I spent a great deal of time gazing up at the mountains on my recent trip home. There are small details you lose, living away, like how shreds of white cloud caress the mountains up, stroking in between the trees towards the grey sky. The way woods sound, or don’t. The desolation of fields of broken lava rock, blanketed by lichen, edged by forest but barren where the fire flowed.

I think the socio-romantic lesson I need to take away from my life right now is that it is useless to be upset about the way other people choose to handle things, even if you perceive it as disrespectful to yourself. The more I come to explore the nuances of consent and choice, the less I feel I have a right to dictate others’ reactions. So, while I might not appreciate how someone reacts - or fails to communicate - my displeasure doesn’t necessarily dictate a different manner of being. Even if they made choices callously, that’s still their decision.

Still, I can be frustrated, and angry - that’s my choice. Though I’d prefer not to waste time and energy, I can feel it in order to let it pass through. And it can be my decision to give someone a well-deserved snub, though afterward I might feel a confusing mix of triumphant and kind of terrible.

There are a couple different situations that have provoked these thoughts. My romantic pursuits seem to have some pretty awful cyclical patterns, so I am trying to change my own thinking in order to perhaps avoid whatever commonalities provoke this cycle.

I feel like if I can take away some growth regarding my own reactions to bad situations, I will have Done Something With My Summer. I’m learning to step outside my own sometimes somewhat histronic reactions. It’s also a good note to leave Vancouver on; I’ve been crossed in love so many damn times here that I feel like this cycle needs to be drastically broken, and my leaving will do that.

I leave for nine months in Mexico on September 27, with the strong possibility of European adventures right after so that I may not be back in Vancouver for a year or so. Who will I be when I return? I would like it to be someone who cares less about unreplied-to-texts.

The house my father owned for all of my

26 years sold this summer

while he and my stepmother were touring English villages.

We drove by on the way to new-home,

and the scarlet tulips he and my mother planted when I was born

are covered by a fresh concrete walkway.

So little of what is mine lives in this town now.

He made me a soft-boiled egg this morning

(though did not cut my toast into soldiers)

I had forgotten how to eat from the egg-cup

in the many years since I was a child.

My damaged younger brother

cried on the phone while asking him for money the night I arrived.

I overheard his voice going stern during the conversation.

We drove on the rainy highway

green mountainous curtains parting before our car

while snaky tendrils of white cloud trailed through the trees.

My stepmother sat in my spot in the backseat

so I could see the river

and I argued with him about Nisga’a land rights

looked out the rain-pebbled window at the

wide green Skeena and thought

how do I keep this minute forever

I picked up my old kitty cat. She’s 19 now, my constant childhood companion, and so feeble and slow that it’s hard to recognize her as the sleek black shadow the vet once called “the fittest cat I’ve ever seen”. I’m home, but things are different, just a little different, and I don’t really fit here any more, and I don’t know how many times I will get to say goodbye to my cat again. I picked her up, and this song began playing, and I just started to cry. She’s so old and hates being picked up, is sensitive about where she is touched, but she curled her claws into my shoulder and started to rumble her tiny purr and looked out the window at the snow with me while I stroked her, her green eyes reflecting the light in a way I couldn’t see her cataracts, and it was just like I was fifteen again and we would be going out to explore summery woods, her little ears flicking as she pretended she wasn’t following me. Tears running down my cheeks, and I know part of it is the stupid song, Bon Iver way too good at touching my emotions: I cry under a hands’ count every year, it’s not much, but fuck, tears rolling down my cheek. Home is such a complicated thing. It is good and it is sad and whether a place or a thing or a person or a combination, nothing remains constant, and death and change are inexorable inevitabilities that can be so wonderful and so cruel. Even in the midst of a wonderful, joyful rest, with a family I love, moments like this come. Christmas and Home even for someone so lucky as I am are never simple, never easy, and I wonder if I will ever be able to create that Home for myself the way it is here, with my mum, and this dying cat.

I’ve spent many years fighting who I am, what I like, and how I do out of fear: unoriginality, cloying, boring, female-oriented (artistically: I prefer to love men, but I cannot tell a man’s story, nor convey form as well). I try to stop riding trends while I’m ahead. I have liked pocketwatches, acorns, crystals, and the like since childhood, which makes seeing such things cheapened by jewelery racks at Urban Outfitters, and the cultural implications of every delicate preference mass-marketed, difficult.

I cut my teeth on fairy tales and it is to the fantastical, the magical, and the unashamedly hopeful I wish to return. Cynicism is very well but in my heart of hearts I do believe in good; not as a binary alone but as a driving force. I believe in writing of love and things beloved. Once I was a girl who left out milk and bread for fairies (no, really. You should see where I grew up. If they could be anywhere, it would be there, and I wanted to believe) and when they were consumed - by any manner of forest creature most likely - I tried so very hard to convince myself of the fey at work. I couldn’t, quite. But perhaps my art can have more of the bread and milk left out in hope to it.

Frost beglittering the drunken blue of a vodka cooler can to the side of my dingy East Van sidewalk made me think of my home today. Though Vancouver lays claim to much of my loyalty, my heart will ever belong on an out-of-the-way dirt road just outside the city limits of an out-of-the-way town in northern BC. The press of the forest is glorious there, breathing green pressing in from all sides, and for longer than I would be afforded anywhere else I knew the secrets of the surrounding woods. A child’s ways are similar to those of animals in their fearlessness and instinct. I knew where to cross creeks, how to climb each cliff, and wore paths in the moss with my bare feet. The quorking of ravens could tell me an afternoon’s gossip and I could call back and forth with owls. My black cat would shadow me, both nervous and nonchalant, and we would both run home when heavy dusk fell, the fears of what lived in the forest most pressing. Twilight in the woods should be frightening.

Frost brings to mind, though, the many ways of playing in wintry chill, and the few I wasn’t afforded. I skated out on a frozen lake, the layers of eerie black water so grim below my skates I could barely believe the lake wouldn’t pull me down simply wanting me for its own. In bear and cougar season, staying close to the yard, hollering at intervals. And there was a pond where a boy had drowned, ten or fifteen years before we moved to my road. He fell through ice and died in winter. The pond next to my house, one that we waded in to catch frogs and play in soupy mud, was but a cousin to this deep pond that had claimed his life. My mother looked sad when she told me the story and told me never to play on that pond, thawed or no. It was fed from a rushing creek nearby. She didn’t like its existence and it scared me from then on; I thought of the boy’s bones tangled and alone in the murk, though he had been buried, and I never played on the pond. Instead flying down an icy road on a tobaggan and jumping from high cliffs into great white drifts were the death-defying feats of choice.

I think of my mother, though it is hard to remember what she might have looked like then, and hard to remember my own childishness. I think of her, sad, overworked as she was, warning me into safety, probably with the touch of caustic threat that often turned me rebellious, and I think she was probably sad for the boys’ parents. He was an only child and they moved away from our beautiful lush road after he died. The mothering doesn’t end when your child dies; instead you suckle ghosts, both real and remembered. Hoarfrost on the window, his cold fingers.

alder, hemlock, birch, pine, sitka.

icy bottle green water tumbles through the crystalline craters of kleanza creek

frozen slabs cracked open, bleeding spring rivulets,

ice blossoming high into flowering sculptures where deep pools gather and tumble.

we are snowshoeing.

i pictured contraptions of twig and cured catgut only to find

steel and plastic strapped to my boots.

snow groans beneath them.

we see tracks, pellets, urine; and trees,

palely split open over the trail, like arched ballet dancers with broken backs.

my mother, huffing ahead of me, tells me about

the ground bees that stung her friend near here.

silence in the winter forest is a truly heavy, clean absence of sound.

later a murder of crows catching and flinging in the high winds

while a bald eagle hunches on a branch

and i watch, unconcerned for a moment with anything but observation:

in the cold woods, my feet on snow, an animal too.

my hometown. old friends. I used to feel uncomfortable coming back just as i used to feel uncomfortable dressing ordinarily. the distance I felt needed to be reflected in every perceivable aspect. now I feel settled into myself wholly, it’s not the differences that matter so. it’s the interior landscapes, and the spiderweb connections between beings that help me define myself.