a fiction from the granville street bridge (part 2)

(this post follows this one)

in writing about this man, the artist who gave me the fifteen dollars to lie down beside him (and no, i did not have to touch, it was all about proximity), i have remembered one other thing he gave me in the morning as i swung my pack back on my shoulder. in front of me now (for i have always kept it), the medicine pouch of deer leather with its small pinch of sage and tobacco, holds an item i ferreted away at some point after my encounter with the artist. i felt it when i searched the pouch out from a tangled drawer – a small black stone shot through with quartz, rubbed smooth from being worn close to the skin in a small leather bag for at least two years. and now, feeling again, i find one more thing – a penny with my birth year on it (1973), also tucked away.

these tokens from my past almost forgotten tell me now i must have been a young woman who relied on some sort of luck or magic to inure me to the street. i feel the weight of these objects in my left hand as the right wields the pen – the weight of asking for a protective spell to survive each day, the weight of atheist prayer carried in a medicine bag gifted by a man contributing to my loneliness with his own.

i do not remember putting these objects in the pouch, though i know along the way that bitter winter i must have – living in a squat known as hamilton street that later burned down in a fire (long after i had left). lucky i was to find fellow travellers who were not so opportunistic, who i could fake out with a sneer as if i was really tough (and maybe it is true my anger did make me tough). when i remember it i recognize that although i knew people with places to live in the city, i chose instead to squat with strangers – it seemed easier than explaining i was coming apart.

but why? i don’t know – but all reeked cataclysm at the time – the death of a close friend, the end of a relationship, my cheap rent in an unheated basement room, people telling me over and over i was too reckless and thus too disrespectful. i don’t think i stood straight or sober a single day in two years from 18-20… and to think of the degree to which i used….. there were not many days where i did not think about calling it over as it seemed there was nothing but that emptiness, that desire for anonymity and ultimately escape, awaiting.

i carry this past like the weight of the stone, of the penny marking my year of birth, like the old man’s loneliness – mostly unnoticeable until another hurt is piled on and my nervous system begins to complain, to tremble with it all.

(for whatever reason this is coming out – it seems to be and so i will keep posting under this heading whatever is scribbled as it emerges – i want no one to take any of this as me being in a bad space… i am actually in a very good place right now – just writing a lot of interesting stuff as it turns out)