the first day of school through the pouring rain [not enough to rival last year though], or maybe it was wlaking hoem with street lights blinking and shawarma signs reflecting in puddles. or maybe it was walking down queen street and passing the garishly lit shawara planet.

i have a secret- i've never had a shawarma.

ssssssshhhh.

lights will guide you home

we're in the car, driving through the night, our headlights cutting a swath in the blanket of darkness and fog that has descended. it's late, we're tired, we're full and i'm thinking of the million and one things i have to do tomorrow [today] before leaving monday [tomorrow].

speaking outloud, mostly to hear myself over the smashing pumpkins, i tell james that i need to go to georgian bay and get a bottle of water to take with me.

there's a few moments of silence, and the blanket of dark and fog feels like it's choking me.

"that's a very witchy thing to do meaghan." he says quietly.

it is, innit?

skies so smokey blue-green

cnn is evil, twisted, bullshit-ariffic americanized junk.

and yet i find myself flipping to channel seventeen everytime the television is on just to see. there's something sick in that, something perverse. i feel like i'm watching soembody on their deathbed, or that i'm viewing the first intimate moments between a man and a woman, or the birth of a child. i feel like i'm trespassing for god's sake.

but i flip it on, and am mourning that the garden district and canal street and lafayette cemetary and thousands of lives have been changed or have ended or will never be the same. and i mourn the fact that instead of bringing out the best in people, this disaster seems to have brought out the worst.

human compassion has never felt so far and yet so graspable.

what a strange way to begin september.