skonen_blades

Why we fall in love:
Cupid doesn't shoot arrows.
Cupid pulls carpets.

Brendan and Alison, think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as the two of you. You’ve waterski-crashed into a different life that you weren’t expecting and I hope you’re infinitely grateful.

This might sound crazy but I believe that if the two of you were born a thousand years ago in what is now modern Uganda, to different parents than you have now, with different skin than you currently possess and were raised to speak a language other than English, that you would still fall in love.

The first time you met, your seventy-five year old selves recognized each other and all that was left was the talking and the stumbling as your younger selves, these bodies here, were coaxed towards that older couple.

My advice is to be each other’s hiding places and play hide and seek with the planet and with the expectations of society. Hide in each other and tell the entire world that it is ‘it’ and to go count to 8 billion. Then turn your faces inward and look at each other through that reflecting prism of your hearts, a light-bridge connecting you wherever you go, no matter the distance.

You’ll still be able to see the buildings and the faces outside. You’ll still be able to hear the traffic and the conversations, but a part of you should face forever inwards, a sun beaming down on the new piece of each other hiding in your chests.

Add today to the collection of good days in your hearts. These memories will be proof that life was good. They will be insurance against the onslaught of age. These memories right here.

Brendan, a crinkling at the side of Alison’s eye and you’re hers. Regrets should go unregarded, unimportant, fleeting and useless as a weather report for next year. When you’re not touching each other, it feels like the circuit is broken. Be it hips, lips or fingertips, that touch makes the reasons plain.

The times you’re around each other are already so valuable. You both know the face of loss, false hope and boredom. You both know the bad decisions, the dreary sentences of days without end, the impending aimlessness of just another week on the fire.

Your relationship is a unicorn on the bridge of the starship enterprise.

Give your good judgment a head start. Make your bodies into flint and spark fires to give love a chance to see in the dark. Make prank calls to your past. Get the future good and drunk and cheat at cards until you’re all naked in a dirty motel room laughing. Spend the rest of your lives colouring inside each other’s lines. Burn your flight plan with your left hand and reach for each other with your right.

Your days have become dreams in between the dreams you have at night that are made more vibrant by the fact that you are sleeping beside each other. You have taken each other’s present, both sleeping and awake, and made it better. Not to overshare the obvious but I bet that there are times when you are lost in this unexpected goodness, this lack of drama, this windfall oasis of peace.

When we are at our loneliest, we are at our most common. That’s why this love, this altered state, feels so special. I hope you feel parts of you that you didn’t even realize were tense start to uncurl, daring the sun. Today is springtime finally catching you in a pillow fight.

You’re turning the strings of each other’s hearts into an orchestra. I hope you swim forever in the high-tide line of each other’s eyes and keep reminding each other that there is such a thing as a safe place. Be thrilled you make each other happy.

I hope you go forward, hand in hand like kids at a playground.

I hope you skip until you break a record.



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It’s planned.

This entire town is like an octopus in a cookie jar. Out here the flies wear helmets and smash through the cellphone signals, handing out whiskey-soaked business cards before they dive too deep into trouble. Bearskin rugs wear crowns and dream of burning-castle screenplays and far-off forests. The ugliest angels you’ve ever seen plummet down to earth, making acne craters in the driveways. Each feather a razor, each halo a carcinogen.

The small white houses in this suburb are measured and pristine. They don’t betray the sharks that swim inside. Dragons with delusions of fireworks and connections to drug dealers stay up late trying to set milk on fire. All they find is that blood makes horrible shampoo. This is a suburb lost at sea but the oars are being ignored. Every bathroom cabinet here is stuffed with orange pill bottles the size of beer cans. The cupboards have enough canned food for the apocalypse but it’s barely touched. It's the liquor cabinets that need constant restocking. All the basements hide blind identical twins hugging each other and crying. “Hyde seeks Jekyll” personal ads are tattooed on the eyelids of every plastic-surgeon promise. The children are pretending to be children and the parents are pretending to be parents.

Snails can be just as awkward when they pose in front of a mirror. In these houses, even the televisions ignore each other. The downtown core is hours away, a series of sandwiches on the horizon. A moustache breeding skyscrapers far away, infested with commerce, excitement, and crosswalks.

Out here, in the manufactured desert carpeted with lawns, marriages become neon signs and the bored pray for any excitement at all. Hypocrites with zombie intentions hoard steering wheels, brake pads, and airbags. Their right arms are longer than their left arms so it’s easier to stab each other in the back.

Every stuffed animal has arteries. Every husband screws the babysitter. Every summer there are a few hunting accidents. And no one reads the paper.




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It’s a time traveler thing.

I’m always walking up to people that I haven’t met yet and saying ‘hello’. I jump around so often that I can’t keep it straight. Then I have to go back and stop myself from doing it. It can get confusing but as long as I keep all the distortions to my own timestream, things are okay. A lot of people think I have a twin who occasionally appears, angry, and gets my attention.

It’s cool. I’m my own guardian angel, I guess.

I like seeing these people who I’m not going to meet for years by their reckoning. Some of them will be recruits, some of them will be lovers, some of them will just be pals with no idea of who I truly am.

I do enjoy a good ruse. I’m also quite the practical joker. I like to go around and leave little traps for myself. I’ve had people come up to me in public places and slap me silly because of what I did ‘last night’. I know my future self is laying down more shenanigans for me to find out about. It’s a gas.

What has me worried this time, though, is this woman in front of me. She’s crying in a way that suggests that she’s witnessing some sort of miracle.

“David?” she’s saying through her tears, hope warring with disbelief on her beautiful face. “Is it you?”

And then she says the words that chill me.

“I thought you were dead. I saw you die.”

Now, my name’s not David. I use a lot of aliases. But this woman seems pretty sincere. We talk for a while. She tells me that I died in her arms four years ago after a car accident. After her tears dry, she admits that I do look younger than her late husband but that the resemblance is still uncanny.

I died? Four years ago? I was married? How could I even begin to screw the timestream that much? That goes against everything I’ve been trained for. She has no idea I’m a time traveler, though, so I guess I at least kept that secret from her.

I’m very unsettled now. I hope all will be revealed. In time.



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I could start by saying that I lost my job. Or that I had to leave town for five years. Or that my family and I have just started talking again.

But I think I should start by saying that she died two days before the wedding. And that I went a little crazy after that.

I remember odd stuff. I mean, I know that a lot of people talked to me after I got the phone call. They told me that they did. But I just don’t remember anything. What I do remember is the light coming through the leaves outside the kitchen window. I remember cooking some eggs and watching them burn until they set off the smoke detector just because I’d never seen that before. I remember thinking that if I left all the doors in the house open, she might come back.

I remember insisting on an October wedding and eventually winning her over. If I’d let her have her way, she would have been married already when she died. Or maybe she wouldn’t have crossed the street that day.

I remember climbing up on the roof of the church to make tiny paper airplanes out of the wedding invitations and throwing them into the wind. None of them made it far. They all fell down into the gathering crowd on the church steps. I remember having it make total sense to do that at the time.

I remember looking down at the crowd that was yelling at me not to jump and not hearing them. I thought I was a ghost and that I was watching my own wedding from an astral viewpoint. I stepped off the roof to float down and see the guests close-up. I landed on a few people, broke someone’s leg and my right arm and that was that.

Hospital time.

Hospital time is one long run-on sentence of doctor-words and drugs. If I thought I was disconnected from reality before, I was really wiped off the grid after those white doors with the red crosses on them closed behind me.

But that was five years ago and I’m back.




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What do you think when you see this guy? He’s eating by himself in the Wendy’s late at night on a Friday. He’s thin and he’s a young looking seventy-five year old kind of man. He’s wearing a white suit jacket, a bright pink shirt, and a black bow tie. Like a Miami magician. You’d think he was on the way somewhere and he stopped in there for a quick bite but upon closer inspection, it doesn’t look like it. He’s taking his time. He’s got nothing else to do. You get the feeling he’s been there for hours. You get the feeling it’s more than just his night that’s finished. He’s almost disappearing before your eyes.

He used to be a gymnast. You have no idea the life this guy has had. He hasn’t been the same ever since his second wife, the one he really loved, passed away six months ago. She was a trapeze artist in a traveling circus that he did some part time tumbling work for in Berlin where he grew up. They emigrated here in the fifties together as friends. She lost most of her family in the war. The two of them kept in touch. He got married to a Canadian. She didn’t marry but boy did she have lovers. A European trapeze artist? Forget about it. Even in her late thirties she was still taking teenagers home. She moved out East.

The German Gymnast’s first wife left him after eight years. He had an obsession with organization that never sat well with her and eventually she left after realizing that she couldn’t change him. It’s too bad it took so long. All that wasted time for both of them.

The German Gymnast’s letters to the European Trapeze Artist became a little more desperate and heartfelt as well as more numerous. He was turning to her as a friend, not a lover. It didn’t cross his mind to be romantic with her. They both had friends in Canada after living here for ten years but they never really had anyone to connect with back in Europe. The Gymast was an only child of only children and they had both died years ago. No cousins to speak of. The Trapeze Artist had nothing as well but that was more a choice on her part. They only had each other when it came to talking about the years before coming here.

For a person who spent her life flipping through the air, she sure spent a lot of time running.

For a person who spent his life tumbling end over end, he was driven by order and stoicism.

It was surprise to both of them when she packed her bags, flew the x hundred miles from Ottawa to Vancouver and knocked on his door. When he said yes a few weeks later, a few phones calls to the capital brought whatever she couldn’t sell over as well.

Those years they spent together, all 36 of them, well, they could have taught teenagers a couple of things about passion and having fun. They’d almost lived their lives in reverse. Like they’d been old when they were young and only found youth later.

Coming to love so late, they had the knowledge to craft it, keep it safe, and live it.

He’s lost without her but he clings to his sense of order. It would have been their anniversary tonight. He puts on his best and eats somewhere close that he can afford.

He doesn’t care that people will think he’s a crazy old man talking to himself for hours in a Wendy’s. Tonight, they’re together in Berlin in an open air café on the vacation back home that they never took.



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