Homage To Summer- Part 3

It seems that all of my summer stories have come to an end, all its sagas and all its stories are now a memory, all in the past, safe as can be.
An homage— a small smoky shrine is the best way I can think of to pay my respects to it. I want to share it with all of you, so that you can in some way be a part of its loveliness and steal a bit of its magical glitter for yourselves. It’s now time to live currently, to give up the memories, to move forward in this new place that I am calling my home.

I just moved into a cool apartment with three other people, who are all doing the same thing as me— trying to carve a little spot for ourselves in the city of Vancouver. One is my best friend, one is the rideshare she found through Craigslist—an awesome Australian dude with whom she shared a one-month long roadtrip to the west coast to eventually meet me. The other is an Irish guy, Mark, who I met on the bus over here, and things are sorting themselves out slowly but surely. I’ve adopted rolling cigarettes from him, and also using the term “ya mad ting”. How wild is it that this guy was living in the very town in which I grew up? Huntsville, Ontario, and we’d never met until halfway through the trip, at an airport pub in Winnipeg. We had the same landlord! We lived on the same street in this small town, at different times mind you, but also haunted the same pubs this summer! I almost blew a gasket when they (him and the guy he was travelling with in Canada) told me, and I knew we would be friends. My best friend is in all-out adoration of him as well, so it’s worked out for everyone, really. I would prefer if they got married so he could become a Canadian citizen and I could wear a stupid eighties cocktail dress to the wedding, but that’s just me.
It’s pretty amazing what we’ve done with only a few weeks time and with a determination to make things work for us. We’re now ‘Drive Kids’ as the saying seems to be, just walking distance from the trendy Commercial Drive.

Anyway, so where the story was left, I was not here.
I was still living in that cabin in Dwight, Ontario, just on the edge of Algonquin Park.
I had no idea I would be where I am right now.
Get your snuggie, and a cheese sandwich or something, because the next part of the story is just as whack as the first two parts.

So I wasn’t sure if I’d never see “You Rock” shirt dude ever again.

And it’s not because I didn’t want to, because he totally sparked my interest. It was mostly because I didn’t want to even think about it. He was in Toronto. I wasn’t.
He said he would come and see me, sure, but he was also ridiculously drunk when he’d said that. Who the hell was this guy anyway? All I knew was that he was incredibly sweet to me for absolutely no reason, and that he had a snoring problem and a really cool t-shirt. Not enough, right?

All the while, some friends from Toronto had been bugging me to come down for a visit. I did live there all last winter, and the last time I left Toronto had been under hasty circumstances. When I left the clinic that strange day early in the summer, my friend had waited for me in the parking lot to whisk me away to the safety of Muskoka to heal—heart and body. I didn’t want to leave that wretched memory of Toronto in my head.
So, for the next week or so after the Fortress party, “You Rock” t-shirt dude and I spoke a lot over Facebook, and he said he’d take me out when I got there. A bit over the phone, too. Cool. He was incredibly charming. Not surprisingly, since he was funny, witty, and seemed to have an answer for everything I said. We could banter back and forth, and not so strangely, I like that a lot. We’d talk about funny stuff, and I’d read him captions from the Encyclopedia of Monster and Other Mysterious Creatures.
I booked a bus ticket to visit Toronto for a few days, hopped it, and went straight to visit one of my oldest friends who was living on Bathurst after having split with her boyfriend. We all hung out, I met a few people, made instant buddy-pals with the man-of-the-house Brando, and then we decided we wanted to go out dancing. So I called upon “You Rock” dude to come and meet up with us. He agreed, as I knew he would. See part 2; dancing is how we met, it only made sense.
By the time we got to the Dance Cave, Brittney Rand was already a few beer into it.
I was busy stomping my feet to Veruca Salt or something equally hipster and nostalgic, when “You Rock” dude tapped me on the shoulder. He gave me a huge hug, and obviously got involved with our dance party. Eventually we were forehead-to-forehead and I asked him to come home with me. And by home, I mean Brando’s carefully constructed “camping room” in his house on Bathurst.
“You Rock” dude and I ended up eventually back at his place after hanging out with my friends for a while. Turns out everyone was fucked on MDMA, me excluded.
So snuggling commenced. We stayed up all night.
I really, really liked him.

Funny thing: I liked him so much that every night after that first starry-eyed one I spent with him in his little room, I spent back there. Of course I visited with friends too during the day, but every night we spent together in his little room. Night time is the strangest time, and I think it’s made exactly for lovers. Days are filled with too many other things to think about, too many other tasks, too many sounds and sights, too many carhorns and subway rides. Nights are still, even in the city, and when you are wrapped in a lover’s sheets there really is no other concern. Those hot summer nights were sweet, filled with whispers and entwined fingers. We connected instantly. It was fun and lovely and understanding, and I was sad when I had to leave it, though I didn’t say so to him, because it was much too soon to be getting attached to such a homely little monster.
I hopped the bus back up north, and hoped it wouldn’t be too long before we would be able to sit together again, for me to scratch his beard, for kisses behind the ear to come back to me.

We tried a couple times to get together after that, and after some frustration with the distance, he eventually, happily, took the train to see me for a few days. We hadn’t seen each other for about 3 weeks to a month at this point. We had spoken most nights on the telephone at late hours, and I’d wake up in the middle of the night if I got a phone call from him, just for chatsies sake. It was nice to have someone who understood my humor; who wasn’t demanding of me, who was honest and uncensored with me. I learned many of his secrets and revealed many of mine to him, and we cooed over that telephone just building up to the moment when he stepped off the train. It was quite crazy—we had really only spent those few nights together and we had it pretty bad for one another. We were getting ourselves into something sticky.
I wanted to see him in my stomping grounds, to see how he would react and interact with it. He was a city kid, and though we were much the same, I figured I could surely teach him something about where I came from and it could be fun.
I picked him up from the train station in the white pickup truck that I borrowed from my work.
I couldn’t wait to touch him, though we couldn’t on the drive, because I’m a new driver, and I might have killed someone in my state of elated excitement. We got out to the cabin in the woods, and immediately fell into the bed kissing one another. So many nights on the telephone we’d said how we planned to not leave that very bed for the entirety of his stay.
We did, however, only for latenight dance mix ’95 dance fests, walks down the dirt road, him writing at the beach, food, Nintendo, WWF 1997 (I love you Stone Cold Steve Austin and Brett the Hitman Heart) vhs viewings and to use the washroom.

It was just the loveliest.
The end of the summer was strange, because I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. I didn’t know if I was going to Toronto, which was a circumstance that “You Rock” dude and I could possibly work with, or if I was going to British Columbia. I went back and forth on the subject. All the while, I was consorting with the most wonderful of creatures, having a great time in Ontario. I could be happy anywhere, really. The options were difficult, because Toronto was safe and B.C. wasn’t—I had no plans beyond the bus ticket out here. But I was drawn more to what wasn’t safe. I was drawn more to the unknown, what I didn’t know, and even though I was falling in love with “You Rock” dude, it simply wasn’t enough for me to stay. We knew this on that last visit of ours. We knew that though our chapter was insanely delicious, and we were eating up every bit of it, that I was bound to leave. It was a dangerous decision for us to have made, to fall into things with such a force of openness, knowing that it would commence. I felt guilt to be the one to leave. I didn’t really know why I was leaving either, but I guess when there is a mystery strong enough that’s biting at my ankles I have to explore it. And it was at the expense of that precious love, which is now a figment of my imagination.

After I dropped “You Rock” shirt dude off at the bus stop, after the loveliest dream ever, I didn’t know how to feel. Our nature was to be fun. We were having so much fun, we waved and hugged goodbye like we would see each other again soon. We could have, since my summer work contract was coming to an end. Except that I had bought a one-way ticket to the West coast for the following Friday and he hadn’t.

Hopeless romantic that I am, I wasn’t satisfied with our goodbye, and I had to see him again.
On the Tuesday before I left (on the Friday…) I took the bus down to see him again for one last night.

This visit was just as joyous and spectacular, but for me, was laced with a bit more sadness. I honestly didn’t know when I was going to see him again. This man, the one whom I couldn’t get out of my mind since the night I met him, was about to be a part of my old life. I resisted that. It drained me, and I couldn’t make sense of the immense feelings I was giving to him. It was even more confusing because I wasn’t sure, even if I’d stayed, if he’d have me. Our whole relationship was based on a total of 10 or 11 nights/days spent in the same city or town. The rest was over the phone. I knew that he was confused about other times he’d been broken-hearted in the past, hurt by them, but all I wanted to do was make everything better for him—to sort it out for him, and bake him cookies, and kiss his forehead and take care of him, and download muchdance mix ’93 for him (his favorite).
Our last night together we spent dancing, again, forehead-to-forehead at our special Reggae bar in the Kensington Market in Toronto. The same place where, earlier on in the summer, we’d hid away and kissed on the escape-route stairs on the back patio. One of our ‘things’ together was our love of Reggae and Dancehall music. We spent the night in his bed again, in his little apartment, in our little fantasy world.
We sat at the bus station the next day not really sure what to feel, but the feelings were a little more intense than the last time we parted, since we really realized that this would be the last we’d see each other for an undisclosed period of time. He kissed me goodbye at the station, and shortly after I caught my bus away from him. Again. A woman on the run—not really sure of anything, but riding on the wings of free birds, exploring, and hoping that the decision she’d made was best for her heart.

We left one another, yes, but continued to talk on the phone for a while. I’d call him at almost every bus stop across the country, until I got to the West Coast. When I first got here, a short time ago to me now, I was homeless. I hadn’t arranged anywhere to live, I wasn’t sure if I was going to try and work in Kelowna or stay in Vancouver. I was living out of all of the following: a) my aunts apartment in port moody outside the city, b) my best friend’s car, c) anyone’s couch that’d take me (I have so many numbers on my phone from meeting lovely people who wanted to take me in for the night) and d) the SameSun Hostel in downtown Vancouver where the Irish guys were staying that I met on the bus. Of course we didn’t pay for the rooms. We’d stay anywhere for free.

In this time of the complete, unrelenting chaos that was my life, I grew very weary. Since we’d decided to stay in Vancouver, we were apartment searching constantly. My mind and heart were so tired from the stress and the heartbreak of losing a lover. I hadn’t had a chance to think about the situation with “You Rock” dude and I at all, and the first thing I thought to do was drink. Have fun. Dance.
Which is totally acceptable if your heart isn’t hurting too bad, and if you aren’t too too lonely.
However, what happened was that I got loser drunk.
I got loser drunk, loser sad, and loser lonely.

I had a one-night stand with somebody who wasn’t “You Rock” dude.
Fuck sakes.
For me, it really did nothing but make me feel even worse than I already had felt, which was hard to imagine. This other guy wasn’t doing anything right. He wasn’t playing the role for me. He didn’t know where to kiss me, and it was frustrating. All I could hear, see, smell, what that somebody else wanted me more than ever on the other side of the country. And I was allowed to have that feeling. Things were basically over between “You Rock” dude and I. Yes, we were talking, but what else were we going to do? How long could it go on for without tearing us up, so that we could allow ourselves enough dignity and pride to walk away from it? Neither of us wanted to let go, it seemed.
The day after this happened, I woke up and wanted to dig a hole and live in it for 56,000 years.
Naturally, the person I wanted to comfort me was “You Rock” dude.
I was honest with him, told him how I felt, and evidently it didn’t go over well, which I understand now.

Needless to say, after texting back and forth about it, some squabbling and some drunken, pathetic texts to him from me, it ended. It ended not only because of the one-night stand, but because there simply was no other way. But I wasn’t done there. No way.
No, I had to call him at 4am after a bottle of wine and say that “this call would be the last one I ever dial” and all sorts of other dumb shit about resolving our issues and tying things up properly. I said if he never returned my call that I wouldn’t try reaching him again.
And guess what?
He never did call me back.

And so, after much sobbing to my best friend—bless her patience— attacking this crazy life from all possible angles, I kind of thank him for sparing me. For sparing us. Because I know I wouldn’t have walked away from him if he hadn’t me. One foot had been left in Ontario, one string untied, and I guess he tied it for me. At this point, I don’t have much to keep on my mind from back home. I am completely and fully in the present, and taking life’s punches as they are swung at me.
I’m liking my little neighbourhood. I have everything here that I need and want, and once I get working I will have some structure back into my life. I have a little, cute park in my backyard with swings and benches for sipping tea on. I really, and wholeheartedly, am excited about the adventure I am embarking on for at least the next six months. I plan on producing lots of artwork, building a ceramic cat collection, many shrines, and collecting crop tops to wear on my back porch with a rolled smoke in hand. And it’s not say that I don’t think fondly of “You Rock” dude anymore, because that’d be a flat-out lie, but I think things just work out as they should. As I said, night time is especially for lovers, and its night time when I think of him the most. We both always knew we’d meet again, somehow, somewhere, someday, but now wasn’t our time.

So I guess since my Homage to Summer is finished and written, that I should continue onward into the rest of fall, and shortly into winter. I’ll be making new memories, new mishaps, new art, new dance parties (www.decentralizeddanceparty.com – this is how I spent my Halloween….wa wa wee woo…). As I always do, I’ll tip my cap to the moments I’m fondest of from my past, and hope only that more will keep coming to me.
Farewell Spain.
Farewell Villafranca.
Farewell to the faces I remember from the clinic waiting room.
Farewell heaviness!
Farewell to my dusty cabin in all its stress, Jack Daniels nights and new friendships.
Farewell to my home, for a while, until I get worrysome that you don’t exist anymore and come back to see you.
Farewell to all the nights skinny dipping in the river in Bracebridge.
Farewell to ‘no pants dance parties’ at the Griffin, after hours, singing Against Me! covers on the house guitar.
Farewell to the country’s endless starry skies, and last but not least….
Farewell to lovers who come swiftly on the most magical and auspicious of nights, for whom I’ve offered slices of my heart and do not expect a thing in return.

It was just the best, and I’ll keep it safe, on the highest shelf in my mind.

Onward and outward,
Signing off,
Brittney Rand.