This piece came about as I thought back to my childhood growing up in Conception Bay South and Paradise, Newfoundland. Looking back, I see a lot of things differently now, and my reflection on that part of my life shows me an entire world that I did not clock the first time. It makes sense, I am older now; I’ve learned to relate my experiences to the bigger picture, and realized that the personal is itself political. So, in a way, this piece is a blurring between my memory of that time and the time itself. I’ll never see it perfectly, but it never existed singularly to begin with. In so many ways, I still feel like this person; we seem to still want the same things.
6:02
The storm and the clock make the sky look like emergency lights that just keep going. A perfect mess of colours yelling. Stay away. Stay away.
The trees reach their silhouettes like cracks in the universe into the ombre blue, rainbow rubber scuffs against the dirt, the lighter flame reflects in his tear-tracks, her lips are dyed purple and the summer night is positively glowing. Someone is bleeding really far away from us, but it still makes us feel noticed, a breeze that takes me back to the convenience store we would walk to, but that caught fire too, didn’t it?
I’ve always wanted to swing from the telephone wires but no one would let me, the Converse just looked so delicious against the backdrop of this life specifically. We had no idea there was that much coke around us, we just wanted to have fun. Anything’s glitter if you wear 3-D glasses, but nothing feels the same once you’ve done something dangerous. Everything else melts like cotton candy on the tongue, a rush that lasts as long as we do. I want to be manic but I’m just so tired; besides, every moment is full of everything you’d ever need so long as you choose to always remember that. All the grief and joy and nostalgia in the world exists all the time so if you want to feel something just do it already.
Baby this town is boring but every piece of wood in every backyard is thriving with bugs underneath and at least a third of these homes have a gun, we’re just trying to feel good enough to actually let it affect our blood sugars, maybe I won’t take my pills and I’ll just never notice, maybe I’m just looking for a deadbeat town to be a part of, some cigarette butts to step over, something to blame.
