volume 7: failing perfect

italian bitters and heartbreak in different colours

Dec 01, 2022

It’s finally down from 18 degree Celsius November weather, into crisp, rosy cheek frozen iPhone finger Christmas air. I love this time of year. The swift and calculated Dollarama transition from Halloween to Christmas. There’s a romance in moving from stringing cobwebs to stringing orange garlands. Placing bets on the first snow. This year, on November 15th.

November 1st brings the promise of joy. I say goodbye to the leaves as I say goodbye to the flowers in late summer. I’ve found these rituals to be good for morale. The leaves and flowers are my dearest friends.

This is the best half of the year, and I savour it. First, we’re blessed with July flavours, followed by late August back to school body panic, suffocating and warmly nostalgic. And with the school year come September reinvention and soup. Then, October Halloween/Scorpio season where cunts everywhere thrive, followed by November first snows and gentle Christmas anticipation. And finally, the last hurrah, December. Erecting the tree and adorning the damn thing. Magical and toasty.

Then dreadful January: The Epilogue. Reinvention part two. No statutory holidays for miles…

Until then, I have malls. I love malls. Love malls even when I hate malls. A fascinatingly regular environment. Where regular people do regular things. Shop and talk and talk and shop. Eat Manchu Wok on a tiny food court table covered in Artizia paper bags. People in out in out. Retail employees worming their way through the secret galleria Catacombs with trash bags and inventory. Victoria’s Secret employees lunging at people’s tits with a measuring tape.

And Bath and Body Works. A candy museum of popular consumer culture. Fascinating. Truly. And the robots in aprons who work there. Bless their blonde Eaton Centre souls.

Malls were born for Christmas. Sopping wet, squishy automatic door carpeting. Defrosting my toesies under warm fluorescent lighting. 4pm sunset through glass atrium. Colicky baby shrieking over Mariah. One shopper per floor tile. And Indigo. Dear dear Indigo.

<3 Or Eataly. <3 Gorgeous baby Eataly.

I was in Eataly this weekend getting focaccia, olives and Italian bitters soda for Tár (WILD RIDE!).

This was an absolutely incredible shopping instinct — however, I recommend taking the ~focatch~ out of the packaging before you sit through truly the world’s quietest film. Prepare yourself to experience your neighbour’s mouth breathing at record volumes.

Twinkle lights caress the Italian-Canadian escalator. Quiet, violent People Volume, hearing everything and nothing at the same time. Funky cheese air wafting over passing Aperol Spritzes.

I was in Eataly this weekend and I felt like June Osborne.

I can’t tell if it was the raging political demonstration I had passed on my way in or the bad feeling I sometimes get now, but it felt like the moments in Handmaid’s Tale in the before times. Nothing is wrong, but everything is wrong. The last good day.

I dunno. Sometimes I just get a bad feeling about things.

Or sometimes bad things happen and I get the feeling there aren’t any good things. Or sometimes good things happen and I am consumed by Doom.

This month is coloured by heartbreak and last month, my dad ran for city council on a ridiculously bigoted platform.

I’ve sat down what feels like one thousand times to write about my relationship with my dad, but I can’t yet. In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg writes: “It’s hard to write about a city you just moved to; it’s not yet in our body. We don’t know our new home, even if we can drive to the drugstore without getting lost. We have not lived through three winters there or seen the ducks leave in fall and return to the lakes in spring. Hemingway wrote about Michigan while sitting in Paris."

Despite my best efforts, my adulthood and the 200km and 7 years that separate us, I am still sitting in Paris.

Reader, until then, I will paint you a picture of how it feels to be his child.

Daddy with daddy issues.

Kind of boring in that way...

“I <3 Trump”

“I <3 G-d”

“I <3 H8 and jazz”

“I…never text or call”

See… boring.

Water sign or bad daddy?

Being his child feels like every colour of the rainbow colouring the love I buy myself as a treat for the slight inconvenience of having a father who will never understand me.

Despite this, I love love. I piss love into every corner of my world. I believe in love and I believe in the power of love to give me a bright sugary sunshine life that people will read about on FamousBirthdays.com or in the Facebook comments below my obitch-uary.

Love is my essence and my middle name and I tried really hard this time and it didn’t work.

On D-Day, I stuck a note on the wall that reads: “More love is possible. It’s okay that it’s over. Good parts and bad. I did the best job I’ve ever done.” Later adding “still true, even as feelings evolve”, for good measure.

Love is not a finite resource. Love is not a finite resource. Love is not a finite resource.

And it is the best job I’ve ever done. Much better than my 2017-2018 relationship with the “Norse God”, as he was recently described by my friend Ryan Bobkin p.g.a.

Things ended and I thought about the mess in love I held myself back from being. From screaming, throwing picture frames and yelling I hate you. From showing up late or cancelling dinner out of spite. I think of the babychild that internalized ”if I’m going to be weird and undesirable and queer, then I have to be perfect.” Perfect even in failure.

I am still very much in Paris, wandering unfamiliar streets with lots to feel and not much to say. And on bad days I am in Eataly, the night before Gilead steals me to become a Handmaid.

In some divine intervention, (weeks spent browsing Kijiji) a Sphynx kitten in the shade “2006 skin colour crayon” was delivered to my door the morning after my breakup.

I named him Booboo and realized instantly that the kind of love I was asking for was on Kijiji all along.