Running away is in this blood, feel it when I press my neck to yours.
Friday, November 30, 2012
Friday, November 9, 2012
Joan is in the back of the ambulance, holding the hand of a young man who is slipping in and out of consciousness. While her physical body is unquestionably in the present - checking his vital signs and communicating the results to her partners - mentally she is stuck elsewhere. Her brain stumbles over the same thoughts again and again, making a firmly packed pathway out of the snowy recesses of her mind. By now the trail is worn smooth; there is no need for her to continue travelling along the path with her eyes open. It is so familiar that each branch softly brushing her side comes as no shock, and each curve of the trail is followed with premeditated ease. This is all Joan can know. Creating a new, unfamiliar pathway through the tall spruce trees of her mind is daunting and not to be contemplated.
Thursday, November 8, 2012
When Teresa leaves home to study psychology her father is introduced to a whole new way of thinking. For Teresa, psychology is a way to figure out why parents leave their children. For her father, it is a method used to replace religion and (most importantly) love. Psychology is an explanation as to why the two have failed him in such spectacular ways. The study of the mind is, to him, implaceable; when targeted it seems to diminish any argument aimed against it. In Teresa's father's eyes: invincible. An old man's last obsession.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
carling avenue
It starts at the park on campus; students serenely study, and light laughter plays across the spacious garden. The blush of red in the fine oak trees gradually creeps into your throat, making you want to scream and rip the scarlet fever from your mind. You tremble into your phone, and hide behind a tree’s strong and silent guard.
The months progress at a sleepy, wintry pace and your mind is still broken, imperfect. You attend daily therapy sessions at a beautiful old building that could pass as a retired castle, surrounded by smokestacks caked in ice. As you march through the labyrinthine trenches of snow up to the Civic Hospital you imagine you are being called in to conquer dragons, instead of your own miserable thoughts. The construction surrounding the hospital acts as a moat, coyly taunting you as if to make you second guess your destination. You adjust your weighty weapon, a thick binder full of coping methods, from one arm to the other as you enter a quiet courtyard.
Passing the entrance to the emergency room reminds you of another hospital, only a block down from the one you are in now. In grade school, the butt of all the children’s cruel jokes were the patients at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre. Though no matter what you found at the entrance of the building – patients smoking, patients muttering, patients screaming – you could always hope to find at the back of this modern, slender structure a garden that could easily rival that of any other in the city. You recall passing through the pink peonies and ornamental grasses and wandering upon a lonely view of the city, with the Gatineau Hills looming in the distance. How a city full of angry, despairing people could look so calm, so indifferent – like a cat perched on a fence, licking the remnants of last night’s meal off its paw – unnerves you.
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