inspo/revelation

So maybe there’s this moment. It’s different for everyone, but it’s pivotal. It’s the moment your head gets screwed off and screwed on again, and everything is changed forever. You can never see life the same way again. You can never go back. Well, you can go back, but you go back with new eyes, maybe a new brain, new ears, new mouth. It could be there’s a propensity for the moment, like DNA that’s planted inside you ready to catch the moment. Some folks might say it’s family history. Or maybe you can trace a series of events, plot them out like a map. You remember this time in your childhood: your mother or father said this; you saw that; you got caught up in this; you read that. Then it all comes together and wham! The lights turn on. O.K., it might be more subtle, more gradual, but there’s always something really significant that captures the heart and mind. And it’s not to say that it might not be painful or personally devastating as well. At that moment you shed an old life to become a whole person because, you believe, your body in its actions and your mind in its spirit are wholly in sync. Your talents and possibilities exist for a purpose that is beyond yourself.

Now it’s not as if this moment lasts forever, or that things don’t get sticky and go back on themselves. But it’s the moment you return to because it sustains meaning and empowers the lonely individual. Of course most folks never get this moment, and you who do get it are still imperfect human beings.

The plan was to go back to school when I got better. The plan was to try to get into Oxford. The plan was derailed by the Conservatives in Ontario winning the provincial election in 1995. When I could finally walk and resume a life, the one I walked into looked nothing like the one I had been heading towards before my surgery. One of the first places I went on my own after months of convalescence was a meeting of the International Socialists. I’d seen a poster on a lamppost. As everything in the outside world had taken on a new shine after I’d been cooped up in our dark apartment for months, I now noticed things like posters on lampposts. This led me through quite a few meetings with various Marxist organizations before I ended up at the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and found a community of activists who took me in, embraced me, and educated me. So many of the conversations in my life now revolved around justice, labour, and fighting the exploitation of the vulnerable, and my own difficult experiences as a young child began to seem small and inconsequential compared with the suffering I was learning about and now saw first-hand. After a year or so, at a dinner at John Clarke’s house (John is the charismatic, brilliant founder of OCAP), someone asked me about being an actor as a child, and I reluctantly recounted some of the early experiences that had haunted me from the productions The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Road to Avonlea. Where I thought I would find eye-rolls in the face of my undeniable privilege, I found empathy, understanding, a weaving of important political context, and a generous holding of my more troubling experiences.

I dove into a life of activism, helping to organize protests against cuts to welfare and healthcare and the attacks on the poor that the Conservatives presided over. Seeing first-hand the decimation of the already impossible lives of the most vulnerable people I had ever encountered made the idea of going off to university to think when there was so much to be done seem frivolous at best, and at worst offensive and selfish. My life became a series of meetings, protests, and conferences, imbued with the camaraderie of people who had dedicated their lives to justice. I had a community I was proud to be a part of, a place in the real world, and a purpose after many months of not even being able to move. This was so much more than my fantasy of being mobile and strong enough to go to the hardware store to buy the imagined nail for the unnamed project. In those activist years, full of conviction and purpose, I lost Corey, I lost school, and I gained a wild and practical education in direct activism.

can’t imagine what it would be like to be together without having children in front of you, it just sounds like a big blank. What are you going to do, travel? To see what? What would you be moving toward? What else would you be living for? Sex? Companionship? Being? Without the forward straining what is there to give you urgency? Just an inevitable end to everything? I’m talking too much, I don’t know why it’s irking me the way it is that she doesn’t want children, who cares, what is it to me? Plenty of my friends and patients don’t want them and it doesn’t put me in this state.

It occurs to me that maybe I’m the one who doesn’t want them.

Love isn’t about straining toward something, she says. Other people try to move you forward. And then I never think I love anyone enough to want to tie myself to them for all eternity, Clémentine says. It never feels like enough. But at the same time once I commit I have trouble leaving. Or at least I’ve had trouble in the past. I worry I might marry the wrong person merely because I couldn’t leave them.

One day, around the beginning of my junior year of college, it occurred to me that I wasn’t going to make it. I had already developed carpal tunnel and tendonitis from years of improper violin technique taught to me by my rural music teachers. I was out of money to go to festivals, and I had no way of making lasting, important connections in a field where who you know matters more than anything else. I had no serious job prospects, nor any hope for job prospects. At work one night, the falseness of the “work hard and you will succeed” ethic washed over me: the truth was the music world was a two-tiered system, and I was in the second chair. Hungover, in the comfort of a dark recording booth, I began to cry. Few things are as life altering as realizing your preferred life is unalterably a fucked impossibility.

Do pictures tell? I have a color Polaroid of Vance at seven and Veronica at twenty-nine traversing a rickety dry-gray dock in Nova Scotia to board a fishing boat. The water is a deep iron smeared with plates of foam; the sky is a thin iron smeared with same; the mass of white gulls around Vance's outstretched bread-filled hand is a cloud of plunging white V's. Vance Vigorous, as he holds out his white little child's hand, is surrounded and obscured by a cloud of living, breathing shrieking, shitting, plunging incarnations of the letter V; and I have it captured forever on quality film, giving me the right and power to cry whenever and wherever I please. What might that say about pictures.

After that month in Cairo she was muted, read constantly, kept more to herself, as if something had occurred or she realized suddenly that wondrous thing about the human being, it can change. She did not have to remain a socialite who had married an adventurer. She was discovering herself. It was painful to watch, because Clifton could not see it, her self-education. She read everything about the desert. She could talk about Uweinat and the lost oasis, had even hunted down marginal articles.

I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book. I don’t believe in permanence, in relationships that span ages. I was fifteen years older. But she was smarter. She was hungrier to change than I expected.

It was a cold winter day. When I arrived, he had company. A friend just about to leave, who was sitting on a couch in Sandro’s loft, flipping through an art catalogue. He wore a peacoat and scarf, and his hair was darker, from winter light, or because it needed to be washed, but he looked otherwise just the same. Just the same.

Rain began to fall, wet darts hitting the windows of the loft. The rain fell harder and harder until the sound rose to an incredible crescendo, like glass beads pouring down over the front of Sandro’s building. The sky beyond the windows was dense and gray but with the curious buttery quality of daytime darkness, as if there were a yellowish light lurking behind the rain clouds. Time had slowed to an operatic present, a pure present.

“My very best friend,” Sandro said as he introduced us.

This friend of his stood.

In that strange light, the showering-glass-beads rain, I felt that I was seeing this person before me in two ways at once. Again — finally. And also for the very first time. His smile was simple and open. If there was the faintest edge of knowingness in it, it was purely of this type: my friend digs you. That was all.

I don’t want to know your name, I’d said to him that night, when he was one of the people with the gun, Nadine and Thurman’s friend.

But now I did know his name: Ronnie Fontaine.

There’s the door, she tells me, and points. Why don’t you just walk out?

I don’t move. I can walk out the door, but then I’d have to stand in the hall and wait.

What about that gate? She’s pointing out the window now. The gate is lit up at night: razor wire coiled along the top, the tower with a sharpshooter in it. Or what about your cell doors? she asks. Or block gates? Or shower doors? Or the mess hall doors, or the doors to the visitor entrance? How often do you gentlemen touch a doorknob? That’s what I’m asking.

I knew the minute I saw Holly that she’d never taught in a prison before. It wasn’t her looks—she’s not a kid, and you can see she hasn’t had it easy. But people who teach in prisons have a hard layer around them that’s missing on Holly. I can hear how nervous she is, like she planned every word of that speech about the doors. But the crazy thing is, she’s right. The last time I got out, I’d stand in front of doors and wait for them to open up. You forget what it’s like to do it yourself.

She says, My job is to show you a door you can open. And she taps the top of her head. It leads wherever you want it to go, she says. That’s what I’m here to do, and if that doesn’t interest you then please spare us all, because this grant only funds ten students, and we only meet once a week, and I’m not going to waste everyone’s time on bullshit power struggles.

She comes right to my desk and looks down. I look back up. I want to say, I’ve heard some cheesy motivational speeches in my time, but that one’s a doozy. A door in our heads, come on. But while she was talking I felt something pop in my chest.