Red Cedar

(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)

there it was – on the bridge waiting for me – a memory i had forgotten about entirely. the despair of an 18-year old girl drenched in december rain – looking over at mid-span and thinking “if i go over with this pack on my back, at least it will weight me to the bottom” – traffic whizzing behind me a whole city indifferent.

only two times in my life have i crossed that bridge on foot – 13 years ago – and tonight. both times heart pounding by the time i reached flat land again. i needed no misery to trigger that memory – just a glance towards the rise where i had once stood and looked down.

how melodramatic i was back then – compelling myself away from the place i had erred to hide in the squats of south granville street with others who were scarred like me – urging ourselves towards greater self-destruction aimless and uneccessary – what force arrested our wills and held them hostage while our bodis endured again and again?

who was she? i can no longer find myself in her – have drained myself of such hopelessness (though there are still some dark places when i poke around the edges) – i try to conjur everything about that night and the day before that brought me there. i remeber later a hotel room where a woman screamed hoarse in the alley all night long and a man gave me $15 to lie beside him while he got himself off. there was nothing so lonely as that woman crying that i had ever heard. the room though, was overwarm and at least i got dry and had a floor to sleep on once i eased myself away from the sleeping man on the bed.

about him – he was no predator, just a lonely old artist who begged in the morning i not tell anyone what he had done (which i had consented to in any case). he lived in the downtown eastside forever making coast salish art for underpaying rich whites and drinking the money away. all he wanted was someone warm close by to stave the loneliness off for just five minutes. i never faulted him for that, and i never told anyone either even though i saw him around all the time. his name i don’t remember anymore (and i believed he passed on years ago).

(i wrote this last night sitting at a bus stop on broadway after crossing the bridge – there was more from here, but i would like to expand on that more before i post it…. take it for what it is – a memory, a fiction, a different life entirely)