The appointment was at the SPCA was for 5:00 and I knew my mom was going to call me after they had put him down. I had spent the better part of the day wandering around the apartment waiting for the call, listening to a mixtape I had put together for a friend who had lost somebody close, looking at photos of the old boy from back before he was old, once or twice crying, or, almost crying, because it felt like I hadn’t cried in so long my body didn’t actually know how to go all the way with it.
I didn’t eat for most of the day and at some point I started to get cold. A long rectangle of sunlight slanted in through the curtains and across the floor and I went over to lie in it. Like a dog, really. I fell asleep there on the floor sometime around 5:30, which was probably right around the time he was closing his eyes for the last time. I woke up out of a very deep, very real-seeming dream to the phone call at 5:46. The phone buzzed on the floor where I had put it beside my head and I snapped out of the dream, picked it up, looked at, said, “Fuck,” spent 3 seconds trying to bring my mind back into waking reality, and answered.
I don’t remember exactly what was going on in the dream I was having before the call and I’m not normally a very spiritual or supernatural-believing-in type of person, but I feel like the old doggo was in it there for a second or two, his yellow ears perked up and flopped forward, looking at me to see what I was going to do next, asking me to take him with me.
14th and sophia.
mackenzie beach.
brette.
mish, chris.
james gardner.
grindelwald, 2012.
teleview, bischofschwiesen, 2012.
filip flisar, 2012.
Collingwood, Ontario, 2012.
first snow, 2012.
its long been a failing of mine that everything i think i feel like saying i feel has already been said by the song i happen to be listening to on repeat at the time i feel like writing. that song right now is ‘weed king’ by guided by voices. i steal a line from ‘weed king’ and write it down, intending to go on from there on my own. instead i write down the next line from ‘weed king.’ i stare at the two lines and then erase them.
it’s 11:34, friday night. i’m going to be in bed by midnight. i don’t feel any anxiety or accomplishment in this. it just is, like everything in life is right now. anything is permitted, everything is acceptable. calmness is acceptable, comfort is permitted. looking myself in the face is comfortable. calm is how i feel about the way things are.
we conjure ghosts and then we feed them, and if it all goes well we’ll laugh a lot and take photographs of what we made
and although we know that haste makes waste we also know that stasis breeds bad hair and future regrets we might be too stupid to realize we should have had. we should never settle for anything less than what we’ve worked to achieve and never achieve anything beyond what we’re equipped to control with some amount of grace.
guided by voices were a band i thought that i could never be into, let alone become engrossed in, but this week i changed my own mind and all i had to do was listen to them.
power failure, iPhone flashlight app illumination, antonia wilson, 2011.
antonia wilson, 2011 - http://alimitedtimeonly.tumblr.com
lion’s gate.
