Duct-tape and soldered wires

We had two big snowfalls here in the last week. From our apartment, we sit on the couch or stand idly in the kitchen, we look out through our south-facing windows and bear witness to the changing weather. We watch the wind start to blow, watch the snow join in as it fights to fall slowly at rest. Watch it fall faster and heavier until snow is all there is to see. The whites of our eyes mirrored in the streets and sidewalks. Our cats sit in their carpet and plywood trees by the window and watch the snow fall onto pavement they will never really know, and they can find a different kind of wonder in the winter. They don’t actually know that it’s cold and wet, that it can be dangerous in large enough quantities. They just think there’s something beautiful worth witnessing, and it’s hard to fault them for this.

It’s winter. The news talks about hockey, and I loathe that we are entering a new era of Canadian nationalism. Nationalism spurned on by the looming threat of annexation by a country that has no claim to us. I hate that we are slipping into being nationalistic about a country that many of us have no rights to ownership of. This is Indigenous land that we live on, most of us are settlers in this place, and it’s no more ours to claim heritage on than it is someone else’s to take. Out on the street, cars have Canadian flags stuck to their windows, and it reminds me of when trucks rambled down these streets honking and yelling conspiracy theories. Flags rarely ever arrive at the head of great things.

I am not nationalistic, but I am protective of the memories I have of the places I have lived. I am protective of the feeling of winter when the snow falls, and of a home I no longer have. I am protective of the days gone that don’t belong to me. They aren’t mine to claim, but I come from them all the same, and they are part of me still.

Bowie, our dog, loves the snow. When it falls by the window, he lies on the floor below where the cats sit in their perch and watches it. His eyes follow the snow falling to the street below, trusting that he will know soon enough how it feels to jump through it. Lysh and I go to bed, happy with the small promises. Knowing how happy he will be in the morning, when the snow is fresh and untouched under his feet. When everything is still and perfect and calm. We are happiest when anxiety hasn’t woken up yet, and all that stirs is the beauty of this life.

The snow continues to fall, even after we close the blinds, put dishes in the sink, make sure there’s coffee ground for the morning. We talk about the anxious things, then we try to shake them from our minds. I wash my face, do my little routine. I put my phone on top of a canister in the bathroom and play music out of its little speaker. Sometimes I have a little cry, alone in the bathroom, so I can shake it out of my head before I try to sleep. Sometimes I need to release it in private where no one can see me. I have my useless little cry, and then I run warm water over a mostly clean washcloth. Then cleanser. Then a little cry again. Then an under-eye serum, retinol, and moisturizer. Then tears and the memories of them get wiped away by cotton pads and a 5% exfoliating product. I move my phone from the bathroom to the charger on my desk, a habit I started a year and a half ago. I stopped letting myself have a phone on the bedside table, and it has changed my life. I’m reverting to my youth, before phones were omnipresent and all that I had to help me sleep was the haunting sounds of the world setting into quiet and the noise my brain continued to conjure. Music maybe, or the anxious thoughts that race through my mind, the ones I try to collect into proper thoughts. I will fade at some point, and then the morning will come, and if it doesn't, I’ll never know.

Bowie wakes me up early because he knows I will always get up early if he asks me to, and although I like to rise at 4:30, by 4 he usually has other plans for us. We get up, I start the coffee, put my clothes on backwards, and then right way. Grab my phone and headphones and bundle up for the winter, then together we venture out into it. The snow fresh and ready under our feet as we shuffle through it, making new tracks in fresh snow that sits on old, tired pavement. The winter here feels different from the winter I grew up with, it’s nice to know it can feel new, and I click the wire on my headphones to start music for the morning.

The sidewalks are watching me think about you

John K. Samson, and by extension the Weakerthans, understands winter better than most. They write about cats, curling rinks, penguins, and Shackleton. Songs like flipping through a card catalogue, with a prevailing sense of winter in so much of their work. The winter that lives here in us and around us, that doesn’t feel the same anywhere else. How the snow crunches under feet in the dark, the snap of it making rhythm out of nothing at all. There’s a poetry in it, an art to capturing its tenor.

I let my mind wander and imagine myself in a half-recalled memory of home. I will often tell people about the cold in the Yukon as a weird little brag, showing off my recollections of seasons past as if they’re stickers in a book that I’ve kept loosely organized over the years. A nothing kind of brag about a nothing kind of thing, but it feels important to me to have had this. The way 50 degrees below zero feels on the skin, a feeling most will never know. How snow sounds different when it’s colder than you ever dreamed possible. Snow where it’s warm is wet and slushy, but in the cold and under the darkest skies it’s hard and brittle like stale bread.

Last night I had a dream that I was at a friend’s funeral, and this morning I had to wake up and check the obituaries to make sure it wasn’t real. I’ve been here before, lost friends and been to their funerals and never had the chance to say goodbye the want we all want to say our own perfect goodbye. The first time I ever knew someone who died, it was winter, and I was 14. I went to work after school, the school where he died, and cried at the sink in the bathroom of a grocery store until someone forced me to go home. The friend from my dream last night is still alive, but we haven’t spoken in years, and occasionally, I think we never will again. My brain conjuring the spectre of a funeral for a life I no longer have, filled with friends I no longer see, the connections that stretched and snapped when I moved away to collect and rebuild myself.

There are things we lose in transition, and this is one of them. The first year after I came out, I lost my mind, and the year before it too. I was scared, and I was excited to be alive, but unsure of who I really was once I accepted I had always been a lie. That nervous and anxious energy mixed with alcohol and turned into something terrible. I tested and weathered all the relationships I had access to until they were shreds of paper that once held memento's of time spent together. After my first year of being out, I left home, and the snow has never felt the same since.

Memory will rust and erode into lists, of all that you gave me

“Left and Leaving” often feels like a poem read at the funeral of a memory, words cast off to a home left behind, and the painful, familiar things it holds on to. The narrator moving through the wisp of familiar sidewalks and faces without names of a home that lives on the way it always has. A home that continues to move the way it always has, even without me in it. Small towns run like this, every life within them a delicate part of the ecosystem, and moving away from it makes the tether taut and tender. It takes cultivating and careful tending to make it strong, and I ran so fast that all of mine snapped. But walking on the sidewalk, here in Toronto in the sober dusk-dark of the morning, the snow snaps the same under my foot as it once did in the Yukon, and suddenly, I’m home again. The cold on my face familiar, like a friend long thought lost.