something I've been meaning to tell you

1. K moved back to the Netherlands a long time ago. I forgot to say so. He first moved back to his wife, then together they went to Holland. He left me a note. The name he called me that I thought meant "pest" was actually "meisje" which means something like little girl. He also left me his watch, the one that helps me sleep.


2. I looked forward to Christmas in Kensington only because of the lights.

But in the shops Christmas lights framed the windows even in August daring winter ever to return and frost the panes. If anyone can see us then they think we are a couple holding hands and shopping when in fact we are nearly strangers. On 4th Street things get darker toward the Mission Bridge and I remembered watching bats becoming entangled in the nets over Fish Creek where as children we were taught about ecology and the interconnectedness of living things. If anyone can see us here we are romantic as I stretch out over the water making wishes on reflected stars, his hand to help me keep my balance. In fact we have only twenty more minutes behind us, the understanding that men walk on the outside of the sidewalk, and I am looking for bats, not wishes. His hand on my back means he is impatient. By the time we are across the bridge he has forgotten which side of the sidewalk his dead mother taught him to use and I am shivering with cold. It is cold even in August on the prairies.

Prior to his mother's death I spilled cranberry juice on the kitchen counter, smoked cigarettes with his mother on the deck, and spoke with her in French I thought I had forgotten.

Afterward I helped his sister empty out the closets, roast marshmallows in the fireplace, made jokes at the reception with his father who had taken too much pain medicine. He laughed. He had taken seven pills.

And after his father went to bed alone for the first time in forty years, we crossed the Mission Bridge and slipped into the darkened house. I went with him to the downstairs bedroom, another weak attempt at humour and further evidence that we live - because I fear we are dying too and I have nothing else to give him of any value that I know yet inside myself. For the first time I hear his accent, French Canadian, when he says marionette.

His impatience coupled with my trance and I tried not to think too hard. Our gazes do not meet. If anyone sees us now we are a married couple twenty two years in; we have forgotten how we met and what we once liked about each other. We touch each other only to check if we are alive.

He left six days after the funeral. He asks if I still smoke. I really don't anymore.


3. Shawn and J have a new game. When they laugh together I am satisfied somehow when I have no idea what is so funny. It means they love each other without me and I do not have to be part of everything. I like sometimes to be apart from both of them because I want to love them both from up close and from far away.





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