well, i did say i would talk about music on this blog. and in follow up to my last “into it” column, here’s another song that pretty much just came out but is already going to be a new obsession. i’ve been looking forward to this one, from nicole sabouné – “so far out”, off her upcoming album ana.
i’ve come to know her work through the random bastards collective based out of sweden and this song, and the concept and making behind it is interesting to me. nicole tells her story of her exploring her family heritage by travelling to lebanon, a place she had never been before. i like the themes of feeling one’s bloodline calling back to something a little deeper, something a little more ancient, a way of knowing that exists within each of us that we may not be fully aware of.
the thing is, i truly get this feeling. i’m a mixed race person – my mother is ukrainian and my father was anishinaabe/ojibwe from a small reservation in northwestern ontario. only as i’ve gently began to explore both side of my bloodline, have i begun to understand myself.
nicole echoes this experience quite masterfully, and i really like “oh i let my feelings lead the way, oh, i’m so in love“. the accompanying music is a little bit chaotic but has this underlying almost 1980s kind of post punk/goth beat going that reminds me of lot siouxsie and the banshees, specifically “hong kong garden” and oddly, the cult.
it’s a really neat track and it leaves me hungry to hear the upcoming album. i’m really interested in reclamation and honouring of not only one’s ancestors but one’s deep ancestral self, not simply “i”, but rather the i that is “we”, that is “us”, that is held within family and place, and land.
as i began my own journey to self knowledge, one of my elders told me that the land will know and hold us, even when we do not know ourselves or don’t know yet how to hold ourselves in the deep reverence that we all should. i think it’s meaningful when music speaks to these kinds of deep personal experiences, especially when we are seemingly swimming and adrift in a sea of content slop brain rot.
i also appreciate nicole’s spoopy goth stylings. we live laugh love a goth babe in this house.
maybe i can’t stress it enough in a simple blog post, but these lines hit like a sledgehammer:
“I’m so far out Hey, my feelings lead the way And now I’m living it out Hey, and if I know myself it will never go away I feel that something within me Has changed now
I don’t know what it is And I don’t know how Oh, the world will now see it How I’m changing Into someone else I won’t let down“
it has been nine years now since you slipped away in the early morning hours of december 4, 2016.
and i love you now as i loved you then. i scan this old photo of you that your mother gave to me and i sit down to write about you because everyone keeps telling me to express my grief and i do and it just doesn’t seem like it is enough. there doesn’t seem to be enough journals or sketchbooks or bandwidth in the world to contain all this grief.
i still miss you.
i miss the way we made fun of the heavy metal boys in the bar while we drank whiskey straight out of an old water bottle in the parking lot with fringed bags and 2010s boots. i miss dancing with you to la roux in my shitty apartment in the shitty student housing. i miss early mornings with you on my tinkerbell blanket laughing until we were crying. i miss the forest raves and broken angel wings and antler jewelry. i miss the rune tattoos on delicate skin and the smell of coconut body spray.
i miss smoking cigarettes at shitty punk houses and telling punk girls to fuck off. i miss the way you kissed trees and tamed horrible horses and rode like the wind looking like lady godiva in an iron maiden tshirt.
i miss screaming along to “she sells sanctuary” because we both loved (and i still love) the cult. i miss how you’d get drunk and call people “montgomery” because the word was funny to you for some reason.
i miss your little notes and late night bike rides to go to the river to be alone together. i miss the three of us taking turns being the mess at a party and i would have to come find you somewhere dancing with your arms outstretched to heaven, looking beautiful in the firelight, looking like you could live forever. but, you didn’t.
you’re supposed to be here, you know? we are supposed to be two battle worn healers trading stories and baking bread and listening to shitty rock music. 2016 was not your time to go, but you went anyways.
i loved you so much even when you were torn apart and rendered into pieces and you tried to put them together again and then fell apart again then you tried again. your last words to me, “see you on december 17th! i love you!” on facebook messenger.
i saw you on the 17th, yes. but not for our viking themed yule party with the horse skull and the wassailing and everyone dressed in white, kissing under mistletoe and singing “god rest ye merry gentlemen”. i saw you on the 17th at your funeral and i wore a black dress you liked and my ex boyfriend was there wearing suspenders and god, you would have hated that and we would have sat in my car plotting to beat the shit out of him for daring to come around looking like such a fucking dork. fucking suspenders? what a moron.
“along with you died joy, all that remains is despair and a future of meaningless tomorrows” – silent hill 2
no, on the 17th i sat in a baptist church service and hugged your father and told him how sorry i was. i cried the whole way home you know and that stupid the weeknd song came on the radio about cocaine and i wanted to just scream and fucking scream but i didnt because then i would just look crazy.
i remember they said that about us, you know? that we were crazy and maybe we were with our body glitter and angel wings and bottles of booze screaming endlessly into the night. i miss those nights and i miss you by my side. i remember when you confessed your dark secret about warming up grocery store cheese buns in the microwave and putting mustard on them and i confessed i do that too. i remember scott looking at us and asking why the cute girls are always nasty as hell and we just laughed and laughed until we sounded like hyenas or donkeys or coyotes.
i miss your awful purse that smelled like victorias secret and tobacco. i remember holding it for you when you dove into the mosh pit at that korpiklaani concert where we all got way too drunk and made assholes of ourselves but that’s okay because the guys in korpiklaani were fucking wasted too. it was my birthday and i spent my birthday money on a bar tab. that was 15 years ago now and i remember it so vividly. god, we were young.
remember when your stupid boyfriend cheated on you and i phoned him and told him to go fuck himself for breaking your heart. he lives in the woods now and wears suspenders and cosplays as someone interesting. he called me crazy, just never to my face or i would have shown him what crazy really looks like. i really should have shown them all what crazy looks like. but now, i show them something worse, i show them what indifference looks like, because they’re nothing to me but sour notes of music carried on the wind and gone just as quickly. i do not suffer those fools any longer. aren’t you proud of me?
last year, when i wrote about you on this day, i wrote with anger and with bitterness, i wrote with barely concealed rage. this year im still angry but i choose to write about the memories we shared, the joy we shared as we walked for a time, together.
i remember you as you were to me, not just as you are now. grief counselling taught me that death ends a life, not a relationship and that grief is love that no longer has a place to rest. i cant tell you that i love you as i once did, because you cannot hear it.
so i say it to myself. i write it on this blog and in these endless journals of mine and in the photos that i take. i sing it. i play it on my lyre or my guitar. i work this love for you when im with people who are suffering as you once did, in pain now as you once were. i try to make a difference now as my final gift to you.
there’s that old bill withers song “ain’t no sunshine” that makes me think about you sometimes. that halsey song. that stupid fucking weeknd song. so many songs. i make a playlist for you but you can’t hear it.
taken in 2015 on vancouver’s downtown eastside
i love you, you know.
you are not december 17th.
you are not december 4th.
you are not purple ribbons and awareness walks.
you are not the grief inside me that feels, at times, unbearable.
for the briefest time, it seems, you were with me and we were us and now that it’s just me, i pray for you, and hope that wherever you are you know how much you meant and mean to me and how much i miss you.
you never saw it, of course, but you were so beautiful. you envied the bird girl but she never ever held a candle to you. she could try of course but it would be like holding a birthday candle to a forest fire. and you were both forest and fire.
and today, like everyday since, i miss you.
and o, that i had just one more moment with you, i would say all of those things i kept inside. and maybe then, you’d hear them. maybe then, you’d believe them.
i am barefoot in the snow on the beach by the unforgiving thompson river that swallows trees and cows and bodies of people that i used to know.
the river is deep to the banks, this yawning dark abyss as the snow falls around me and obscures me vision.
i am frantic and confused, as i often am during my dreaming.
driven only by the impulse to run, to get away, i approach the old train bridge as it stands, this imposing figure in twilight, a place i have brought lovers to show them the river so that maybe then they could see that this river runs too inside my veins and under my skin, weaving its wild way through me, cold as ice.
i was born a five minute walk from this river and feel it as a part of me, this unyielding force.
i remember after he died, this woman asked if we should go lay flowers at the river, like some kind of offering, and it was so absurd that i just laughed in her face.
this river cares little about flowers or bones or bodies or car wrecks. it is wild. it is not molly coddled or pacified by cheap grocery store bouquets. the black churn of the water is warning enough: proceed with caution.
and no one ever does.
i dream of standing on the bridge in a white nightgown. i dream of rusting metal and river water.
i wake and feel like i swam my way out of my bridge dreams and i can’t tell if its sweat or the inky black water of this river.
when they take my blood at the hospital, do my red blood cells achieve suspension inside the darkness of this water?
hospital vespers 