white noise
Hey everyone. I hope you are well. Please accept my apology for not writing to you since late July. Life has been _____.
I am back in school. Thankfully, I love school. I love classes, professors, old buildings, unsafe drinking water, getting drunk on Thursdays and going to mass on Sundays. I live alone now. The quiet is incredible. My bed is cold.
I spent the rest of my summer avoiding awkward conversations and saying half-goodbyes. I missed Montréal. I missed the cold. I missed the uncaring march of the city. I missed the anonymity of it all. I missed stumbling through pleasantries in French, falling off my bike, the incomprehensible shouts from the elderly Québécois.
I have been partying. I made some new friends this summer while away in Italy and I enjoy doing things with them that I never enjoyed with anyone else. Loud parties, hot, cramped rooms filled with frat boys and girls with curtain bangs and baby tees. I have found myself frequenting these places. They have all but replaced the lonely cafes, old cathedrals, and empty bars I called my home last year.
I spent most of the summer alone. I made friends, but I spent most of my time traveling from city to city trying to find somewhere to read my book. When people ask me how I am I tell them I’m great because I am, but that’s not the whole story. See, I fell in love with a pastor. Something happened and he has a boyfriend. I fell in love with a bartender in Amsterdam. He has a girlfriend. The men I love hardly notice me. Dating apps breed loneliness. Connections are meant to be made between humans, not photographs. As I write this a spray tanned French woman gets up from her chair at the cafe to kiss her date on the cheek, an older gentleman wearing a light blue button down with a striped sweater tied around his neck. Her teeth shine bright against the false tan of her skin.
I need someone to talk to. I always do. I live alone and spend almost all of my time alone, but I need to tell someone what I am doing or it doesn’t feel real. It’s a product of the lockdowns, months spent cataloging behaviors and storing them in iPhone images, fragmented notes, texts left unsent. I’ve devoted myself to my espresso routine, spent hundreds on equipment. The coffee tastes acidic, bitter, unpleasant. It sputters out of the portafilter and sprays across my counter. I do this every morning, a routine built to fail.
My friend is a pastor, but he hardly believes in the Christian God. He tells me the resurrection of Christ is irrelevant. He says he wants to do good. He invited me to an afternoon service at his church to listen to him preach. I entered the cathedral on time expecting something of a crowd to have formed. Every week I forget that the churches are empty. The handful of us who congregated at the front of the massive space stumbled through a hymn about something in French while the pianist played a completely different tune. The pastor, my friend, delivered a quiet sermon about forgiveness with nothing but pain in his eyes. We made a prayer circle and lit votive candles. Most congregants walked up to the altar somberly and muttered something about needing guidance or hope or good fortune from their god. I lit a candle and said the only thing I could get out. “Grandfather.”
I congratulated the pastor friend after the service and he said he just feels miserable and I said sorry. He knows I love him, everyone does. I met his boyfriend. He speaks mostly French, a language I can only barely understand and try to imitate. His boyfriend seemed lovely. I had to introduce myself. I could tell by the way the pastor looked at his boyfriend that it was over. A slight smile. The kind of subtle raise of one side of the lip no camera can capture. The pastor fixed my collar and told me I look “smart”. He meant it in the old-fashioned way. I walked around the cathedral alone trying to find images of saints I recognized, forming an imaginary orthodoxy as the rest of the congregants chatted in the ambulatory.
The pastor and I sat in the sun a few days later and talked about my lack of lovers. He told me I would be quite the catch for any lucky man. I told him I mostly appeal to women and he seemed surprised. I had to tell him that I do have sex with women and he said he could never do it because he just wouldn’t know what to do. I laughed because he is perfect in his peculiarities, but really I felt terrified by the truth I had just admitted. I mostly appeal to women. A girl I only slightly knew walked by several times in a half hour and eventually sat next to me. She asked for my social media, but my username was already queued up in her search results.
I work up the courage for an hour to talk to a man, build up an entire image in my head of who he is, where he is from and where he wants to be. He seems interested and we talk for an hour and exchange information and I see his profile picture is with his girlfriend. He likes my stories, tells me I look good and asks how I’m doing. I tell him I’m doing great and I mean it and he tells me something horrible and I never know what to say so I say I’m so sorry. He says it’s not my fault, it’s never my fault, and once it gets heated I ask him about his girlfriend and he says he loves her and I say that’s great and I mean it.
I ran into a boy on the metro late at night a few weeks ago. Neither of us knew one another’s names, but shared glances of recognition. We had met at some art show exactly a year prior. We talked for an hour about books and art and made jokes. He said he was from some town in Alberta and we exchanged information and I sent him a message he never opened. I never thought I would see him again. He was sitting alone on the train, smiling, but staring off into the distance. I sat across from him and he smiled big and shook my hand and we talked about where we met and when and how and he said he’s great and I said that’s great and I meant it and he said we should hang out sometime and I said I would love that but I knew that I wouldn’t see him for another year.
My friend came and visited me in Atlanta in August to record her project. She brought a couple members of her band and no less than six guitars. We spent three days in my makeshift studio recording take after take and convincing one another that this would all work out. One of her friends looked like the kind of guy I would fall in love with in slow motion. He loved my dog. They’d lay on the floor together for what seemed like hours. He’d rub her belly and she would groan the way old dogs groan and kick her leg in the air. He laughed and she laughed with him, her black and gray hairs floating like feathers in a pillow fight. It took a week after they left for me to realize my feelings. I told him I wish I had kissed him and he said he thinks that would have killed him.
I am back reading theory and theology. I guess I never really stopped. I took classes abroad the whole summer and read hundreds of pages a week about the way the world works or the way it’s supposed to work or the way it used to work. I am studying schematics and divine legal systems and metaphysics, but really I am studying myself. I feel like a fool because I am one. I’m staring across a pond expecting an endless horizon. This isn’t the ocean, it never was. It’s a river, it’s a pond, it’s a creek, it’s a city. I’ve been biking a lot. I fell off my bike and didn’t feel any pain at all. There was blood and bike grease all over my face and I would’ve been worried, but the Québécois lady yelling at me in French and the music still playing in my headphones put me in a kind of chaotic meditation. It’s all flashing past me, images at a million miles per hour. I didn’t feel the impact.
I’ve been back running on Mont Royal recently. It is my favorite place in the world. Every night the sky glows gold and the sun sets over the Plateau. In time the sun sinks below the horizon and the sky turns everything pink. A whole city reflecting, absorbing deep red, yellow, gold on the thousands of trees on the mountain. The cemetery glows too, the headstones dotted across the hills imbued with the warmth of the setting sun. I wonder what’s in that soil. I wonder if they still kiss down there. Do ghosts haunt cemeteries? Wouldn’t you haunt your bedroom? Your old school? Your lover’s house? Let the soil become flowers. Let the bugs eat the bodies. Come on, bury me standing.
The other week I spent a day out of town with my friend. We took a bus to our university’s agriculture campus and lay in an open field staring up at the clouds as it rained and soaked our clothes, skin, everything. It was a gentle rain, the kind that feels more like snow, television static, film grain, blurred vision, white noise. I remember years ago my family took a trip to Puerto Rico. One morning my dad, brother, and I got up early to surf. We paddled deep into the Atlantic where a local told us we’d find real waves. The waves were polite, they picked us up and delivered us a few meters from where we had started. At some point we could no longer see the shore like the waves had been taking us deeper into the ocean after all and suddenly the waves stopped. A clearing. In a moment it started to rain. The same rain that fell the other week in that open field. I remember lying on my surfboard looking up into the gray sky, no fear of a storm. This wasn’t storm rain. This is the rain that your skin absorbs. This rain doesn’t leave you cold. It hardly leaves you wet. It’s delicate. The sky waves hello.
My family hosted a video call for my grandfather’s ninety something. His cancer got better and then suddenly worse. He talked slow, very slow, and told jokes five minutes too late. He told us to “just keep up that feeling and you are going to be one hundred percent winners most of the time.” For the past few years every end of a conversation with him has been a goodbye for forever. It must be exhausting to live in suspension. It is exhausting to live in suspension. What you want will go away. Never call it a mirage, never an illusion. You know it, it has always been a dream. Keep up that feeling. We will all be winners most of the time.