B. invited me to a Halloween party at her house this past Friday night. When she asked me I knew right away I would probably not make it. She lives on Roosevelt Ave, outside of my zone. I have been to her house before, mostly in the day time, and I'm always a little nervous.
And I really wanted to go, mostly to thank her for throwing the party and because she is a good friend to me. I knew I would be going out biking on Friday no matter what, so I decided to go over towards her place, and then decide how I felt once I got there. The weather was mild and I had a certain amount of energy, although I had moments in which my entire body would relax, while in motion, into tiredness.
I took William to Roslin. As I turned onto the wider street, the dark sky opened up all around me and I gazed into the blue-black silhouettes of the trees lining the street as they faded into the sky. I found comfort in these silhouettes, dark empty spaces that smell like living damp, cold and sublime on first glance, gentle and warm after some time spent with them.
I turned onto Dawson and then on to Westmount, where the car lights shone electrically as they blasted past, and then the street was empty, strangely empty, and I crosssed among drifting dy leaves. As I neared the farther side, a car rushed up behind me in the darknes and I moved quickly in the leaves and lights.
At the top of Westmount and Erb, I sent Brenda a text to say that I was not going to come to her party. I felt sad about this but I remembered the promise that I made to my body that I would never make it do anything it didn't want to do. I could feel myself wanting to do this thing for my friend, and show her my love, and at the same time, my body's tiredness, my mind's tiredness.
And, still, my body didn't want to turn around, so I continued to bicycle towards her house, and all the way to her driveway, where I stood looking into the window at her friends, wondering if I might just go to the door, give her a hug, and then leave. I thought this might be disruptive and pointless, there she was with all her friends around her, enjoying her party, and that was good. I felt sad, not sad from being left out, but sad from not being able to show my love with presence.
I felt at peace with my decision to leave so I turned and returned via Karen Walk, my old street. As I bicycled past the identical suburban houses, I realized I could no longer remember which I'd lived in - there were two that were a possibility. The only identifying trait was a long line of tall pines heading east away from the house's backyard, which I remembered looking at from my bedroom, so by lining up the house with the trees, I might be able to discover which house had been mine, for 4 months, in my third year of university.
I went around through the Keats Way school yard and up to Waterloo Park. Coming into the park on the west side, I looked up into a forest of tall trees in which the leaves were quivering blackly against the night sky. Through my muffled hearing under my hat and helmet, I heard strange shrieks and rough calls - there was a sudden movement, and hundreds of crowss flew up off the trees in a shimmering, black, rasping body. Crows were everywhere, circling, glimmering, shrieking, against the sky in the dark and moonlight. I stood to watch as they settled again, lifted off, murmured, conversed. It was so lovely and cold and clear in the park.
I carried on through the moonlit dark of the west field, through a clump of trees, nervously, keeping my sense alert for people moving in the darkness, but everywhere was empty. I came down over the bridge in the centre of the park, through the pitchy woods where the crows normally congregate, empty now, bare branches against the sky. As I came out of the woods, a train was coming south on the tracks the cut through the park.
It was an old train, and lit up from inside, one car only, filled with people in black and feathered costumes. I could see woman with bobbed hair, a feather elegantly rising from it, and a little black mask. As I came towards the train, I watched her, framed in the bright lighted square window of the pitching and rumbling train, and then as I came alongside the train in the parking lot I raced it, watching the people laughing and shimmering in the car. I raced it all the way down the dark path, where the Japanese trees had lost their leaves in little yellow piles, and the lights from the little light poles winked in the night. Before the bridge, I decided not to follow to see them come off the train, although I longed to, more than I have for any human in a long time.
Instead I turned east and bicycled down the board walk. I sat down in the middle part, where I could gaze out over the black, still lake.
To my right there were two girls sitting under the gazebo, taking pictures of themselves. They were posed against the water, back to back, with their knees up, facing the camera, like a perfect reflection of each other, a set of twins. Two ducks drifted by on the lake's stillness, and a couple passed by behind me, holding hands. I remembered that this was Lover's Lane, where everything happens in twos. The lake was so still that I wanted to lie flat across it, while my limbs drifted in different directions, staying connected by finer and finer threads.
Bodies around me reflect each other, mirror to create twins, while I dissolve, flatly, a prairie plain.
I started to become actually cold so I left the park via the dark path along the easts side of the lake, coming up onto the busy streets. I went to the grocery store, where two giggling university girls moved in an irritating, irrational dance around the produce section, as I tried to get directly through it. One said to the other "Do you want to get corns?" and this ridiculous moment of childish bad grammar, making a plural out of a singular, repeated itself again and again in my head, as I tramped resolutely through the store, like a crow collecting berries before rising into the vast night sky.
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