Love in the Time of Cholera

I read it four years ago on a trip to the Okanagan with my boyfriend at the time's parents. My hair was long and black then, and I remember towing around a ratty green shawl with me everywhere I went. I had picked up a Mexican nightgown on a trip to San Miguel that year, one of those little white things with a crocheted neck line. Aside from a bathing suit, it was the only thing I felt comfortable wearing, as it was loose enough to allow air to circulate on my sweaty skin. With the heat of the valley gripping every moment of that trip, my reading experience was enhanced to a point where I felt I was vacationing within Marquez's long drawn out love affair, rather than camping in a tent trailer in a little campsite outside Summerland B.C. The site was sheltered from the sun by trees. When I took breaks from reading I followed the small stream only meters from our tent, through bushes of baby breath, under a fallen tree, towards the lake. I'd wade through the running water and dive head first into the lake when I reached my miniature estuary.

Postcard

He walked me out to my car. We embraced. I looked up at him with desperate eyes, the vulnerability of youth, like acid eating away at my finely crafted appearance. I even tipped up my chin in the hopes he might kiss me. His lips brushed haphazardly against my cheek. Seconds passed before my eyes opened, and I stood there on the driveway, next to my car watching him skip back towards the warm light of the party, the drunken voices escaping through the slightly open door. His last words hollered over his shoulder. “I’ll send you a postcard!”

Eleven years ago. The post card pulled from a box of memories full of shards of love letters, blurry pictures, creased and bent in places, drawing ragged white lines across a face, an arm, a foreign landscape. The stamp still folds over the top corner. It is a picture of the Scottish Highlands, velvety green mountains, crooked black rock, a clouded sky descending upon the landscape. The stamp is Portuguese. I imagine it hidden in the front zipper pocket of his backpack making its way across the English Channel, through the streets of Paris, the majesty of Northern Spain, and finally back into his hands in Albufeira, stamp licked, folded over top corner, and sent to me, worlds away.

Canadian snow. Footprints tracking a path through an everyday routine. Checking mailbox, waiting…

So few were the gestures, that I made monuments of every one. He hoped to find himself. I hoped that somewhere, drunk on cheap wine, beneath a street light in Hyde Park, or in a church made of bones in Prague, he might find me. A vision of my face manifested in a mixture of light and softly swaying leaves. My rosy seventeen year old cheeks filling out the form of a holy skull. I had never been there, to this landscape of self discovery known by most as the European Continent. But I imagined myself appearing, like a ghost, in every place I heard he had visited, reminding him of the love he had overlooked in his eagerness to seek out the self.

The patterning of expectation and emotion in my young self, was directed through a deceivingly strict regiment of typical romantic love, etched out in my subconscious by years of obsessing over historical romance novels and movies. I run my finger over the still gleaming laminate top of the postcard, trace the rigid lines that make up two cliffs in the foreground of the picture. I am lost in the image and soon imagining Mel Gibson running, kilted, across the highlands, and then there is his true love, her long ash brown hair caught by the wind, stray strands swirling across her angelic features. It was likely this idyllic image that festered beneath my plea,

Think of me in the dreary hills of Scotland.

I flip it over and see his handwriting, and remember attempting to decipher a hidden meaning behind every word. “Greetings,” he wrote, “from the land of dreariness.”
What followed was an account of “beautiful women, ugly men, and lots of laughs.” The only note of affection was his lopsided sign off. “Later babe,”

Years later I went on my own journey, yet still not entirely my own as it was a dramatic attempt to prove to him that I too, had a self. In Barcelona, sleeping quietly on the top bunk in the corner of a coed hostel, that really seemed more like a homeless shelter, was a young man who looked just like him. He wore white t-shirts, so white that the folds contrasted against the yellowing walls, just enough that I could make him out scurrying from bunk to bathroom, like a floating sheet. He kept to himself. Propped up on his bed, his back pressed into the wall, he fidgeted with his eye glasses from time to time, as he wrote in his journal, maybe even a few postcards. I kept watching him, seeing in his gestures, his loneliness, the man I loved.

But the feeling is no longer a feeling, but the memory of a feeling, long lost over a decade of experience.

I put the postcard back in the box, tuck it inside a birthday card and underneath a stack of photographs. Next time, I'll have to be digging to find it.

In Defense of NOT Breastfeeding

I read the name tag hanging at an angle on her bright red cardigan. CAROLYN is really sweet. While I sign for my package she makes bizarre faces at my nine month old daughter Freda, complemented by some form of baby talk. Sometimes I enjoy this sort of thing. Life can be lonely, and babies seem to bring people's guards down. There are times though, when I find these encounters rather grating, like today. So I throw a little body language out, and give no response to Carolyn's behaviour in the hopes she'll drop it and let us be on our way. But she's not one of those people, and all my hints seem to fly fast through her gushing.

"I see you've got yourself a great baby carrier."

She smiles approvingly at my choice of slings as the little one starts to squirm and make noise. I nod, begin to turn, and then she drops it, the age old question, as if this brief and meaningless encounter has justified such prying.

"Are you breastfeeding?"

I am more than a bit touchy in this territory, I'll admit, as I've just come off a period of "mother guilt", having weaned my daughter at only five months. The question comes up again and again, followed by disapproving looks and awkward silence awaiting my explanation. I'm fed up, so I decide to lie to Carolyn, and I lay it on really thick with a wide confident grin.

"Yes, of course."

Carolyn has obviously breastfed all her children, and sees immediately that I, like her, intend to create a species of planet saving subhumans through the gift of breast milk.

"I could tell she was breastfed right away," she muses. "Breastfed babies are always more communicative and bright, they're just more advanced than formula fed babies."

I look again at Carolyn's flimsy name tag, and find myself beyond irritated, but frightened that there are people like her all around us, judging predestined futures for children everywhere. She is a menace to freedom.

I fight the urge to tell Carolyn that my daughter was bottle fed from day one and I'm just amazed that, in spite of such misfortune, she's already starting to string together simple sentences.

Once in the car I explain to Freda that ladies like that one are to be avoided at all costs. They seem really nice, but hidden beneath their sticky sweet little goos and gaws, are some outrageously aggressive, self validating opinions.

The Blue Room

I watched Krzystof Kieslowski’s Trois Coleur’s: Bleue last night for maybe the tenth time. There are so many aspects of this film that never lose their dramatic effect for me. It is the streets of Paris illuminated by shades of blue, Juliette Binoche’s flawless performance and exquisite face framing bob. Most of all I am struck, as always, by the blue room.

Julie, played by Binoche, returns home after surviving an accident that has killed her husband and five year old daughter. The gardener is out trimming the hedges, green against the grey sky and stone house. She approaches softly, seemingly emotionless.

“Have you done as I asked? Have you cleared out the blue room?”

The original contents of this room are never revealed by Kieslowski. The gardner has followed orders and Julie finds it empty, only cobalt colored walls and a chandelier of small azure crystals hanging in the centre. She leaves her home, her life, and takes only a string of chandelier beads with her.

I have always seen the house as the architectural metaphor for Julie prior to the accident. The blue room is her soul and the beads are her soul illuminated by fate. They are all she can bear, in her sorrow, to hold onto and are symbolic of her will to live in the face of devastation.

Everyone has their own blue room. A space, with its own individual characteristics, that haunts their life and never lets them go. In his song, “Tonight Will be Fine”, Leonard Cohen describes his room.

I choose the rooms that I live in with care.
The windows are small and the walls are bare.
There is only one breath, there is only one care,
And I wait every night for your step on the stair.

This is perhaps reflective of Buddhist beliefs; the bare walls and small windows, a single breath awaiting the sound of God.

Ever since I saw Trois Couleurs: Bleue, I have painted a room in every house I have ever lived in, for a long period of time anyways, a different shade of blue. Cerulean, azure, and cobalt create distinct backgrounds for specific events. I string them together with the continuity of a root shade so to remind myself that some things stay the same. When I meet people I'm sometimes curious if their walls are bare, or blue, or if they've ever even bothered to think about it.