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I try to plant seeds. Nobody asks me to do it. I just do. And I’m not patting myself on the back, here. Maybe it’s manipulative in nature, but I mean no harm by it at all. I just plant the seeds, and I tend to them, too. It’s hard to get anything to sprout, it’s a harsh climate. But I still expect something to grow, and I know that it might not, but the tiniest, coldest corner of my heart wishes so terribly that it would. Just give me something. I’ll take anything. Over, and over, and over again.
Ever since getting back, I have nearly locked myself inside my apartment. I do not care to go out into the world. Everything I need is right on my corner. I want to be in my little allotted box. I want to be with my blankets and pillows and soft pants and big shirts. All 100% cotton, of course. Soft and safe, very few threats in here. I’m not afraid of other people, they’re just so unpredictable. Sometimes I feel like a magnet for strangers to tell their life stories to. Strangers tell me I look sad all the time, and that I should try smiling. Cashiers ask “long day?” when I’m having a perfectly normal one. I mostly want to be invisible. As for my friends, I have run out of offerings.
I live directly above a tiny grocery store, where I can buy almost everything I could ever need. It is an incredible use of space down there. I feel a kinship with the family who own and run it, though they see thousands of shopper’s faces every single day, and my shopping face is no different. Still, we are always happy to see each other. My bed is right above the cash-register.
I called a couple of crisis lines early on Sunday morning, around 4:30. There was no answer on any of them. For some reason, this is deeply funny to me.
I crawled so deep into the bog just to be down there next to you. Intoxicated, barely moving.
When there is suffering in your life, some cause for grief that sits you down beside yourself, everything else seems trivial. The little people and the little cars, the little street corner below the apartment. The emails. The tweets. The news. The videos. The posts. The outfits. The ads. Whatever the fuck they are always squealing about between songs on the radio.
Everybody has their own definition of what suffering is, and everyone, eventually, has a place and a time when they found that definition.
I often think about my time as a child, being babysat by my Aunt Darlene. Perhaps she wasn’t suffering per se, but she was indeed miserable, and these things go hand-in-hand. Aunt Darlene’s house was where our family spent about half of our time. The porch of the house had a very specific smell: of cigarettes and blood. The porch was attached to the shed, where my Uncle Rob would hang skinned moose carcasses on big metal hooks to dry. You could see them through the window in the door, their blood dripping into the plank floor below. Ruby red. Bone white. I am sure it must still smell like that, or like some memory of it.
My Uncle Rob was a jack of all trades, and even a master of some of them, too, by my books at least. He was an incredibly intuitive person, very much in touch with the natural world (on a genetic level, like, in a way that he wouldn’t say this about himself, it’s just this deep, sort of innate thing that you glean from someone, if you’re lucky.) My dad describes these things to me, about what happens when you are in the true wilderness of the woods, and I’ve felt it too. There are these sensations of innately knowing things. Knowledge in the body being accessed for the first time. Dad told me that he thought for sure they were lost one night when their flashlights went out, but my uncle rowed the canoe in complete darkness under cloudy skies, for miles, and knew exactly where to stop along the shoreline to get back to the camp.
My aunt would chain-smoke from morning to night, drinking a Pepsi with every half-package. She’d talk on the phone all day, too, usually complaining, whining about something or another. I remember the cigarette smoke dancing in the rays of the morning sunlight. She was a deeply bothered soul, I knew this as a child, and I resented her for that. She was my definition of misery. But when her husband, my Uncle Rob, would come home from work, everything changed. He was my golden guy. His presence like delicious, sparkling sunshine beaming through thick, black smoke. He was tall, handsome, tender, tough, and warm. A hard worker, and a hot temper, too. We’d fold origami boats out of golden candy wrappers. He’d sing foolish songs to me
You might think it's goofy,
But the man in the moon is a newfie
And he’s sailing onto glory,
Away in his golden dory.
Not long after those days of boat-building, my Aunt Darlene and Uncle Rob got a divorce. Messy, like any. My uncle lived with us for a while, and I adored eating breakfast across from him in the darkness of our kitchen before school every morning.
In the ashes of it all, My Uncle Rob had found the love of his life. They got married in the backyard of the house, painted the nicotine layered walls bright yellow, went on fishing trips, pitched tents and drank wine next to rivers. Took photos of each other on disposable cameras, and framed them to put up in the house. Danced. Laughed. Hollered at each other in pure, ecstatic love. Uncle Rob’s new relationship was the fresh air we didn’t know we needed. It made so much sense to finally see his golden aura multiplied. They went to Hawaii and he came back talking about one thing: how sweetly fragrant.
My dad and Uncle Rob’s side of the family was large, catholic, with 15 siblings among them. They were dirt-poor and from a tiny outport town in Newfoundland. My dad was brought home as a newborn in a row-boat on Christmas Eve.
My grandfather died when my dad was just 16. He worked in the woods, and they found him slumped over next to a pile of logs. Nothing more to say about it.
His brother Tom drowned on the exact same day a year later, saving the life of a younger cousin, who was out hopping over pans of harbor ice in the spring of the year. The Queen at the time gave my family some kind of very special medal, only handed out a few other times.
My uncle Ralph died as a passenger in the car with a drunk driver. I was about seven. We got the news while visiting Darlene and Rob one night. I remember my dad, laying face-down on the couch with his head tucked between his two arms. This seemed so horrifyingly wrong to me in a way I couldn’t make sense of, to see my own father, who was always upright, always moving us forward, in such a mournful, troubled position. It was the first time I had seen real anguish, real-time grief, right there in front of me. My parents speak of my Uncle Ralph with such a reverence. A glistening, glorious sense of humour. To me, he is as good as mythical.
My Uncle H died later that same year. At the time of his passing, my parents told me he had a heart attack. I did not find out the truth until I was a teenager. Many of my family did not attend his funeral.
These are the little notes in my back pocket, things I come back to when my life starts to move in a certain kind of way, when things start to flow in a familiar direction.
I’m from a broken, isolated, northern town situated on top of billions of tonnes of ancient iron rock formations. The good stuff, too. The best. We live here because we have to dig that shit up as fast as humanly possible and sell it to Chinese steel manufacturers. They mostly build sky-scrapers out of it, I guess. If you want to be somewhere else, you just have to choose one out of two directions to drive in. You can drive south on a dirt road for 8 hours through an uninhabited forest, or you can drive north on a dirt road for 8 hours through an uninhabited forest, until you reach any other place.
This year, our suicide rate was 51 for every 100,000 people in the province.
Mining let my parents be working-class people who earned slightly more than the average working class people, because they decided to live in a shitty, isolated, culturually-void northern town. When you combine dangerous working conditions with those factors, I guess it’s a fair trade off that you get to make, like, 100 grand per year. I guess it’s not that bad after all.
My Uncle Rob retired and left town after working in the mine for over 35 years. He and his wife built his dream home by the ocean, the promised land. He died of lung cancer only a few years later. I was living in the same area then, too. That year, I watched his golden aura fade away. I watched his life drain away from him as he grasped at it, hopelessly clinging to some remnant of his own impossible strength. When I hugged him, I could feel his bones. Whenever the sun would come out that spring, I could not stand it. All I could imagine was how he would thrive underneath a big blue sky, like a cowboy, traversing the earth and soaking up every drop of radiance and glory that it had to offer to him. The sun was out, he was dying in an overfilled hospital, and I was at home with the blinds pulled. Right now, in the depths of one of the buildings on the mine site, you can find his hard hat hanging on the wall. Perhaps to some, it might serve as a quiet reminder.
We’re all gone from there now. My parents retired. I worked my final shift as a truck driver in the mine this past summer. I spent 5 summers doing that exact same job, helping to move dirt around.
Since coming back from there, my life in the city feels trivial. MFA, art world, collectors, exclusive invites, social circles, shitty galleries (they want you), cool galleries (they hate you), fine dinners, trendy outfits, secret rave parties, these levels of coolness in the city, indicators of being wanted, of having value; trivial, meaningless, nothing. It all means nothing to me, and I’ve come to let go of the idea that I have to make myself valuable, create something of myself to feel wanted. I know that there are places where these things do not matter. For now, I meet myself wherever I am.
In the mine, there are an entire sub-set of employees whose job is to control the flow of water and to redirect it. Water finds its way through everything, it flows underground, through cracks and crevices as deep as time itself, and it will always find a way out into the open. It likes to form new streams and waterfalls, settling on the pit floors, forming brand-new lakes, and slowing down production.
On my first day ever in the mines, one of the trucks I would learn to operate had accidentally crushed a road-sized pickup truck using just one of its front tires. The operator had no idea she had even done so, until she drove off and heard the frantic voice of a man, our coworker, who had just narrowly escaped being crushed to death, calling in an emergency on the radio. We heard that same voice recording played over and over again in safety meetings for the rest of the summer. Morale was abysmal.
There’s a lake I like to swim at in town, called Quartzite lake. Apparently, it is almost 100 feet deep, and it is so cold, even in the summer. Because of the nature of the quartzite mineral and how it reflects and refracts sunlight, the water in the lake is like wading through pure, liquid turquoise. If you put your head underneath, all you can see is blue. It takes a while to adjust to the cold water, but I find it to be extremely refreshing. I feel completely equalized by it. My preferred way to swim is to go until my two legs cramp up, my teeth start to chatter, and I begin to feel very scared.
When you’ve seen the land ripped open and turned inside out, life on earth, in general, feels trivial, it feels wasted, and it feels compromised. Nothing can really compare to being on the bottom floor of an open pit mine, or being at the epicentre of an earthly wound so big it could fit 100 football fields.
It never heals, it only gets bigger. It bleeds, it bleeds, it bleeds.
It rained almost all summer this time around, but on a sunny day off, I went out onto Shabogamo lake in a boat with my friends. On our way back to shore, I gazed at an unremarkable line of mountains in the distance, and thought, how permanent. The curvature of the waving hills against the fading sky, like an ancient stamp, placed there for the rest of time. So sure. So reliable.
This time around, I’m finding it harder than ever to recover. Three months now, I’ve been in a form of chemical hibernation. Licking my wounds. Trying to figure it all out, again. I can’t even listen to music, because it feels too raw on my exposed nerves. I find myself living through memories, letting my mind run backwards, so that we may be together again. I’m hiding out until that glimmer returns to my mind’s eye. Surely, it will. It has to. I’m holding out for it, and I’m holding out for you, too.
