Bri you beauty do you remember that night you hated the city? I was all done hating myself for the day and we walked down the Rosedale Valley Road, walked with our arms linked like the British schoolgirls we’ll never be, and I extolled the virtues of Toronto for you. Joking December rain not romantic-sounding as November Rain ha ha look at our funny brains, look what gets in, wet winter nightcrawl and all we can think of is Guns N’ Roses and bad dances at thirteen, stepping aside for cars as they swished past, down into the Valley, letting the rain melt our hair to our faces yours so bright in the light of that

What is that?

. . . the orange fluorescent light in the dark forest of your eyes and the old trees on this road, your laughter a mist shrouding my face. For a moment I was so sure. And I said, you see, the rain coming down the hill makes small waterfalls for us, and you like a serious child said I see them, and then the city was beautiful, then you believed me. There by the dark houses that must once have had horses and carriages drawing up to their heavy wood doors, you believed me then because with our eyes we made city cascades twinkling with streetlamps like moons; because we were walking upwards in the bright darkness, our arms linked and our youth on us like the sheen of the rain on the pavement, blessed and temporary.

And what were our brains like before movies or photo-graphs, how did we render beauty permanent in our minds and to what did we compare beauty to chop it down to chop it down to human-sized digestible bits? I ask you this and we yell about art – we compare mountains to movies! Make all beauty over in our image, as if it existed for us! – yelling just because we are excited and it’s raining and our breath is dragon’s breath in the cold night. I ask you this about art and beauty and am looking at the photograph, the film, I see us small in black and white, painted over in sepia, framed by the dark empty street, and thought of all the artists who had walked this way, arm-in-arm with some old friend, believing and not believing in the weight of what they’re saying. And we, with the sky on our eyelids and our teeth, we knew we were timeless. I felt a thousand minds opening to the same ideas a thousand first times. I felt included, beatified.

And then remember when we were standing on the narrow street by the park with the slim brick houses of Toronto’s sleeping affluent, and we talked architecture. You told me something very interesting about houses in Montreal, I think, something about a community of houses that could be moved around but I could only be outside of us there, only be watching you and knowing I would have to ask you again what you said, wondering about you the day you went to see these houses and about how you know to speak of them so confidently, to speak of the authority of city structure and the revolutionary ideal of having homes like building blocks. I loved you then but not properly because I was knowing at that moment the self-absorption, the isolation and hubris of making everyone into a character even as they exist before me. Knowing I could never do justice to your processes, to how your nerves respond to stimuli. You stood there trembling in the rain, like a pale, wooly flower, one of earth’s beautiful creations, a constant, two-way transmutation I can never capture.

And then I saw you looking at me, felt myself as I was for you, became acutely aware of my dark curls unravelling, and the brightness of my eyes as I looked at you and thought, ooh, I’ll have to be a character too. Crap.

• • •

And Mike, darling, dude, what to do with you? Love is a dead language. "I love you" now like those golf courses that were formerly national forests. Language like public lands, sold off for profit. So I hear your love in the breath between spurious and information as you deride some corporation policy and I hear it in your comfortable nonsense and you know this. We use so much language that there are times we want none. But sometimes I want to say to tell you as you’re shifting in bed before sleep, I want to whisper it low and not feel foolish for stating the obvious. But I ponder too long, I think of Ethan Hawke movies, and wonder how we acquire our behaviour with lovers, and you turn on your side, your brain creating scenes you will not remember and I will never know. I lie next to you hoping you can feel my words in the heat of my bones.

And you know that night we talked with Sean, that night you came along after I had argued with him off and on for four hours about Great Men? All day I had held my ground against Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Khan, Ghandi, against the whole host of outstanding individuals who mastermind History, Sean not saying it’s good only it’s how it is and you gotta respect ’em, The Men Who Make It Happen. I argued for everyone else, for us, who shape the world with our perceptions, for the generations of individuals whose lives are not simply fodder for the life of One Great Man who steps outside of history, grabs it with His mighty hands and thrusts His steaming cock into its ripped backside . . . i am a passenger. da na na. da na na. i ride and i ride . . . da na na. Iggy Pop! . . . anyway, Sean invoking human nature and me railing on about evolution of human consciousness beyond so-called survival, we’re fucking killing ourselves surviving, you bemused, looking kindly at my red face; you spoke of luck, of the Depression that gave Hitler a chance, of opportunity meeting preparedness. We talked talked talked and like the blessed peons we are we accomplished nothing, the conversation now gone, dissolved into the current of a history we will never know, recorded by no one.

That’s why, you said later in bed, that’s why as kids we all thought when we grew up we’d be heroes in our own stories. Yeah. We expect our lives to be extra-ordinary. Middle-class middle-class. But dude, you know we can’t help it and we laugh about it. I will keep my bulk rice in jars and my babies in cloth nappies but you know where my aspirations come from.

That night I knew. I want to be a Great Man, too. And you love me for it. Like Si Ma Qian, that poor man, I have delivered my fate to words, I live to document, redemption through the telling. But an imposition of will.

Willing our lives into language like trying to catch a waterfall in cups. Your metaphor. And will I know what of mine is mine and what I should mine or mime? Darling, I’m glad you’re such a good comrade because I have no concept of privacy. Why don’t you fault me for my pride?