How romantically beatnik an evening yesterday turned out to be.
Somewhat delirious from medication, I piled my pink ringlets atop my head and swathed myself in pleated black pants and a narrowly ribbed black turtleneck and my long, black, ever-so-ladylike earth-draping coat with the victorian princess hood, and climbed into David's car, waiting out on the road for me.
We dined on hot dogs at the historic Montreal Poolroom, that thirty five years ago was the cheapest place in town to get hot dogs and strawberry-flavoured soda, the hot dogs there now are double the meagre price of all the fast food chains that have sprouted in the neighbourhood, but the yellowing maps on the walls are still there from when my father first came here to lay down a life for his soon to burdgeon family.
Then we marched up the stairs of the Monument National theatre, peeking into the big theatre hall, confused to find it dark.
Until we found the little playroom.
Ten tables or so, with chairs about them, would've seated perhaps thirty people if they were very, very, friendly theatre-goers.
We chose the taller table towards the back, and the waiter brought us beer.
David seemed so apologetic when he found out how tiny the venue was.
I told him stories of the illegal venue somewhere terribly far north on Berri street, in the back of a truck-storage building, where we saw productions of anything from Jean Annouilhe's "Antigone" to locally written sketches about lover's spats on trains, where seats were donations only.
Sometimes we would pay $5 if we had it, sometimes we would simply pay with our appreciation of the show...
That was a long time ago.
Almost as long ago as I felt the welling up tears that yesterday's play brought out in me...
It was about a writer trying to write. The two supporting characters were "Thought 1" and "Thought 2" and somehow the director managed to choreograph them so perfectly...
...and the writer would sit there and think about thinking, and scribble about scribbling, and break out of his mind and scream at the audience, of his dead drunk father, of his mother who had died inside, of how he joined a gang at fourteen for three years...
...and now, at nineteen, was trying to build a life, despite the plaguing nightmares of his father...
He never loved his father...
Three years on the streets, eh? Three years playing punk-ass bitch and carring a knife like he thought he meant it.
Three years, (and I'm extrapolating here because really all he said was three years) hardening his face into someone else's entirely, and stalking the city streets...
"Montreal was our skating rink"
I remember writing that, last year, the first time I allowed myself to think of it.
The play in itself was brilliantly funny, but the moment he mentioned "three years"...
Is it just me, or is the moratorium three years for everybody?
Three years or you never get out.
Three years.
And now it's been... Seven since then.
Ten since it all began.
And what have I done?
I've learned to love, to laugh, to tell jokes with the wave of a hand or a hip, I've learned to fuck or make love as the moment permits, I've learned to doze my way through university and play corporate whore and sound like I know my shit when I talk about red wine.
I've learned to do my laundry and how to wear high heels and three shades of eyeshadow so that it doesn't look like I'm really wearing any at all.
I've learned how to pluck my fucking eyebrows.
I've learned how to juggle, how to cry, how to forgive people.
And all that time the writer onstage was bringing up memories of how his father died when he was a kid, and how he wants his father back,
I was shaking my head, whispering to him "no you don't, no you don't, I'd trade you any moment, anything, for you to have your father and for me not to have mine..."
And I can't even feel guilty for it.
I don't have it in me.
He's alive, I know, two of his four heart-attacks he survived because I spent too much time in first aid training.
And every time I knew I was saving him only because of the professionalism beaten into our heads, not because I wanted to.
Oh how badly I didn't want to, how badly I wondered what would have been different if I had accidentally unplugged the phone before dialing 911 and using my A.R pump on him.
But it doesn't matter, he can't ever come that close anymore, the rending insanity spewing from his mouth no longer impinges upon my own.
He can't shatter my horizons anymore...
He can't steal the muses from my dreams, he can't touch any of it, not a single striation of the rainbows I've learned to paint where no one can see them.
"What's wrong with you?!? How can you be such a screw up?!? How do you expect to survive out there in a world where everyone is going to try to lie cheat and steal from you, if you're such a stupid girl..."
Fifteen years later he swears he never used the word stupid, but it's too late now.
He was the only person truly stealing from me.
All the broken dishes have been buried where there shards can't jab into the soft parts of my feet anymore.
Except for last night, shaking hands with the actors and driving home and idly discussing this bit of timing or that clever twist in the plot, my hand on David's knee as he drove too quickly to my appartment, how good he tastes mingled with how hard I was thinking of other things the entire time.
He didn't seem to notice, and we slept well with him clinging to my waist the entire night, and I kicked him out at six o'clock this morning to head out to the ski hill.
It was a beautiful, warm day.
I spent it mostly inside being pampered and coddled by Sandy who was rather upset by my fever-flush cheeks, but the brighter air did me good, and the mulled wine with the antibiotics was definitely a mellow touch.
And I'm still thinking about those three years, and how I was most aware then, most alive, most determined, and most fierce, and yet so fucking far from where I am now.
My thoughts are everywhere and I am losing patience with myself, but there are tears and smiles and tall constellations that speak to me of the myriad of lifetimes we're allowed to lead before the path stops winding.
And in high school when Barbie was drawing pictures of unicorns and rainbows, and I would cut up all my rainbows drawn in shades of black and paste them together as shards of shattered sobs, nobody will ever see those anymore either.
And I never play a rogue in AD&D anymore, for the same reasons.