Seventeen 'Till I Die

Today my room mate turned seventeen.  I told her, as I always tell people who turn that age, that seventeen is the best year.  In my mind I could fairly happily stay seventeen forever.  But why?

(xCoffeeAddict)

It was actually a pretty crappy year.  I was lacking direction and fought to no end with the school I'd chosen to graduate with.  This ended in tears and the principals office.  As well as fantasies of judo-throwing her incompetent self through the floor (she got fired the next year, and had been shuffled around repeatedly because she can't do her job).

I got kicked out of home.  It didn't last long, but was something of a reflection of my family situation in general.  I never got pregnant, did drugs or assorted rebel behaviour.  My parents just didn't get down with my lack of respect for imposed authority.

I spent three assorted months house sitting.  Nothing seemed more magical then a place to myself.

I questioned the beliefs I was raised with late at night, realizing they'd have to become mine, and not sure if they could.

I built.  Houses, with my Dad.

I passed my road test and took to driving like I was made for it.

I dedicated myself to judo, and subsequently reached my peak.

I struggled to establish a social group after the six month trip earlier that year threw a massive friggin' wrench in the one I was supposed to have.

For whatever reason, all that compiled into a belief that seventeen is independence, freedom and life more abundantly.

In the month before I turned eighteen I bought my own little car that I learned to love.  I also graduated, put a down payment on a place, moved out and got a full time permanent job.

Maybe it's just that I never much cared for being an adult.

The Middle of Nowhere in the Middle of the Night

Dec. 31st, 2009, 11:30 PM.  I needed change.

11:30 PM and someone said we should climb the lookout.  In the middle of a wildlife reserve.  In the dark.  We were in the middle of this nowhere anyway.  We were tired of flying down an icy hill on over-sized tubes and throwing gasoline on the fire.  I was tired of chocolate Christmas baking and being the oldest in the group.  I was tired of doing doughnuts in empty parking lots and hours spent running in a mild winter out of pure frustration.

twenty five of us piled into four cars and sped down to the empty reserve and a clear starry sky.  We ran down clapboard paths over dead winter marshes and up the four flights of steps to the open top.  We made it, breathless, by midnight.

I screamed at the emptiness and my small town's lights in the distance.  I grabbed my blonde friend and we looked at each other, jaws set.

"Get lost, 2009.  We're so done with you!"

She was going to Calgary.  I was going to Arizona.  I haven't seen her since.  I miss her, but I know her life has gone the way she wanted.

And myself.  I just didn't know.   I'm not my brothers that were hugging me, lifting me, threatening to throw me over the rail.  I'd given up construction long ago.  I was twenty three.  I'd seen the world.

Twenty four of us yelling in the new year.  Crammed in an open look-out tower blindly hugging and looking forward to 2010.  And me.

Foreign Flavour

(Jahblessme)

I think I think I like you
'Cause I really think you're cute
You're sweet but you are edgy
Like you're trying to improve

You smile, hold the door,
but in every conversation
I'm really very certain
you swear without realization

You're genuinely thoughtful,
even when I know you're wasted
Like a new and foreign flavour
that I've never really tasted.

You wear death metal t-shirts.
Yeah, you seem a little shady,
but you really are exceptional
at helping out old ladies.

I think I think I like you,
and I know you think I'm hot.
So this may seem a little crazy...
I won't give us a shot.

Sometimes

I mismatched my hair elastics sometimes just to piss you off .  Because you needed to lighten up and learn that red and orange on my braids was fun.  Sometimes I pretended I didn't care, and you didn't call my bluff.  Sometimes I held your hand in the backseat and decided to think that no one noticed.

Sometimes I told people it was nothing.  I told them what I couldn't stand so they would believe me.  I told myself it wouldn't happen, and wasn't happening, and would never happen.

Sometimes I got tired of being the strong one.

You let me cut your hair, and wore the shirts I got you.  I looked in your eyes.  That was my mistake.  Your eyes, your phone voice, your endless adoration.

Oh, did I say endless?  My mistake.  Oh, no, wait.  Yours.

(luna-aino)

Things To Love About Road Trips

~ The opportunity to actually get tired of driving.

~ Taking photos (see left).

~ Ice tea and ice cream from greasy gas stations.

~ Flea markets, roadside stalls and garage sales.

~ Young international hostel crowds.

~ Feeling like a rebel spending nights in the car.

~ Adventure.

~ Couchsurfing.

~ City streets and checking off a list.

~ Coast line, mountains, plains, rock formations and sunsets.

~ Hiking, swimming, stretching after sitting too long.

~ Fresh visits with old friends.

~Never feeling restless.

Fragments of Friendships

They're memories of you. All of you. Sometimes I don't open the drawer for months. Other times I take them out five times in a single day. Pulling these close to my heart, brushing them with my lips. Clenching them in my fists or throwing them back and slamming the drawer.

Random pieces. I like life a little better when I forget they exist.

A homemade necklace. A charm that says “friends.” Yours said “forever,” of course. We were twelve and we knew it. This one is a broken heart. That's not what it meant at the time.

I hold it now and it remember the confusion of torn families I only observed. Whispers over the phone. And you disappearing one week without a goodbye. The strong decision your Mom needed to make. I still see your Dad sometimes. I'm glad you're free, and I trust you grew into a woman that would make your Mom proud. Confirm she made the right decision. I know more, now. Things I wasn't ready to understand when I was twelve. Things you probably weren't either, but had to. I'm sorry. I wish my two letters could've said more then that I missed you.

Where are you now? I don't know. I guess I never will. I searched your name on Facebook, but it's probably not what it was.  I still have that piece of pressed metal that says “friends.” That's what I'll remember you as.

A sand dollar. I was sixteen now, walking with you down an abandoned Mexican beach. I was so proud to call you my best friend. So sure you were cool, you convinced me that athletic teenage girls like us looked good in over sized t-shirts. We would wrestle, and I would win. I believe that you thought it would last forever. I trusted you.

At nineteen we lost touch, but I still have that sand dollar. I wrote letters, e-mails. I poured my heart out and scribbled in my notebook. Life did get in the way. Such different paths, you and I. We share the most important now, but it's not enough.

I'm sorry. I try to hard.

A pair of drumsticks. They say you'll love me forever. I almost believed that, too. Luckily I was jaded enough to question it all.

I know I held you at arms length for longer then you thought possible. But you were my best friend. A misjudgment, but I wish that part could have been true. I cried with you well you held me. I cried when I left. I stuck by you until I couldn't any more. It was too long, yet far too short.  How you could blindly cut me like that, I'll never know.

These drumsticks will never tell.

And you. You haunt my life more then any other with these reminders. We shared our childhood, our struggles and, finally, my home. Others came and went, but you were like my sister. My sister with communication skills that would never match mine. Is that where we went wrong? This crumpled stack of notes, letters, ramblings? This giant paper clip, teddy bear and a heart. How unlike us, then. You and I with our hitch hiking, our first time swearing, our baggy jeans. The times we shunned each other and our mutual respect.

And this last letter. The one where you asked me not to reply. The one I'll never understand.

I'm closing the drawer for now.  I've learned that others will be added, despite my greatest efforts and my learned reservations. I regret that it's still so damn worth it.

(photo source: Barcarola)

When Skater Boys Strip

(Source: Afireoutsideme on Deviant Art)

Pretend it's June in North Ontario.  The sun is weak, the town is tiny and the area is stunningly beautiful.  It's also St. Jean Baptiste which means the Quebecers in my little group want to get wasted* and declare their sovereignty.

Now, I'm not all Vivre Quebec, but I enjoyed hanging out with the biggest Libre believer of them all.  Thom was a guitarist of the tenth degree.  A ponderer with a French-guy afro.  Funny, deep, and a little bit lost.  Being as it was Quebec's national holiday he got all introspective and wanted to wander off to the beach with his guitar.  I was bored on our free block and decided to go along.  Mostly, I confess, I wanted to sit looking over Lake Superior and listening to Thom's acoustic guitar.

As we got closer to the beach a cop car pulled up and informed us that a bear had just been reported on the beach.  There's another thing about this town.  It wasn't unusual to see black bears crossing the street in the middle of town.  With a dejected Thom I turned and meandered down towards main, stopping at their little skate park.

Laying on the curved concrete Thom played and I listened.

Groups of fourteen year-old boys can be a little obnoxious.  Especially when it's a birthday party and they're on the way to the corner store to try scam cigarettes.  They spotted us like prey on a field mouse.

"Dude, you're amazing.  Man, play us something."
"What do you want?"
"Play us some Slipknot!  Know any Metallica?  Dude, Slash!  Who's she?"
"Kris.  She sings."  I shot Thom my "way to try switch the heat" look.
"Dude!  Play us something and she can sing."

Kids don't shut-up easily.  Thom cued the opening bars of Hotel California, about the only song that we both knew he could play and I could sing through.  Amid just-breaking voices and experimental swearing he glanced at me.  Kind of a "just do it, I dare you."

As I started on dark desert highways and cool wind in my hair the miraculous happened.  The group shut-up.  They stood against the graffiti and stared.  When the guitar died they were all, "Man, that was amazing.  Amazing!  Beautiful!  Really."  That's right.  We got a fourteen year old male to use "beautiful" as description.

Then the birthday kid dropped twenty bucks in Thom's case.  Twenty-bucks!  We were on a youth volunteer program, so that was a night out at the Legion (yes, the Legion was the happening night life).  It was his birthday money, but he wouldn't take it back.

They headed off to the convenience store.  We returned to our non-heavy metal under the night sky, but it wasn't too long before they were back.

"Dude!  You were amazing!  But we're out of money, Man.  Here.  Have a rock."
"No way, Man.  They're too good for a rock!  Here, have my shirt.  No, seriously, take it!"
I was laughing.  Thom was like, "C'mon guys!  You can't go home without a shirt.  No, it's cool."
"No really.  Take my shirt.  Take my shoes."

"Here!  I'll give you my pants!"

To our chagrin a barely teen dropped his pants.  Right there on the skate park of a little northern town.

"Want my boxers, too?  I'll give 'em to you!"

Thom was freaking out a little.  I couldn't stop laughing.  We managed to get the kids to (mostly) keep their boxers on.  Eventually it was us who had to leave them running around the ramps partially dressed.

"I was scared," Thom confessed.  "Man, like, maybe we get in trouble for little kids strip in front of us!"

It was perfect.  My first and only St. Jean Baptist.  But regardless it'd probably be my favourite.

*Yes, I see the irony as the holiday is (apparently) named after a saint.

It Tastes Like You

It tastes like you.  The rush, the thrill, the novelty.  Pressing it to my lips.  The driftwood behind my back.  That endless lake, the setting sun, our handprints in the sand.

Salt tears and blood.  The tensity and an allergy.  The cold that I'll inhale.  Bruises and your hand at my waist.

Bandanas, denim and soft plaid shirts.  Mine and yours and maybe a mix.  Sweat beading at my neck before I lift my hair.  Leather cuffs and the tang of their metal buckles.

Daisies and a hard dirt trail.  Labatt beer, wild strawberries, foam and that photograph.  Dust.

It tastes like you.  I'll hold my breath and wait for the bitter aftertaste.

Rachelle

We have a history.  I think that's worth something.

I know you never liked me that first summer.  I was fifteen and obnoxious.  You were sixteen and insecure.  A good mix, I know.  We slept in that tent, rode in the back of pick-ups, napped in the afternoon sun.  We listened to a lot of Rebecca St. James.  I was on the right, you were in the middle, the glue was over there on the left.  We were a trio, so obviously meant to be thrown together.  Funny how we were opposites despite the circumstances

I never understood.  I was young.  Of course I knew everything.  I want you to know I still cared.

You've gone a little skate punk and stayed a little preppy.  I've gone a little hippi and stayed a little tomboy.  Are we a study in contrasts?  Still each on those opposing and identical journeys to figure out where we fit.

I remember working it out.  What we couldn't do face to face we said over e-mail.  Yeah, you were in Virginia and love, with so much discovery left.  I remember crying to you on my couch as I told you part of my past.  I never knew why I showed you that hidden vulnerable side of myself.

Boys, travel, school.  We've both grown through a lot.  You've become a beautiful woman.  Much different then anyone thought.  An artist, athlete, thinker and adventuress.

We've never been best friends.  I know we never will be.  I just want to thank-you for the effort.  The fact that, after it all, we can still sleep in a tent.  Maybe I'll be on the right and you'll be in the middle.  We can talk about how it doesn't make sense.  We listen to that mix c.d. and drive with the windows down.  You've taught me a lot with your searing honesty and occasional disdain.  Things your patience and frustration needed me to know.  I hope I've been a little bit worth it.

Photo source: Janne-landet on Deviant Art

My Parents Were Rockers

My parents were rockers, once upon a time.  I can open wrinkled seventies photo albums and find grainy yellow photos.  My Dad with long full blonde hair.  My Mom in her boyfriend's plaid shirts.  Their young love and vintage guitars.

Before I took my first breath I was attending band practice.  Kicking hard and frequently as they cranked their amps and powered out hits that would never make it.  Recorded on retro equipment they bought with construction and waitress wages.  I was a cassette era baby.  Missing the brief 8 track days and the single copy of the Steve Miller Band they played in my Dad's hippi van.

The first recording of my life was my first time home.  My Mom looks young, tired, happy.  I am red, wrinkled and cranky.  My Dad reflectively plays his acoustic guitar on our old eggplant coloured couch.  His little sister makes snide comments about how she's surprised he didn't bring his guitar into the hospital.

This is the world I entered.  K-Rock on the radio, piano stencils on the wall.  They changed as they got older, my parents did.  They started listening to Wes King and Kim Hill through speakers they'd wired up around the house.  But they'd already left a mark.  I remembered Janis Joplin being tossed out the window during a fight on the highway.  I remembered asking why Elton John thought rolling like thunder under the covers should be called the blues.  I didn't know the names, but I knew that Billy Joel was a piano man, and that my Dad had played my Mom down the aisle singing that if the sun refused to shine, he'd still be loving her.

They instilled a love, a need, a craving.  My Mom put me in piano lessons, but it wasn't for me.  Well my home schooled friends strove to reach grade eight theory I saved for albums by DCTalk and Audio Adrenaline to play on the boombox my sister and I got for Christmas.

My little brother takes his cue from us, now.  He develops his own taste for Linkin Park and Grits.  Cranking rap and playing pool with his gangly buddies in a room with piano stencils on the wall.  My Mom calls Seventh Day Slumber screamo and listens to Jennifer Knapp and Norah Jones.

My Dad plays guitar.  The continuing and unvaried sound thread of my life.  His fingers stir the strings creating the sound of security regardless of what he's playing.

Alberta Boy

Through the patio window I see his truck pull up and park.  Lifted and black, like the rest of them.  There's no plate on the front.  I know right away that the one on the back will read "Wild Rose Country."  He saunters around the front of the bumper and squints at the meter well reaching in his pocket for forgotten change.

This side street meter has a knob he'll have to turn after inserting his quarter so the yellow "paid" tag will pop up.  We've installed digital ones two years ago, but only on main street.  I'm sure he's amused.

By time the door opens Donna has a menu ready and seats him in the front.  Now that lunch rush is over she wants to mop the back.  He's at table three, his profile framed by the backwards white letters reading "Marty's Diner."  My section.

"Did you read our lunch special on the way in?"

"Yeah."

I can hear Donna moving chairs in the back.  He glances up from scanning our burgers and smiles.  "But you can tell me again."

I look at his Oiler's cap, and the glasses he's rested upside down on the brim, and smile back.  "Grilled bacon, mushroom, swiss with your choice of side."  Or, in your case, fries.  "Can I get you anything to drink?"

Large Pepsi.  Could he make this a little more interesting?

I'll take my time filling the cup, waiting for the foam to recede.  Taking his order, biting my pen lid, laughing when he jokes about our classy menu, not glancing back when I return to the kitchen.

Why drive through the Crowsnest listening to Sirus radio, alone?  Stopping too often for diesel and energy drinks.  Maybe he just wants girls to flirt with and small town teenagers to admire his truck well it's parked at 7/11.  Maybe he's from here, somewhere back home.  Maybe it's his Mom's birthday and he wants to get stoned with his high school buddies and brag about his pay.

Whatever it is, his sandwich is fine, and could he get a refill on his Pepsi?  How does he get back on highway two?  He leans on the counter well he pays with debit.  His Dodge key chain already out and resting casually by the till.  His name is Jordan and he tips five dollars on an eight something bill.

Locals will swear and his red and blue plate as he speeds through school zones on his way back to his rig job.  Whatever that actually is.  We'll end up there, too, in those oil suburbs.  Because we want a 4x4, a snowmobile, a nice bike and maybe a seadoo.  We can always haul it out to B.C. where there's a decent lake.

Peel the Label

There will always be smokers cluttering the entrance.  Freshly exhaled nicotine wafting away in clouds.  I would step out with my friends to stand beneath the streetlights and discuss the crowds.  Escape the music and breathe the frigid night air.

Stepping back inside we'll drape our coats over a bar stool.  Everything a soft orange glow beneath neon signs advertising Labatt, Bud and Stella Artois.  Cheap hits play just loud enough so we have to lean in close.  Nelly Furtado, Les Cowboy Frigant, Usher.  We're all waiting our turn at the pool table.  No one is brave enough to step onto the ten by ten hardwood against the wall, yet.

I am aware of everything.  The way  I hold my beer, trying not to warm it as I drink it slowly.  The barmaids heels walking past my boots.  Laughing at a joke, biting my lip, running my fingers through my hair.

I'll drop a loonie in the table.  I'm usually the one with spare change.  This time I play a French artist.  We make a good challenge.  I'll break, loving that first tight shot.  The only one that always works.  Not really caring who wins, just how well I play.  I've learned to chalk my cue by rolling it with my foot, never doubting how cool this makes me.  My French friend plays well, although I banter with him about how he'll lose.  He is deep, that one.  Too deep, really.  I will miss him.

Leaning against the bar with the girls in my group we smile and talk about summers back home.  I sip their coolers and look back at the tables.  Brown bottles and green felt.  Beer and billiards.  It even looks good on a random who should really work out and wears slightly tacky t-shirts.  Or maybe I shouldn't order another drink.

We will walk down the street, our breath crystallizing as we hurry to that basement place where we can afford the two dollar cover.  Or maybe we'll go to the folky Rafiot with their live music, shandy and checker boards.  Regardless, we'll always stop at Tim Horton's on the way back.  I'll order a moyen Carmel Anglais for a dollar forty-nine and try to sit with whomever is still sober.  It ends up making no difference. 

Falling asleep on my rickety top bunk beneath that provided pink plaid comforter I forget to realize I'll never have a twentieth winter again.

Today the old gray hoodie I'm wearing smells like pesticide.  Such a contradictory smell.  It makes me sick.  I recall trying to shower it off behind the tarp of my parent's outdoor shower before crashing out in the back of the bus.  I wore this hoodie too often on those early mornings.  I haven't washed it enough since.
Today I walk to the edge of a lookout.  The mountains are hidden in an upside down bowl of fog.  For some reason I'm convinced it's snowing and wonder where the line will drop to.  I push my hands deeper into my pockets.  Why does it look like the end of autumn?  The beginning of winter.  Looking out my eyes follow the back road, the river gully, endless orchard rows.With a jolt I realize I'm standing directly above the fruitstand I worked at last year.  The trees right below me were sort picked a few short months ago.  Laughing with gristly old men who let me take the easy branches.  Sitting on overturned bins I'd eat mini culls and drink lukewarm coffee before returning to the stand to sort and sell the apples.
From here I can look farther back.  Cherries.  I have five of those seasons on my record.  Across the valley I make out the block of orchards I hit last July.  I can outpick some of the hippis, now.  I'm still not a highballer.  Quebecois dreadlocks and Mexican accents in the rows next to me as I affixed my stickers on wire handles.  M17.  They claim to pick faster stoned.  They may well be right.  Walking down the road I felt like society's rebel in my canvas harness and Thai pants.
Today I stand in this brush taking it all in.  Wrapped in this damned hoodie that smells of poison and yesterday.

She was crazy.  Not the kind of crazy that your best friend is when you roadtrip on the weekend.    Real crazy, but she was good at it.  Crazy was her forte.
It was hard to tell, sometimes.  We sat on her deck drinking blender margaritas and overlooking the parking lot.  Back then you could blame it on alcohol.  Her stories grew with her confidence as you commented politely on what she'd just said.  Why not have this outside friendship?  Crazy stories, her cigarettes and booze.  Always booze.  She was never really sober. 
Then you could blame the drugs.  Of course, you could never be sure what she'd actually done.  Something fucked her up.  She wanted to get stoned with me and build snowmen.  Prescription bottles littering her apartment.
Her parents, dead.  Although eventually you came to question even that.  A year later, when she'd finally left, her Dad came into the restaurant.  The same one who'd committed suicide.  She told me she was going to kill herself on Christmas and she hated my boyfriend.  I started avoiding her calls, and loathing the shifts we shared.  I knew she was taking my tips.
She was 24.  She was doing a convict in the kitchen, guys from out of town she met on the internet, and old men who came into the restaurant and called you Sweetie if they thought they could.
Sometimes I'd get phone calls late at night.  Slurred disillusions.  Once she'd been shot, and sewed herself up with dental floss.  I tried to call the cops on that one, but she made me promise not to.  She had four names that I knew of, and excuses for all of them.  A pathological liar.  And definitely good at it except for when she got carried away.
Eventually she knew I'd caught on.  She needed help, but there wasn't much I could do about it. She started to hang out with the other twenty-one year old waitress.  Stacy was naive and desperate for friends.   
She talked herself out of the hospital when she finally got called.  Talent.  A sad broken alcoholic.  We learned, among other things, that she was also twenty-one with numerous fake IDs.  My age.  That shocked even me, and I recall saying that she was just a kid.  I was just a kid.  We were both too young.  I never figured out if she knew her age, or had fooled even herself.  She never admitted.
The late night calls came again.  This time she threatened me and I hung up. 
When I see a puffy faced chubby girl I think of her.  She had good hair, at least.  Thick and deep burnette. When I walk past a group at night and hear a female slurring profanities, she comes to mind.  To this day I'm not comfortable with the fact that she knows where I live.  Maybe mild post-traumatic stress.   I think I have a right, after 2:00 AM phone threats.

So lately I've been dipping my cyber-toe into a bigger wider world of blogging.  I'm pretty much a veteran if you count only time span.  However, the fact that most of those posts were read mainly by two sisters in Saskatchewan, a life long friend I no longer talk to, an ex who was trying to impress me at the time, and a missionary kid, I'm not to sure how much cred that actually gets me.  My domain name was cherrytomboy.  Need I say more?
Online blogger sites are my new hobby.  it's not even about blogging, any more.  It's about screwing around with my template, getting on feeds, reading what would be stacks of random blogs that I have discovered I can have limitless access too and trying to master the art of following.  I've always enjoyed these glimpses into stranger's lives.  Even back when I was seventeen, 20sb bloggers didn't exist, and scanning meant clicking "next blog" and seeing what came up.  Even if it was a business site in Mandarin. 
Ultimately, though, I'm blogging for myself.  The mini-community I was part of originally have all moved on from the blogosphere.  Can you believe I was nominated for featured blogger once?
Now I like looking back for glimpses of my own life.  Remembering the posts that I was particularly proud of, although all my comments were on Haloscan and, consequently, lost. 
I'm working on the rust.  A wire brush is in order.  Hopefully with a little practice I can return to enjoying my own blog as much as I enjoy other people's.