Two o'clock in the morning and the cars on this little sliver of a street have finally gone still enough for me to sprawl on the porch in my nightgown, but the sky out east over Toronto is still the deep purple of Canadian light pollution, the deep purple od hand-painted Inuit and "first people" tourist paintings, done entirely in cheap watercolour that always seemed so cheesy until the first time I actually returned to Canadian soil from another skyline and realized how true it was.
The purple I saw on a thousand wolf-against-starry-sky t-shirts as I boxed them in the warehouse ten years ago, before carrying the twenty kilo box onto the truck.
I was too lazy to put them down for weighing on the way to loading, so I would step up onto the scale with the dozen's dozen t-shirts wedged against the perma-bruise on my hip, the bevvy of overly muscled mexicans on my team giggling like schoolgirls, the same way they giggled when they told a rude joke and saw recognition in my fifteen year old eyes.
THe sky is still that purple through the old white window, the storm is stopped and I am still drowning in his enourmous white bathrobe, I can hear the gentle snores of a stressed man filtering under the door of the bedroom.
Tonight Johnny and the firemen ditched us, and in turn we ditched Steph and her new boy and their plans for "blacklight bowling" and Larry and his birthday at Savage, I didn't have the guts to call yesterday's friend and instead of all of it we rented Terry Gilliam's first movie on a madcap whim after I'd dazedly announced that I'd never seen "Time Bandits".
It only took two video stores and two estranged conversations to find it
and I giggled with geek glee when each salesman asked "VHS or DVD" and Mr. Pyke simply and facetiously said "yes".
This morning was forgetting that Debbie was in town this weekend and wandering past her bedroom door stark naked just as she was emerging with sleep in her eyes.
I apologized not for my discomfort, but for hers.
The St-Laurence market was something I remembered from so many cities, fresh vegetables (I bought beets and their carmine ebullience is still singing up at me through a flight of stairs and a heavy refrigerator door), and shiny toys too crowded and too silv'ry for my eyes to rest long enough on any of them, fresh handmade soaps where I learned NOT to just pick things up and put them to my nose because
inhaling fresh jasmine (tea) makes my toes curl happily
inhaling fresh lavender makes my shoulders unclench
inhaling fresh coffee makes my brain smile
inhaling pure lye feels like a herd of elephants taking turns raping my sinus cavity and urinating in my eyeballs.
Is that what an allergy feels like? The overwhelming UGH and then the watering in the eyes?
Oh gods, I'll take flat feet and a propensity for sheer stupidity over allergies any day.
The man who sold the raw honey giggled at us about vampires, the woman who warned me that the sausage was very spicy (and was ACTUALLY UNDERSTATING! Yeah!) called me a "Cudowna dziewczyna" (spelling not necessarily accurate), the hippy who sold us the oatmeal and camomile soap commented on how we were both wearing humourous t-shirts and for some reason I found this so charming, despite the obvious "make contact with your customers"ness of it.
I spilled miso soup all over a little girl and her mother's purse. The sushi lady laughed bubblingly at me.
I bought perfect black tiger shrimp that are sitting in the freezer awaiting masala-like inspiration. I loved watching the fishboy's fingers slip and slide as he scooped them up for me.
I drank bubble-tea and remembered every time we used to hide upstairs at the Faubourg to study for university exams because the library was full, and the lady at the Korean counter there brought us tea with tapioca balls in it to bollster us through our studies.
She let us pay for it some of the time, the rest of the time she just laughed and nodded at the thousand fluttering pages strewn about us along the abandoned caf� tables. She was the one who pointed out that the redhead we were studying with hung awfully closely off my every word.
I started telling the whole story of my bubble tea memories today and realized
not everyone wants to hear the contents of my head.
A suncatcher glinted at me as we passed and my hair smells like aloe and my hands smell like almonds (and I promise it isn't cyannide) and there are strawberries in the kitchen for breakfast and I will remember the smile of the salesgirl as I eat them
and I spent an extra hour on the front porch listening to the storm because it made the air smell of Canada.