II. Rumination

The Sunday I got the news, man, I was lying in bed just fuckin’ brutally hungover. I talked to C. and I didn’t know what to say at all. There was this angry old westerly wind blowing through. You know the one-enough to blow over all your patio furniture. I sat there in bad and rolled one after another and wondered if there was a little piece of you blowing through from Calgary on the coattails of that wind. I wondered what you would have said. Remember when we lived at Purple Lights, and you got home from school and asked me if I had a smoke, and was like ‘Shit, no man, I’m fuckin’ broke, I was hoping you’d have one…’ and we sat on the couch and talked about how shit being broke was and we dumped out the ashtray and rolled up the butts. Then you said something that’s stuck with me ever since–you said ‘There’s no shame in rolling butts, man. There’s no shame in having to roll butts every once in a while. You gotta do what you gotta do.’

But anyways, like I said, there was this angry old wind…Fuck man, you know, I would have loved the chance to say goodbye.

We all just kind of found ourselves sitting there like fuckin’ idiots, knowing it meant something, but not knowing what it was.

I. One in the morning, Trinity Bight.

Past midnight in Trinity East, the main road is almost completely black in places on nights without stars. Of these nights there are many. It is not difficult to wander off the road and find yourself suddenly inches away from smacking into a tree placed conveniently right at the spot where the gravel shoulder meets the land. It is dark, dark, dark–A dark you don’t know when you’re accustomed to the city. A dark that is hard forget once you’ve spent time in it. Until you find yourself walking around alone in the deepest hours of the morning. If you’re home and expecting someone, you leave a light on.

This dark is quiet. Often the trudge of your shoes on the ground is the only thing that echoes through it. A softly closing door. the flick of a lighter. Nocturnal wildlife. The occasional vehicle, audible from a great distance, direction easily placed with plenty of time to meander to the side of the road before they approach you. Nocturnal people. Close to the water, the splash of the waves, barely at all some evenings, other evenings a sound far rougher at it’s edges.

Nothing at all. A fog horn. Whatever is inside your head.