Changing Homes

I just celebrated 10 years at my job. I was 28 when I started and ready for anything and everything to happen to me. Now I'm 39 and someone needs to explain to me what the hell happened? Everything and nothing, like water down a drain.

If grief is the response to loss, then nostalgia must be some sort of grief too. Only we’re grieving a place we no longer live, a person that no longer feels like ourselves. When I see her in pictures she has a lightness to her, her smile comes a little more easily. All the things that happened in those years have not yet happened to her and she’s blissfully unaware that they’re going to. She’s you but she’s not you yet. I don’t know what I prefer.

Like that photo of all of us sitting around Roger’s bachelor apartment; his bed in the corner, we’re on the floor around the coffee table, ash trays are full. I remember an ice cream cake was stuffed in the freezer but it had previously already melted once. Our party was interrupted by the fire alarm, and we stood on the sidewalk in the freezing cold, watching firemen run into the building. That was the night I turned 22.

Life surprises me with its resemblance not to a straight line, but to a quilt, slowly growing one patch at a time, only slightly aware of the end of one patch and the beginning of another.

Only a year later I was turning 23 in a house in Calgary, three thousand five hundred kilometres away from Roger’s place. This time we were in a brown 2 story house we’d just started renting. Georgia decided at 6am to throw me a party and invited the downstairs neighbours and their 6 cats. I remember how excited they were to go to their first ever early morning birthday party, as they opened the front door and the cats came piling in. They enthusiastically called in sick for work and one of them brought a Treatza Pizza from Dairy Queen. Georgia arranged little breakfast plates for us all with sandwiches, a clementine and little chocolates. The beauty of a Birthday between Christmas and New Years is all the little chocolates hanging around. We hung out in our furniture-less apartment drinking, eating ice cream pizza, and petting cats all morning. A few days earlier I’d gotten a paranormal disposable camera in my stocking, so all the photos I have from this birthday morning include strange ghostly figures in every corner. It was a memorable party, even though everyone was passed out by noon. This house, my first house in Calgary, has since burnt down.

These are the places I wish I could visit from my past, briefly on a Friday night, like a pop-up bar of my house in Ramsay in 2008. This place was a treasure, and anyone that ever visited it would confirm. Sure, I’m romanticizing it, there’s no doubt about that, but what if I just built it, how I remember it; the dark hardwood, arched doorways, long red curtains that matched the red rug, and that big orange piece of furniture that opened up and was both a bar with a back mirror but also a record player with speakers. So let’s say I could visit a pop up bar of my house in Ramsay in 2008, and lets say I invited Geoff, and Angela, Duncan too. I can see us putting Alan Parsons Project on the record player/bar and sitting on the front porch with gin and tonics, cans of lucky, smoking Duncan’s American spirits. We’d remember things we’d forgotten, as only sitting together with friends in the space can truly remind us, but eventually I’d realize that I don’t drink anymore and Chris has died, and Ryan before him. So can that house, that porch really be anything more than a pile of bricks without the heart and souls of those boys in it?