We Are Learning to Make Fire

I have never believed in soulmates. The idea of The One, the person put on this earth to complete you, has just never sat well with me on any level. Statistically, the odds of you even finding the one person you’re destined to be with in a sprawling world of billions of people are astronomical. You have a better chance of randomly finding your first grade teacher on Chatroulette, and the odds are even greater that if you do, he’s going to show you his penis.

Even leaving aside the logistical problems, I feel mildly offended at the idea that I need to be completed. I’m already a complete person, albeit a deeply flawed one. I do believe in love (“to the depth and breadth and height/My soul can reach”) and I’m not opposed to romance. I just don’t want to be the half of a whole, because what happens when your other half goes away? You can keep your souls meeting in divine union. All I really want is a partner.

And yet.

And yet, nothing is ever that simple. If all it took was mutual respect and shared life goals and a certain amount of fondness, we’d live in a very different world. There has to be something more. Even lust is just science, boiled down to bare bones of evolutionary biology and pheromones that often lead us terribly astray (“The lads I’ve met in Cupid’s deadlock/Were- shall we say?- born out of wedlock”), and even that is fleeting.

I’ve fallen in love before. More than once, but not often enough that you could call it habit. There’s no pattern aside from an obvious predilection for boys with glasses. The variables are all different. There’s no predicting it, that maddening rush that comes when a person walks into a room and says your name just so. It’s a poorly designed scientific experiment with the methods all wrong and inexact and the subject staring dreamily off into space, doodling hearts in a spiral notebook. This has happened before and it will happen again (“Let us go then, you and I/When the evening is spread out against the sky“), but I don’t know when or how.

I think it’s backwards to think we’re only able to find true love with one person in the whole world. Isn’t it more romantic in the end to think that the possibility is there at any time, an unexplained phenomenon that most of us will experience at least once in our lives? If love is neither math nor chemistry nor biology, then maybe it’s alchemy,  spinning the ordinary and everyday into gold.

*Credit where it’s due to the authors of the italics: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dorothy Parker, and T.S. Eliot. Title comes from Margaret Atwood.

Wires Crossed

It is next to impossible to recreate the smell of a hospital. People talk about how hospitals smell like antiseptic, which is true, but it’s only the most easily identifiable base note. The real complexity is in the impossible-to-articulate scent of illness and death and anxiety and sadness shot through with the faintest whiff of hope, like Pandora’s box come to life.

I’ve never liked hospitals, despite my childhood aspirations of becoming a doctor. Unfortunately, I had a scary fainting spell last November that nobody could explain using words other than “holy shit”, so I’ve had to become quite familiar with them. The ER couldn’t figure it out, so they sent me to the neurology department. After several tests, one of which required me to be sleep-deprived and have bright lights flashed in my face (which I’m pretty sure is against the Geneva Conventions), Dr. Mumtaz told me that I was completely normal, brain-wise.

I had the good manners not to laugh in his face.

Anyway, the good doctor continued as I bit the inside of my cheek, the EKG from the ER wasn’t normal so likely it’s some sort of heart problem that’s gone undiagnosed for a while. He did not seem to have an answer as to why they didn’t mention it to me at the time, so I can only assume they did not think it would be the kind of thing to ever come up. You know, because guns shown in the first act never go off in the third.

Long story short, my blood pressure goes down all the time, you know, whenever it feels like it. The lackadaisical slut.

The reason I was at the hospital today was to get a Holter monitor attached so they can figure out what the hell my heart is doing that it’s so unpredictable, which is a fine adjective for loopy manic-pixie-dreamgirls in movies that are all about teaching uptight bankers how to seize the day through the power of feng shui or whatever, but not so much for one of your major organs. The monitor is a sexy little get-up that has about seven different electrodes and wires hanging off various points in my torso. You do not get a photo, since it is not that kind of blog, but this gentleman should give you an idea of what I’m dealing with here. I look like something a bomb squad would be dispatched to deal with, the observation of which prompted my mother to remark that today would be a fun day to go to the airport, because I guess Mother’s Day cards that come from a maximum security prison are just that much more sentimental. Even my boss deadpanned asking if he’d seen me in The Hurt Locker. (Everybody’s a goddamn comedian.)

I really hope they figure out this thing soon. I’m tired of the hospital smell. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go outside and scare the neighbourhood children. I might be able to convince one of them I’m a cyborg.

The Wall

I moved out of the house I shared with my ex a couple of weeks into January. After spending a week gratefully crashing on the couches of kind friends and feeling like the Littlest Hobo, I was becoming a little desperate and decided to reply to an ad online about a room for rent. The rent was reasonable, the neighbourhood was close to where I needed to be, and the two girls living there seemed nice. Within a day or two, it was a done deal, and I moved all of my worldly goods into a basement bedroom. Sitting on the twin bed and looking around the bare walls, I told myself that it would be fine for the next several months. Why, I thought, it could be an adventure!

Looking for an apartment is kind of like playing minesweeper. There’s something awful waiting, but you don’t know when or where you’re going to discover it. Sure, it’s energy-efficient and great on utilities, but there’s no laundry hook-up. The hardwood floors are beautiful, but the ceiling leaks. The location is fantastic, but your next-door neighbour is Rape Clown.  You know how it is. There’s always a catch. I don’t know whether it’s lucky or not, but I discovered the catch when the ink on the lease was barely dry.

I noticed I was hearing voices.Voices having conversations about dinner plans and whose turn it was to pick up the milk and that whore at work. My first thought was that I was finally having a complete nervous breakdown brought on by extreme amounts of stress. After I realized that my subconscious couldn’t possibly know that much about Twilight, I was left with the sinking realization that the wall separating me from the people in the basement apartment may as well have been constructed from tissue paper.

Hours later, listening to squeaking bedsprings and a nasal, shrill voice begging “Greg” to fuck her harder, I came to the conclusion that I would have preferred the psychosis.

Every day I learn more about my ever-present friends, my resentment grows just a little. I hear entire conversations, can pinpoint the exact stupid thing he says that’s going to cause an argument, and from there it’s just the waiting game for the inevitable makeup sex theatrics. Some of the people I have explained this to have said that it must be entertaining at least. I can understand how it would seem that way, but I assure you, it is not. I would rather give unmedicated birth to a passel of hedgehogs than listen to this woman’s clumsy attempts at dirty talk. Hearing her ask for the fourth time if he’s going to come or not makes me want to set my vagina on fire rather than risk even the smallest degree of association with the whole ghastly affair. Any entertainment value gleaned from the first couple of times vanishes once you realize that it’s just never going to stop. Dante himself couldn’t have dreamed this up. Neighbours or not, I guarantee you that if Fred Rogers had to listen to King Friday and Lady Elaine getting down in detail this graphic, he’d have hung himself by the sleeve of his goddamn cardigan.

And yet, when I give the slow golf clap afterwards, I’m somehow the rude one. Well, I’m sorry, but Emily Post never addressed this. We’ll just have to agree to disagree.

Also, if you don’t know whether he’s come or not, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.

Opening Act

In some dusty basement somewhere, there is a videotape of a kindergarten graduation ceremony. Set in the long-ago landscape of 1990, it shows a matronly teacher in polka dots interviewing a sea of children in itchy-looking formalwear. Though I couldn’t tell you exactly where to find it, there is a point on the video where this woman (who looks for all the world as though she smells of baby powder and cheap lipstick) asks a gap-toothed little girl with crimped hair and a crinoline what she wants to be when she grows up.

“A doctor,” the little girl chirps, pushing her giant plastic frames up on the bridge of her nose. A pause. “Or maybe a ballerina.”

I don’t think I need to tell you that the little girl never became a doctor. By telling you that the little girl grew up in a small town in Newfoundland that offered no dance training and that the puberty fairy decided to be extra generous with the secondary sex characteristics, I think you can probably infer that she never became a ballerina either. Some of the sharper among you have probably deduced that the little girl was me. (I bet you figured out the ending of “The Notebook” right away, didn’t you? You intellectual dynamos, you.)

As a way of introduction, I’m Lynn. I don’t have a fancy career. I’m not gifted in any particular way. I’m not possessed of ethereal beauty or even particularly good skin more than two weeks out of the month. That said, I like to write, and I’m told some people like to read it, so here I am, and (hopefully) here you are. I welcome readers and feedback from all walks of life.

Unless you’re a ballerina. Who likes “The Notebook”. Then you can go to hell.