by Trisha Cull
3:24 am.
There’s a blizzard out there tonight. The wind is howling. It has snowed eight inches this evening. I went out into the blizzard to haul a basket of laundry to the laundry room. The wind and snow swept over me, covered one side of my face and hair with snow, in a matter of seconds. When I left the laundry room and returned to the house a minute later, I was again swept over with wind and snow, which covered the other side of my face and hair in seconds. That felt good somehow, to be evened out, to have both sides of my face up against the blizzard. I wanted to keep walking into it, letting the snowflakes and black sky mesmerize me, walk down Beechwood to the ocean, stand at the lookout above Ross Bay, and let the blizzard surround me then bury me.
How does this work? My mental status? There’s nothing particularly new or interesting to report: same rapid fluctuations of extreme emotions. I think this is rapid cycling. I have had some good days, walking lots, downtown and back again, wearing my snow boots and feeling like a kid again, crossing fields of untouched snow just to be the first person to make a path.
I looked over at Leigh in his chair tonight, wearing his bathrobe, his elbow resting on the armrest, his hand against his cheek, head tilted, hair scruffy, and I could see that he was crying.
December 22, 2008
I am harpooned.
Pinned to a wall that is not a wall but worse than a wall; I am harpooned, pinned to existence.
Everyone is so far away.
I can’t feel anyone.
December 23, 2008
I have been taking many photographs lately, pictures of snow and tombs and pathways and water. I have been taking pictures of beautiful things and ugly things, some close up and some far away.
Many pictures of my rabbits: beautiful beyond measure.
Footprints in the snow, untouched snow on the street, winter sunsets, pink, red, melting to blue and beryline.
Shifting the perspective, the camera angle, landscapes in night vision. The world reduced to a cool shade of blue. Portrait setting. I have taken multiple pictures of myself, arm outstretched, that dexterous fateful propping of the digital Olympus FE-115 partly on the palm of my hand but my fingers wrapped around it too, and the forefinger poised over that ominous go button, the little silver circle you press down upon, which in turn releases some shutter inside the camera box and likewise inside your heart, a little quiver.
Yes, this is me, this is me taking a picture of me, in the snow, at night, on the boardwalk by the sea, Victoria, BC, next to the Pacific Ocean, planet Earth.
Or just in my living room.
My cheek pressed flush against the Modigliani painting of the woman with black eyes and an elongated neck, the picture that hangs on a wall in our living room; that woman with black almond eyes, head titled, her loaded smile, Mona Lisa-esque.
Who are you?
I press my cheek against her cheek, press my lips against her lips, touch her forehead, place my hand over her mouth in one shot, place my hand over her eyes in another shot.
Will she go mute and blind (and in that order) if I in turn place my own hand over my mouth, then place my own hand over my eyes?
What is the relationship between the subject and the object, the person and the portrait, the artist and the art?
I kiss my Modigliani woman on the wall.
It’s not about the kiss, the touch, the sameness of the sex, two women, one real, one false.
What is most erotic is the subliminal film of space (and time) that separates (or perhaps unites) the real from the not real, the real woman from the false woman.
I am searching for myself through a kiss.
December 28, 2008
Leigh was aloof all of Christmas day.
I think it was the booze. He’d been drinking all day, wine and so on, sparkling wine and orange juice with brunch.
On the subject of drinking, I haven’t wanted to drink in a long time, haven’t even been tempted really, but that day, at brunch, and in the evenings since, I have had the urge you know? Leigh was drinking Crown Royal last night, and even though I’ve never been a hard liquor kind of girl, it sort of appealed to me. I have, I suppose, quite simply been longing for some kind of fierce high, some potent chemical alternation of my senses and body.
Leigh and I avoided each other the rest of the night. I went in the bunny room and Leigh went to bed. Our Christmas presents to each other remained unopened.
January 1, 2009
Stoned right now.
It’s 4 am New Year’s Day. Tonight, in the company of friends and acoustic guitar, I smoked some weed.
Just now I walked home up Fairfield in the pouring rain. I was wearing my yellow raincoat and new black velvet hat. Rain dripped off the rim. I sensed rainwater spilling off my plastic coat in rivulets. I sang “You Are My Sunshine” over and over again the whole way home. I was quiet as I approached home. Leigh would be asleep, but somehow I knew I was in trouble. I slipped off my wet shoes and slick raincoat, tossed my hat on the umbrella rack. I made coffee.
Leigh appeared in his bathrobe, said contemptuously, “Oh—hi.”
I feel the distance. He sits across from me now, glowering, foul-faced, disgusted. In this moment it is clear that my husband hates me; just now, he hates me.
Leigh has left the room. I am still humming with the high. I know everything, my situation, my treacherous relationship, will hurt again soon.
I miss simplicity.
It’s still raining.
January 1, 2009
An hour ago, Leigh:
Raging. “You leave me here to take off and spend New Year’s Eve with two guys and your sister, two total strangers, come home at 5 am, etcetera etcetera… rage, rage, rage. Doors slamming. Laundry flying. Coattails of bathrobe flicking with menace, that too-loose, too-long fabric belt that wraps around the waist, if he ever tied it up, but he lets it dangle loose on each side, one long end almost touching the floor as he rages across the living room. It makes me nervous, not just his anger, but that wayward fringe of fabric, the untidiness of it, its potential to twist around an ankle, decrease a man’s equilibrium in his own home, 7 am, after his wife has returned home from an evening out with platonic friends, an evening which he adamantly refused to partake in, as he did Christmas this year with my family.
He has just demanded to see my Facebook, all of it. I complied. I have nothing to hide. He spent some time scrolling through it all, the notes and wall messages and links and photographs and personal messages. He found nothing, declared aristocratically, “Thank you,” and resumed his position reading the morning newspaper in the green chair a few feet from where I sit now.
It’s the unravelled, unkempt, unknotted length of belt on his blue bathrobe upon which I focus.
Everything is so loose.
January 1, 2009
Leigh has left for the day, went to the boat to work on the engine. I have taken a bunch of the clonazepam and Seroquel, and some other shit I found in the cabinet. Leigh’s allergy pills I think. I was popping the clonazepam all night at my sister’s on New Year’s Eve too, because I wanted to feel some sense of levity, some kind of high, to sort of match the glee of drunkenness surrounding me. And then there was the pot.
Turns out I took a lot of clonazepam and Seroquel over the course of the evening on New Year’s Eve. Now there are the pills of today. I am compounding drugs upon drugs.
I feel weird.
When I do this I am flirting with the idea that I will take enough and go to sleep and maybe, just maybe, not wake up.
I went out to go to the hospital earlier today after Leigh left, made it halfway there, turned back thinking, Shit, do I really want to sit in an emergency room on New Year’s Day?
So I sit here instead, typing to you, feeling high and weird, waiting for it to pass or not pass. I’m going back to sleep now, 3:30 pm, in the bunny room, about to cuddle Ma
rcello.
This is going nowhere.
January 11, 2009
Yesterday I fell asleep on the couch with Leigh at about 11 pm while watching a movie. He tried to coax me into bed, get me off the couch. I was so out of it he actually helped me to my feet, but I laid back down again and fell asleep until 5 am this morning. At some point I rose from the couch and rolled into bed. Leigh says that at about 7 am I was giving him the most amazing blowjob, then he says I fell asleep with his cock in my mouth, fully erect. He says he felt my teeth settle onto the shaft, which he thought was sweet and erotic. He slid himself carefully off my teeth.
I have absolutely no memory of this whatsoever.
I gave my husband an unconscious blowjob.
Why do I feel slightly violated?
January 20, 2009
Counselling appointment with Fiona tomorrow. Issues I will bring up, to discuss:
Inability to settle into my own skin and thus a relationship with any man, or at least with my husband… and all the anguish and conflicting feelings therein, the guilt one moment, the total love the next, and then numbness.
Self-loathing
I seem to either be totally insomniac or nodding off all over the place. I literally fell asleep while sitting in the upright position on the bus ride home tonight, out completely, twice. Then I’ll stay up all night on the weekend, get more or less high on something or other, entrance myself, flirt with death, hug my rabbits, fall asleep so drugged sometimes I’m not sure I’ll wake up. But of course I always do.
Four
Skate Wing (July 2006)
My desire to be loved and kept by a man begins at age ten. My fifth grade teacher, Mr. L, holds out his arms to me. He is smiling, delighted. I have just given him a hot pink pin that says, Being sexy is a hard job, but somebody has to do it. “Thank you!” he says, even though the pin is inappropriate, especially for a Catholic schoolgirl.
As he moves toward me to give me a hug, I laugh and run away, leave him standing there with his arms extended. Thus, my duplicitous relationship with men begins, desire and aversion at once: desire because I want them to fill the void that is me, and aversion because they can’t fill the void after all.
It’s a perfect evening: blue July sky, Garry oaks through the window, twinkle lights strung around the banisters and trees outside.
Leigh asks the waitress for a quiet table for two, but it’s a busy night and there are no tables available.
Leigh insists. “Can’t something be done?”
The waitress says, “Let me see what I can do,” then dashes away, only to return a moment later with good news. “We don’t have any regular tables for two,” she says, “but we can offer you one of our private dining suites.”
The waitress leads us through the sea of beautifully adorned tables spread with white linen tablecloths and fine flatware and silver. People smile as we make our way through, escorted like VIPs, and I flush with embarrassment at this special attention.
The private dining suite is a gorgeous little enclave with dark wood walls, soft lighting and a heavy decadent curtain on each side.
These kinds of embellishments tend to frighten me, the lavishness of it all; I attribute this to my blue-collar upbringing, dinners of meat and potatoes, meatloaf, meatballs and anything else having anything to do with grade-A beef served conservatively next to potatoes or rice. I grew up eating in front of the TV.
“It’s like a little kingdom,” I say.
The special tonight is skate wing. A fish shaped like a skate: my initial analysis leaves me confounded. Later I will learn the truth about the skate, a species of fish resembling the stingray that has been overfished and whose population is steadily decreasing. I imagine the skate like a stingray willowing through the water with its wings expanded, the lovely caress of water flowing over and under the wings, the small face of the fish in the middle and the long deadly stinger a wisp, a live wire trailing behind.
Endangered.
I think of the wings of the skate sliced off and the remaining middle part of the fish, that face of it, drifting off to sea.
In the 1400s in England, a gentleman sent a pair of gloves to the woman he wished to marry; if she wore these gloves to church on Sunday, it signalled her acceptance of the proposal.
In Wales, a lovesick man would carve a spoon of wood and send it to the woman he wished to marry; if she wore the spoon on a ribbon around her neck, it meant she accepted his proposal.
I know it’s coming, my marriage proposal. I asked for this, harassed Leigh into doing it, said time and again, “Are you ever going to marry me?”
So now I look at him sitting over there across the table from me, smiling, thrilled with how the evening is unfolding. He loves our special room, the special attention. The pretence of good service seems to please him more than the occasion at hand, more than the pending marriage proposal. I sense this intuitively.
The implications of acceptance are vague but profound. To say, “Yes,” or better yet, “Yes, I will.” I will what? I will spend the rest of my life with you, I promise? Preposterous. I will never leave you, I know it? Ridiculous. I believe in this absurdity no more than I believe in the tooth fairy. And yet…
I maintain a pleasant demeanour.
We’re having a wonderful time.
It’s as if the universe has set the stage for something divine to transpire between us, or the universe has set this beautiful stage as a test, to see if I can decipher the truth beyond the beauty, to see if I can make the right decision despite the trinkets of stars hanging above the treetops, and the summer breeze drifting through the restaurant, lifting the hems of tablecloths and rousing my senses. Or do I mean lulling my senses?
It’s intoxicating.
I smile.
I feel sick.
We’re living in the top portion of an old heritage house now. It’s like living in the gut of a ship.
We moved in at the end of the summer. Our old apartment building across from the high school on Caddy Bay Road caught fire. We left our red walls behind.
“You have three days to move out,” the fire chief said, even though our place was relatively undamaged. But the smoke wreaked evil—the co-mingling of the natural and unnatural elements of those things that form the architecture of modern human co-habitation, of communal living—the scent of burnt wood and plastic mingling with paint and carpet, a hint of fried electrical wires and a subtle undercurrent of fibreglass, all those sloughed-off skin cells, all the hair from everyone’s hairbrushes, maybe even asbestos.
It was the plumber welding pipes in the wall behind the bathroom sink in 304 who did it, the spark from the plumber’s blowtorch. The plumber did it to us.
This is what communal living smells like up in flames—a post-mortem of human decay and industry, capitalism up in smoke. I couldn’t help but think we deserved this, because the scent of a house fire is like a warning. It smoulders. It shrugs. It whispers from the ashes, It isn’t natural to live this way.
Only one soul—a cat—died in the fire.
Going back many hundreds of years, every woman had the right to propose to a man on February 29, the leap year, the day considered to have no recognition in English law, thus the day was leapt over and ignored, hence the term leap year. It was considered to have no legal status, therefore, neither the day nor tradition had legal status. A woman would consequently take advantage of this day beyond tradition and propose to the man she wished to marry.
The waiter brings us our skate wing. I look down upon it, note its shape, its ravaged capacity for deft motion through water, its other wing amputated, perhaps lying over there on Leigh’s plate, the other wing, the other half. Are we dining on the same animal ripped in half? I cannot help but feel a sense of travesty.
Oh, where’s the severed capacity for flight?
The ocean is so far
away.
I’m standing on the deck, staring at the moon.
I smell herbs from the garden. The boys, the three young chefs living in the suite below, keep an herb garden in the yard, along with three potted tomato plants, so the air holds the tang of fresh basil and mint, combined with the hearty sweetness of the tomatoes. Morning glory has twirled up the trellis, and the white blossoms have pursed shut into little funnels reaching into the darkness.
The sky is so black and starry. Nothing is in the way. Nothing stands between me and it, whatever it is, that thing that compels us into action. And I don’t mean perseverance but rather something more in line with necessity, to live despite ourselves, the surge of being.
I feel it in the hard times more than in the joyous times. It feels like a hard, round object the size of a golf ball moving down my throat, then taking up residence in the hollow region of the guts, as if we come with an empty space inside us in order to harbour the pain of existence.
My heart contracts.
Halloween last year:
Here’s a dilapidated jack-o-lantern sitting out on the deck in the rain. The Modigliani portrait of the beautiful woman with an elongated nose gazes at me knowingly from the corner of the living room. The flames in the gas fireplace lick the glass panel that separates the open flame from the world. The glass panel gets dangerously hot.
I have warned Leigh’s children to be careful. “Watch the glass. Don’t sit so close.” I have never had to warn the oldest boy because he seems to have acquired in his small-for-his-age delicate body an evolved understanding of a three-dimensional universe, how we fit, what precautions must be taken in order to come out of it all in one piece. I sense this in the way he reads diligently, hair tussled, always curved into the process of whatever he’s doing.
I feel burned, even from this distance. I know what burnt flesh feels like, and somehow this knowledge is enough.
