the midwest in retrospect

i remember november first, twenty-fifteen

i remember being hospitalized

and i recall what happened after, but the events leading up to it are much foggier.

the only visitor to my room was the cop who had booked me in october for being a stupid teenager.

that year, i had dreamed of running away:

i would move to vermont or somewhere, far away from everyone i knew

and i would change my name and let my hair grow

and i would stop trying to be someone else

my great american midwest teenage story ended

when i moved back to barrhaven

and the reality of my less than ideal situation hit me full force.

today, i live in the best possible version of that dream

separated from the people who hurt me by miles and miles

without ever having to give up myself.

i don’t need to keep suffering for my story to be worth living.

i deserve community and love and belonging.

and i am home.

growing up

as a child i learned that my pain and trauma were only valid if what i had experienced was worse than what anyone around me had ever experienced. growing up means allowing myself to feel that pain without the need for external validation.

a letter to me

hi.

i write you from the leafcovered streets of montreal.

you are younger. 

things are not stable and they may not be for a while. but things do get better. you find family in the winter. next summer you’ll have an apartment all to yourself. you’ll be isolated—but don’t worry, we’ll all be isolating (you’ll understand in time).

in the fall you and an old friend will both be living a short walk from one other in côte-des-neiges, and two more won’t be far behind. remember that you have friends and that they’re there for you even when you feel alone.

leaves fall and crisp and crunch under my boots and the weather drops to freezing by the end of october. soon you will be exactly who you want to be in the city that welcomed you with open arms.

things are looking up for us.

H.L.

a letter to a friend

friend—

i think fondly of you from time to time. your face returns to my mind when i hear the first strummed chord of one of my favorite records—when i look at the jacket i wore all spring and into the summer—when i remember ben yehudah street after sundown.

each time i reach out to send you kind wishes, sober or otherwise, remember i do so directly from the heart. 

be well

social media

please let me write a tweet in a language nobody else knows

i want to shout and sob

without letting anyone know how ruined i am

i am overwhelmed with panic and my hands begin to shake

the blood running through me goes cold

when i see your face on a list of followers

private account, hidden, behind tinted glass

my hands are shaking

i hate to see how much your hair has grown

your smile—after all this time—still makes my stomach hurt

and the back of my head feels light and heavy at the same time

get the fuck off of my feed.

an instagram caption

i am limited by my choice of medium. every time i attempt to portray an emotion on this platform, i find that i can never properly re-create what i wanted to show in the first place. i can’t take a photograph that adequately explains the feeling of a september breeze on my freshly cleaned skin after two months in bed. i can’t melt my moods into an instagram caption.

though i have tried, no medium has ever consistently served me as well as my writing has. any attempt to sit down and compose music has, with few exceptions, ended in despair. i need not mention my inability to draw or paint. putting words on to paper seems to be the only suitable manner by which i can explain my emotions—and, i might add, it brings with it an inextricable sense of connection to my past and to other writers i’ve admired which i haven’t been able to find any other way. echoes of my betters.

no amount of cropping or application of the right filter can communicate as exquisitely the feeling of a commute into the city every single morning—where, underground, it’s always dark—as the use of no less than two hundred words.

how i know you were my favorite person

it’s a peculiar thing.

to’ve pined over someone, to’ve had them consistently at the center of all of your hopes and desires for as long as i did, and then to give them up. to recognize, though it was your love which was unrequited for so long—not theirs—that you no longer had that same love.

i don’t know what it was that they must have represented to me that i would feel perfectly reasonable in walking away from what we had once i’d gotten it. this way of thinking, though, presupposes that they were somehow symbolic to me, that i didn’t take them at face value. and i don’t think that’s the case.

they made me feel wanted and even appreciated at times, and they did many nice things for me. misty rose and powdered sugar. i gave them my time because i liked them and wanted to see them. then i didn’t.

it’s weird to think about the change that happened, because it wasn’t clear cut; it wasn’t a shift that took place all at once. 

but that’s over now. (get over it.)