hospital vespers

grief as siege warfare

November 12, 2025

i used to believe that grief was like a river, full of rapids and ever changing waters, deep to the banks in some areas and calmer in others. the river runs the stones smooth and the bones into nothing.

now i’ve changed how i feel. i feel like grief is kind of like siege warfare.

for me, anyways, in times of grief, i retreat inside, because it’s what i know how to do.

i cloak myself away, hide in my darkened bedroom both literally and figuratively with this weird hope that i could wait it out. i convince myself that i have enough good faith and good memories to wait it all out in the safety of my closed doors and drawn curtains.

but, obviously, that isn’t how things work. grief is a siege of the homesick heart and i’ve bled my reserves dry over and over with all of the death.

you can find me in the castle yard with the fool and the dead horses.

and i have only myself to blame for it. my own foolish avarice and even more foolish pride unable to concede any kind of meaningful defeat so i wear my grief like spikes in an iron maiden worn inside out and use my pain as a weapon and i’ve made it clear to everyone but myself when my grief is pretending to be anger.

did i lose you with the medieval horseshit? maybe i lost myself a little bit and felt like i had a better point to make about how the november cold makes me nervous with dry skin and i find myself thinking about death and using too much bubble gum lip balm.

why did all the big deaths in my life have to happen in such close proximity to winter, the season of death and cold. why did i drive by the christmas lights on the way home from the hospital where my father died? what about the blow up santa claus on the way home from her funeral with christmas carols on the radio next to that stupid the weekend song “i can’t feel my face”. she died taking cocaine, so i guess that was applicable.

wren died in the old punk house we lived in, slipping away without letting us know.

and i miss her.

you know, they called her “the iron maiden”? and yet to me, she never was.

i was the one unwavering, made of stone cold iron and hate.

and she was tie dye and marjoram, incense and weed smoke.

she was this happy laughing yogi and i was the master of arms with a sharpened blade in place of a tongue.

november is almost halfway over. i can’t tell if i am ready for december yet.

and january, is somehow even worse. my birthday.

another reminder that i made it through another siege.
lest we forget

November 11, 2025

the fighting of world war one ended on november 11, 1918 at 1100, a day that became known as armistice day and in the british commonwealth – remembrance day.

as a canadian, this day has been something traditionally recognized in my home as my grandfather served all five years in world war 2 – overseas.

he came back with a war bride and PTSD. he joined the legion and drank the horrors of war away.

he didn’t like to talk much about it, so he didn’t, unless he was drunk.

my mother and father would drop him off at the legion and he’d be wasted when they’d pick him up after shopping at costco or wal-mart. then he would talk about the war, and the guns, and the boys he’d killed when he had just been a boy.

later, after he died, we found stacks of old love letters and polaroid photos from women he had met overseas. with long black hair and olive skin and high cheekbones, looking stereotypically first nations, he must have been so exotic to those european women. he called himself jack, overseas.

he said he felt like he was someone else when he was overseas, and maybe it was easier to truly become someone else.

i wish i had had more time with my grandfathers.

i think of them often, but especially today.

i remember you.
things i like, in no particular order

November 10, 2025

i like unicorn tattoos and swedish accents. i like guys with long hair and girls with short hair, and people who stand outside the drug store yelling stuff about god and the devil. i like emaciated looking punk boys who have leather jackets and patchy pants, but are toxic and usually full of drugs and bad decisions, but they’re cute to look at. i like drag queens and kings, i like rude girls with red lipstick. i like orange cats with stripey tails and pug dogs. i like bunnies and black coffee. i like boys with sad hearts and athletic girls who never miss a work out. i like that one guy in those tailored pants and nice shoes, but i also like boys who look sketchy and ride bmx bikes. i like fantasy art books and antique photos. i like old churches and those denim jeans from the 1990s that have no back pockets and make everyone’s butt look really really nice. i like books about BDSM and reading the bible. i like angel wings and see through dresses made of stars but i also like big goth boots and jewelry made of bones. i like trinkets and boxes for trinkets. i like old churches and new cars, i like really highly curated street style and fashion even though i only wear comfy basics and could never.

i like blundstone boots and my orthopedic insoles, i like my pink fjällräven kånken, and my gel pens and my vintage cameras. i like magic the gathering and bad mystery novels. i like girls with knives in their bags, i like those silver lighter cases that look really edgy. i like libraries and dive bars. i like books of poetry and realtree shirts. i like cloudberry jam and bannock. i like my mom’s cigarette stained french manicure. i like 10k gold jewelry because i think it’s fancy. i like acoustic guitars and EDM. i like the gay guy that develops my film sometimes because he’s beautiful and has really nice nailpolish and i could never. i like this hot girl i went to university with that i still think about sometimes. i like serious boys and i like quiet boys. i like black cats and white dogs. i like people with two different coloured eyes. i like antique jewelry. i like raunchy comedies and disturbing horror films.

i like this swedish pop star called axel ruby and i don’t really know why, i guess i just think he’s neat. i like big beards and small hands. i like this vancouver jewelry brand called pyrrha because it’s silver and this couple made it and they seem neat. i like corsets and lingerie and i like old silk kimonos. i like those vintage 1990s table lamps that look like flowers. i like going to the big city to go to the big thrift stores. i like the stars she used to draw on her face. i like girls with bleached blonde hair.

i like paintings and CRT tvs, i like birds and whales and shows about aliens.

i like old dictionaries and national geographics. i like bible cartoons.

i like pad thai and dim sum and pierogis. i like wood panelled houses and talking about sex. i like old radios and girls with lip piercings. i like old typewriters and silver rings. i like yard sales and yoga and green juice and kombucha. i like vitamins and candy. i like old valentines tucked in between the pages of books. i like the smell of church incense and old people’s homes.

i like people who collect cool things like antique buttons or thimbles. i like paintings of dragons and faeries. i like watching true crime on netflix. i like vegetarian pizza. i like sydney sweeney’s boobies. i like marlboro menthol cigarettes. i like dreaming up being friends with people because i don’t have many friends in real life. i like beach walks and snail shells.

i like collecting bird feathers and writing in my endless journals.

i like drawing horses and angels. i like mean dogs. i like ethel cain and mitski and danny schmidt. i like reading about norse mythology. i like my labubu and the clothes for my labubu.

i like old trunks and boxes because it feels like i can fill them with possibility. i like old kandi raver bracelets. i like avicii and crying over avicii. i like playing chess. i like learning languages.

i like vintage clothing and fancy chocolate.

and i like you, of course.
bedrooms

November 9, 2025

i’m obsessed with bedrooms.

i like spending time in mine and i’ve turned it into this place where i can go to be alone and utterly myself. i have a little tv and my vcr and my macbook. i have my cameras and candy, a guitar and a midi keyboard, a lazy cat, and stacks of disturbing books about violence, death, antique dolls and photography. i have my stanley cup in antique pink, a typewriter, my iphone, and a mirror i paid too much for at a shitty discount department store.

i can close the door and light a candle and take off my bra and my masks together and be simply me.

there’s something holy, i think, about bedrooms.

you see someone for who and how they are in their most initimate and vulnerable.

i could write a paper about it and maybe i will but who would read it anyways?

what’s your bedroom like?

do you burn candles and incense or have red painted walls? do you have a big bed that you always tear the top sheet off of? do you keep sex toys or BDSM gear in the bedside table or are you more of a sudoku and kindle type of person?

do you have art on the walls or are they plain? if you do have art, what kind?

is it that weird dentist office stuff or is it something gritty and strange you turned up at some old lady’s yard sale down the street in that one small town you only drove through that one time?

i want to know.

“It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls… but only that we had loved them… and that they hadn’t heard us calling… still do not hear us calling them from out of those rooms… where they went to be alone for all time… and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.” – The Chorus/The Narrator, The Virgin Suicides, 1999
the estate sale guitar

November 8, 2025

i bought a guitar at an estate sale today

it’s small, with a shorter scale and it was handmade in mexico and hung on a wall in a beautiful living room with a fireplace and lots of big fancy furniture

i paid $30 for it, counting out a purple ten dollar bill alongside a crumpled green twenty and a handful of change for the other things i purchased:

-an unused leather bound journal

-a bag of beeswax tealight candles that smell like honey and hope

-a chipped fluorite crystal

-a large chunk of raw amethyst

-a small metal plate with seashells on it

the man who brought it back to canada loved music. he was the husband of the woman who died. he died before her. his photo is stuffed inside the guitar.

i hear whispers about an ambulance and then the house was empty, neighbors come to paw through her things and offer $5 for a lamp or $10 for a stack of old photo frames.

i don’t need another guitar, i have several already. when the mood is right and i’m feeling a little bit like my aging hands need to play some classical music, i pick up my instrument and make music again, mostly for the lazy enjoyment of my cats.

i don’t need another one. but i buy one anyways. and i go home to my room and make music and write and take photos and think.

one day someone will be buying the guitars off the wall at my estate sale or pawing through my things – drawers of crystals and gold jewelry, books and old photos, all the antiques i treasured.

estate sales make me pensive. i think about death and guitars and the inside of stranger’s houses and stripped mattresses and family photos in the garbage. i think about cleaning supplies and when i had to clean out my uncle’s things after he died.

he was a criminal and schizophrenic, but he had always been kind to me.

i kept two things that belonged to my uncle – a rock and this copper tray he made in a high school art class. i think about those things sometimes – how delusions and paranoia could be laid away in order to cut and hammer a beautiful vessel. you wouldn’t think by looking at it, that the person who made it was crazy and spent time in psych wards and prisons.

i wonder about the rock. it’s this strange twisted specimen and i don’t understand it or why it was kept, but it was and now i keep it on my vanity where i keep an alligator’s head and some taxidermied starlings and a victorian perfume bottle like the one from the 1993 film “the secret garden”.

i wonder about the estate sale lady’s crystals. did she like crystals for their beauty or their supposed metaphysical properties? why did she keep the broken fluorite? what did she see in it? did she see anything at all?

i wonder if someday someone will wonder about me.

i wonder if my perfume bottles and paintings and bibles and guitars will be held like i held them?