For a few days, there was a pretty terrible smell in the hallway by the elevator near the entrance I use to get in and out of my building.  Then the smell was gone and there was a whole bunch of furniture stacked up by the garbage bins out back.  Apparently the forensics unit had stopped by somewhere in between the disappearance of the smell and the appearance of the furniture but I hadn’t noticed them.  Or maybe I had — I often see the police here, I just don’t pay close enough attention to them to see what units are showing up.  To be honest, I didn’t even notice that the cat who is usually sitting in the window of the apartment by the entrance had vanished.  It was only when a neighbour pointed in the window that I noticed that the cat was gone and the room was half gutted.
They say she killed the cat before she killed herself.
One of my neighbours said that he once found her crying on the front steps of the building.  When he asked her why she was crying she said she was hungry and had no food.  He asked her if she had any parents who might help her out and she had told him that they wouldn’t help her anymore.  They said maybe next month.  They said she had to be more responsible.  He was appalled and put together a big box of food for her.
She wasn’t all that old.  Younger than me by half a dozen years, I reckon.  She wore glasses and had short red curly hair.  I think she had some sort of developmental disability.  She was always friendly with the kids and I.  I know another woman in the building was bullying her.  Everyone else knows this other woman.  Most, except for a few of the hardcore drinkers who are always lounging around out back, avoid this other woman as much as possible.  The last time I spoke with the girl who is said to have killed herself and her cat, she told me that this other woman had threatened her life and told her not to talk with any of the men in the building.  The girl who is said to have killed herself and her cat said that the other woman wanted all the men to herself.
I remember thinking, “Why would anybody want to bully you?  How could anybody feel threatened by you?”  And I felt sad and angry and helpless.
Sometime around the time she stopped being who she had been, sometime around the time she stopped being at all, we were laying in bed, all mixed up together — limbs and heat and breath and thoughts and silences all tangled up together — and I was tracing the lines on your face.  The curve of your brow, the dip of your temple, the line of your jaw, I was tracing you in space, when you asked me to tell you a story.  I didn’t know what story I would tell, I did not know this story until I told it, but this was the story I told:
Once upon a time there was a boy who lived in the forest.  He made a house out of cans he had found but every night the wind would blow the cans down.  They would fall with a crash around him and wake him up and then he would lay in the dark, exposed to the night and its creatures, too scared to move.  He would cry until the sun came up.  When the sun came up, he would set his house of cans back up and then go looking for food.  By the time he came back, the cans would have fallen down again and so he would set them back up in the evening before he fell asleep and before they fell down around him and woke him up and left him crying in the night.  And this went on and on, day after day, night after night.
Some days, he would walk to the road that passed through the woods, and ask the people who traveled on that road to help him or feed him or take him away with them.  But they never seemed to see or hear him.  They passed by him like the wind and he was less than the air the wind passed through.
Other days, when out looking for food, he would discover families of people who did not live in the forest, who had stopped in this or that clearing in order to have a picnic.  Sometimes they would throw scraps to the animals — a piece of fruit for a bird, a nut for a squirrel, bread crumbs for the ants — and he would try to snatch the scraps away.  But the people would throw rocks at him and beat him with sticks.  “This food is for the animals!  It is for the bird, and the squirrel, and the ants!  Go away!”  And he would go away, sore and hungry, and back to his house of fallen cans.
One day, he decided that he would go onto the road and follow it out of the woods.  He walked and he walked and he walked until his feet were sore and blistered from the pavement.  But the woods were still all around him, so he continued walking.  He walked and he walked and he walked until his blisters had burst and his feet were trailing blood.  But the woods were still all around him, so he continued walking.  The sun began to set and the night, along with its creatures, began to awaken and, finally, he was unable to walk anymore.  He could not stand and so he crawled to the side of the road.  He was a long, long way from his house of cans.  But the woods were still all around him.  Night came.  The wind blew.  And he was less than the air the wind passed through.
The End.

I recently watched a documentary about a fellow who spends some time with children in an AIDS orphanage in India.  One of the boys becomes very ill.  His body becomes covered in sores and blisters that burst and stay open and seep and make him look like his skin is peeling away from his body.  The doctors say the same thing is happening to the membranes and tissues inside of him as well.  His lips look like God or the devil has taken a potato peeler to them.  A compress is kept over his eyes, blinding him, in order to try and prevent infection from spreading there.  He frequently spits or drools out blood and mucus and, I don’t know, the kind of fluid you think oozes from wounds.
He is in a lot of pain.
His name is Surya.  He is about the same size as Charlie.  Charlie, my son, Charlie, my beloved, Charlie my beautiful one whose hair smells like sunshine.  Charlie who takes me by the hand and looks up into my eyes and tells me that I am beautiful and that I make his heart feel happy and then asks if he can sit on my lap and watch a movie with me.  This Surya, he is also somebody’s son, it’s just his parents died, ya know?  He is also beloved, it’s just that the people who love him aren’t wealthy or influential or connected, see?  And I’m sure his hair also smells like the wind and childhood and earth and the wonder, and when the person who was with him got up to leave and use the bathroom, he also took him by the hand and, speaking for the first time in days, said, “No!”  This Surya, this Charlie, this boy, this beloved child, he said “No!” because he was afraid that he would die in those moments when he was alone.
I watched all of this far away from where Suryas are too numerous to count.  I watched it play out as a movie on a flat screen HDTV.  And I cried awhile, and the gal who was with me, who loves me and whom I love, she cried awhile, too, and we held each other and later that night we made love and then the next morning the alarm went off on my smartphone (which, like most things I own, is made by children like Surya who live and die like Surya) and I went off to work and she went off to school.
And life went on.
And death did, too.
~
A year ago, I would have laughed at the idea of referring to sex as “making love”.  Who talks that way?  If sex was transcendental, it was simply because the nearly pure physicality of it could permit sad and lonely and broken and lost and angry and weary people — people like me — to momentarily forget all of these things.  In sex, you can lose your self in touching and being touched, in giving and taking, in caressing, and in fucking.  You can give yourself away, you can become absorbed in another — just as another can become absorbed in you — and in that forgetting you can also forget that this life doesn’t seem worth living.  But, hell, all the reasons for dying seem like bullshit, too, and so, in this limbo between the living and the dead, there is, at least, la petite mort.
Funny just how much can change in a year.
~
In the documentary that featured Surya, the Charlie covered in sores, there was also a young girl who becomes very ill and comatose and is on the verge of dying.  The father eventually tries to rush her to the hospital — he is sitting on the back of a motorbike, holding her in his arms — she is naked but for a blanket — and they get caught on the road waiting for a train to pass at a rail crossing.  She dies then.  We see her die — her head falls back, her mouth open, everything totally limp and the father cannot close her mouth.  He takes her in his arms, the blanket falling from her body and turns and starts walking back into the night with her.  “I am taking her home.”
What was her name?  I don’t remember her name.  But the film makers thought the scene was dramatic enough that they decided to include it twice — once at the beginning, without any subtitles or talking (what better hook for those of us far way watching this movie on HDTVs, right?), and once later one within the context of the story and with a voice over.  I do remember this though: wrapped in a shroud, her body looked tiny, as did the grave they buried her in.  When she was buried, she didn’t look any bigger than my Ruby, my beloved, my beautiful girl who isn’t afraid to say, “No!” to me when I tell her it is bath time, and who asks me to be a monster so she can sit me down and bring me presents in the closet, and who want to hold my head on her stomach when she is falling asleep.  I watched the dad bury this little girl, I watched him weep and hit himself in the forehead when he looked at pictures of her, I watched him love his Ruby and lose her.  Forever and ever and ever.  And this is not uncommon.  To cite just one, from any number of possible examples, around 2000 children under the age of five die every day from diarrhea-related disease.  That’s two thousand Charlies and Rubies every day.  That’s more than one every minute. Gone forever and ever and ever.
Welcome to the world we live in.  Things don’t have to be this way.  We all know that.  It’s just that we haven’t wanted to love one another at least well enough to prevent the needless suffering and dying of children.  And we never will.  Things will always be this way with us.  We know this, too.
~
Last weekend I went to my father’s wedding.  I missed the first (wasn’t born then) and the second (wasn’t speaking with him then) but I made the third.  It was a small ceremony in an old stone Anglican church with beautiful wood floors, and candles, and stained glass windows, and a pipe organ that I loved as much as all the other parts combined.  Ruby thought we were in a castle, she thought the priest — who was wearing a white robe — was a ghost, and she thought the bride was a princess.  She was pretty excited about the whole thing and stood on the pew the whole time so that she could “see the princess.”  Charlie was a lot less excited about the actually ceremony but he played games on my phone and it kept him still and quiet.
And me?  I don’t know what all I was feeling.  Or maybe I do but I don’t think I can talk about the way it felt without, in that very act of talking (or writing), retroactively changing what happened.  So I’ll say no more about that.
What a mess life is, eh?  How often we hurt when we desire to help, how often we betray when we desire to love, how often we curse when we desire to bless.  It is very hard to know what we are doing, regardless of what our intentions are.
And how often we get bogged down in our own wounds, our own cuts and scars and insecurities, and never see anything beyond ourselves.  Even now — I watched a movie and I feel things about characters therein by comparing them to my own children, whom I will continue to love in practical ways (just as I will continue to ignore or oppress the Suryas and the girls whose names I forget in practical ways), so, really, am I even seeing anything beyond myself here?
~
After I watched this documentary, I wanted to be more kind.  I wanted to never be angry at another person again.  I just wanted to love… and be loved, too.  I’m weary of anger and frustration and pettiness and violence, violence, violence everywhere.  But, you know, after I went to work the next morning somebody was rude to the fellow who helps me out and makes coffee in the Resource Centre I supervise and so I decided to be rude back to the fellow who disrespected my helper.  I didn’t say anything rude in words — but in my tone and in my body language, I basically told the fellow that he could fuck off and I didn’t give a shit about anything he might have to say about that.  Then, that night, Charlie and Ruby were refusing to go to sleep and I felt frustrated, even after reflecting upon Surya and the girl whose name I forgot, even after thinking how I failed that fellow at my work, even after recognizing these things in the midst of feeling frustrated… I still felt frustrated and, after sternly telling the kids to be quiet and go to bed, I went to another room and dropped a number of whispered eff bombs as I washed the dishes (in an overly aggressive manner… fucking dishes).
Do I ever learn anything at all?  Woe to me if I can watch a documentary like that and go on unchanged and unchanging.
~
…
~
But I will tell you a secret.  A very exciting one.  One wholly unanticipated.  One I stopped believing in a long, long time ago.  Are you ready?  This is the secret:
I have already begun to change.
Ain’t that something?  Because I was dead but I am now alive.  And that breaking process, that slow inexorable shattering that drained me of my insides and filled me up with darkness inside?  It wasn’t the final word.  My pieces are coming together again.  But I am not going back to being who I was before.  I am being made new.  I, too, have experienced the resurrection of the dead.  Here and now, I have been born again — this time from the dead.
This is what love has done with me.  How about that, eh?  I wouldn’t trade this love for anything in the world.  Not that I could trade it even if (for some unimaginably absurd reason) I wanted to do so.  This love after all, is something I am in,  not something I produce.  It is more an event and an environment than a choice.  At least for me.  Perhaps the one who loves me, who introduced me to this love in which we are now situated, perhaps for her it was a choice.  For me it was not.  The dead don’t make choices.  They’re simply dead.  I could not choose myself back alive.  I could not heal myself.  My heart felt as though it had been broken into pieces, and the pieces had been burned, and then the charred remains had been wrapped all around with barbed wire.  But when she first laid her head on my shoulder, when she first held my hand, when she first said to me, “I love you,” everything changed and the wires were cut and the ashes were swept away and the pieces came back together and, just like the motherfucking Grinch, my heart grew three sizes that day… and it hasn’t stopped growing since.  I’ve got a long way to go yet, my hair still stinks like the grave and I’m a bit of a mess and sometimes old feelings or reactions still surface, but a resurrection is more like an insurrection than a makeover.  It takes times but, baby, it runs all the way up and all the way down and the fruit that it bears are a lot longer lasting than a tan and botox injections.
~
And the girl, the Ruby who died?  Her name is Vembadi.  I will not forget it again.  She died but our time with her has not ended.  Because we know her story now.  We are responsible for it and we our responsible for ourselves and how we will live in light of it.
Whether or not this proves to be a responsibility we can handle will be determined, I think, by whether or not we are in love.

I’ve seen her at the pub before.  She is young, especially for a place like this, and one of the first things most any fellow would notice about her is how full her lips are.  Generally she is sitting at the bar drinking with an older fellow – not the same older fellow – but different men who look almost but not quite old enough to be her father.
She doesn’t smile very much.  Her posture and her expressions remind me of the way a person drinks at a work function.
Another gal I used to drink with at this pub once told me that she is a sex worker who picks up clients here.  Perhaps it is the formality with which she drinks that led to this conclusion… perhaps it is the ever changing older and far less attractive men around her.
I don’t know if this story is true.  Maybe she’s just socially awkward and, let’s be honest, it’s pretty much only older folks who drink at this place so if a pretty young gal shows up here, there’s bound to be any number of daddies creeping on her.  And, who knows, maybe the gal who told me this story was just feeling insecure or jealous of her beauty.
But, honestly, I don’t care either way.  If a person chooses to be a sex worker, I reckon that’s no better or worse than choosing to be a social worker or a construction worker or any other kind of worker.
~
When she sits down beside me, I thought I had a pretty clear idea of where our conversation might go.  We are both fairly drunk – her more than me, I think, as she keeps repeating the same questions or makes the same statements multiple times.  She begins by telling me that she is a registered nurse but later states that she’s actually a nurse practitioner – it’s just most people don’t understand what a nurse practitioner is, so it’s easier to say she’s an RN.  On weekends, she goes to Toronto and is a “Bud Girl” at special events.  She does a mock performance of how she gets the fellas to buy beer from her.  She is quick to call me “honey”.  Mostly, I only like it when the older servers at the bar call me that.  They’ve spent a lifetime waiting tables, dealing with drunks, putting up with pricks and I reckon they can get away with calling people “dear” or “honey” or “sweetie.”  Whenever the younger servers pull that on me, I feel like they’re trying too hard.  Let’s not get carried away, okay?
But she calls me “honey” and she touches my arm a lot when she talks to me.  She asks me if I’m single and I say that I am.  She asks me why and I am honest and say that most everybody I meet bores me – I don’t really give a fuck about hearing somebody talking about her favourite TV shows or her favourite kind of music or the fact that she really digs guys who can make her laugh.  Wow! Who knew?  God, what a bore.  She says she understands and feels exactly the same way about the guys she has met since moving to Ontario when she was twenty-four.  That was three years ago – she came here from B.C. – and started a new life for herself.
I don’t mention that I’ve already decided that she is boring, too.
~
She gets excited when she learns that I play piano and have a keyboard.  Turns out she is a classically trained musician – piano and vocals.  She asks if I have all eighty-eight keys and if they are pressure sensitive.  It is imperative that they be pressure sensitive.  I say that they are but that I don’t have a full range.  She asks if I have drinks at my place and if I like to party.  I mention I have drinks but I don’t party much these days.  But, hey, I don’t care if she indulges.
~
She asks about going back to my place.
I say okay.
Getting into her car she says, “But we’re just doing this as friends, right?  This is just a friends thing, okay?”
I say okay.
~
My place is a bit of a mess from having kids for the last four days.  I tidy up quickly and mix a drink for her as she settles at the keyboard.  She plays some songs from memory and some songs from sheets that I have.  I play a few songs and she sings in the background.  She has a decent voice but she is an exceptional piano player.  When I play, she pauses to powder her nose… a few times.  And then she plays one of the most beautiful renditions of the Moonlight Sonata that I have ever heard.
When she finishes, she says thank you very much and, gosh, it’s hot in here, and I escort her to her car and say goodnight.  I smoke a final cigarette out back after she drives away and then I go to bed.
~
A friend tells me I should be looking to get laid.  She points out that the mock profiles I set up on an online dating site – one to see if I could get rid of an old toaster, one pretending to be a total D&D nerd dressed up like a banana, and one pretending to be a circus bear – aren’t actually very conducive to meeting people and she reminds me that, really, I should be more serious about dating or at least picking people up.  She says it’ll make things easier.
I’m not so sure.  The story of lonely people meeting in bars and going home to lose themselves in the embrace of strangers seems a little overplayed.  I met a girl at a pub.  She came home with me and played my piano and then she left.  I never touched her once.  And, that, I think, made this whole encounter much less boring than I thought it was going to be.  I was laughing to myself about it as I fell asleep.
~
I hope I don’t ever see her again.