Anamorning.

On the step just out the front door, he’s waiting for me again.

Every morning for the past four, he waits, his nose a nervous twitch-tick he can’t control – flaring nostrils scrunching the bridge.

Each morning following me down the path toward the train, his gait a lumbering trip-hop-step, he asks if he can call me Mary-Ann.

My name is not Mary-Ann.

He, despite his bombastic vocabulary and apposite collared coat indicating a learned life, doesn’t understand.

He is agitated most on the days when I am late.

The alarm clock a sorely beaten snooze-foe nursing wounds from my refusal to arouse from furrowed bed sheets until the panic of losing my job to the comforting folds of dream eject me, sleep-fuzzy and stumbling, toward the bathroom, the routine a blind-eyed bang-on precision performance: the hair-comb, toothbrush, face-wash, hair-tie, cheek-pinch, eye-flutter, sweater-zip, good-bye combo (today, a judges’ score of eight-point-five) launches me out the door just in time to see the train fly by two minutes earlier than the day previous.

He stomps his paddle foot, the toes spreading wide at the helm of his rough-worn shoe, an impatient tippety-tap as, its face disappointed and arms raised in ten-to-eight fright, he flashes the reflection of first-light sun off his pocket watch into my eyes further curdling my already pea-soup thick frustration.

I try to keep my head, but he’s impatiently tapping my shoulder: Mary-Ann, Mary-Ann. How’d you get so tall?

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Little Lady.

Standing on the street corner beside tourists swinging cameras and kids from shoulders and hips, I am hungover. My head is thick with leftover gin. It would have been a better idea to stay in bed.

I stand, confused. This city’s strange to me; I don’t know where I’m headed.

Pulling up behind me, he rings the bell on his bike – a stiff reminder I should have taken a Tylenol or two before braving the world.

“Where you headed today, miss?”

“I’m in search of the perfect cup of coffee and something to kill this hangover.” A smile, hesitant. I think I may still be drunk.

“Hop in,” shrugging a shoulder toward the passenger cab tugging behind his bike.

“What’s the catch?”

“I don’t feel like working today. You buy me a cup of coffee, I’ll take you on a tour of the city unlike anything you’d experience with these yahoos,” he points to double-decker buses manned by sour looking guides dressed in period garb, tugging at lace and cummerbunds desperate to escape the heat.

“Yeah, okay,” I sigh.

“Climb in, little lady.”

“Right, only on the condition you please not call me little lady. Or ma’am. I’m not that young, but I’m not that old.”

“Sure, whatever you say princess.”

Weaving in and out of traffic we leave the tourist trap and cruise down residential side streets with clapboard fences and overgrown gardens. No one knows where I am or who I’m with. And what if this fellow’s only stolen me from the busy pedestrian street to skin me alive and leave me for dead in a dumpster behind the A & W, where I’ll be found by the late-night shift worker as he dumps the day’s grease trap over my quickly rotting body, flies swarming in and out of my mouth, my eyes glass marbles staring straight at the 14-year-old kitchen monkey who before that moment thought his only real problem was whether or not to tell Sarah he’d like to be her boyfriend?

Instead, we stop at Serious Coffee, a bohemster café complete with hippy-grain muffins and home-brewed dark roast. Not a bad start to curing the hangover.

“The best coffee in town,” he says, handing me an extra-large. “You cold? I’ve got a blanket in here you can use. I wouldn’t want you suffering from a chill while I do all the hard work up here,” a wink, quick and sparkling.

We tour through old China town. Pulling over, he ushers me out of the cab. Walking down a desperately narrow street he talks about the old days, about the thousands of people crammed into impossibly small places, the half addresses for half floors. We walk into the door of a shop crammed high to the roof with trinkets made of wicker, wood, tin, painted bright colors. We walk through room after room, small hallways leading into open spaces, the inventory a never ending collection of silk-bound journals and parasols. Nodding at the girl at the counter, he leads me out another door back into the street. There’s the bike, but that’s not the door we came through.

Huh. The hangover, it starts to wane.

Spinning through the market, we smell flowers and put our hands in vats of bulk grains. I splash my hands in the fountain and pose for touristy photos – broad plastic smile, standing with strangers.

Out of the market, he pedals us uphill toward the park – an open heartland of acre upon acre of gifted trees not native to the area. Eucalyptus in the middle of a west coast island. Monkey trees wrapping around Maples.

We stop to feed the ducks and even though I hate birds I let them eat right out of my hand because in the soft sunlight they don’t seem as dirty and plotting as they do in my imagination. We wander over to the gazebo – an orchestra plays and a little girl in a sundress spins circles around the crowd, her steps ill-timed and dizzy.

“I’ve been doing this for almost eight years now, you know? Being a tour guide, it’s not a bad lifestyle – get up in the morning, talk to people, put a little cash in my pocket. It’s not glamorous, but I don’t mind. Sure I sleep in my van, don’t have much to call my own, but I did that once, I was a real greedy bastard, working the oil for more money I didn’t know what to do with.

“You think about giving up all them comforts for a little freedom like that? Sell your stuff, give up that apartment of yours, see where life takes you? I wouldn’t go back. When I was traveling, I saw a happiness in people that was never because of money, you know? Those third world countries, they’ve got nothing like we do but what they do have? That look – you know, that satisfaction. They know what happiness is. They find it every day in the people around them”

Riding along the border of the ocean, we watch kite-surfers twist over tail winds. We stop and pick chestnuts from a tree in the bluff. Up the street and around the bend, we stop at an old lady’s garden and eat flowers from the dirt, rub fresh lavender on our temples.

We go to the wharf where we watch a fat seal eat salmon right from the fingers of a little boy.

“That seal eats better than I do!” he says.

I smile.

We walk along the dock, peering in the windows of houseboats.

“Can you imagine – two hundred and twenty five thousand dollars for a boat you can’t take away from the dock. What’s the use?”

Good point.

We sit on the edge of the dock and share a smoke. Whale-watching tours heft tourists to and from the shore.

“Whales guaranteed today!” the salesman yells from the opposite side of the dock.

“A hefty promise,” my tour guide says.

Planes pilot into the harbour, landing softly on calm waters. It’s a perfect day to cure a hangover.

Back through town, we ride to the shop where he parks his bike.

“A burger and a beer: a perfect way to end this day,” he says.

“Sure.”

“Don’t say much, do you? A little shy?”

“Hardly shy. Just taking it all in. Thanks for today – I had fun.”

We talk with the other tour guides, all of them far from home, all of them in search of something the corporate world never gave them.

I contemplate trading in my plane ticket for a seat on the couch in the cab lounge, but instead we walk over to the pub and devour greasy burgers and kick the hangover with a few beers while listening to an old guitarist pluck the blues in the background.

My tour guide waves goodbye and wishes me well.

“Safe travels, okay?”

I nod.

He doesn’t ask for my contact information, he doesn’t make a move.

“Good luck in your search for happiness, little lady.” That wink again.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

The Quiet of Chatter.

The wind tears through clothing, biting raw skin, a rash of goose bumps breaking out across layers of wool, ice picks pricking swollen cheeks, nostrils stuck shut with frozen snot.

Waiting for the reprieve of winter takes on a whole new meaning when you’re unable to breath, your lungs suddenly solid with the vapors of ice.

On the bus, everyone is a rendition of a wild animal bearing its winter coat: the mink on the left, dark and slick, black eyes peering from behind layers of Lycra fur made by the poor indigenous people of a country that’s never experienced weather quite like this; the bear, his beard thick with frost, his paws pulling a worn wooly toque over sad, experienced eyes, feet dressed in boots too big save the three pairs of socks; the bird, always at least one, too proud to hide its feathers but obviously shivering in its poor choice of stylish jacket and delicate shoes.

I, smudging fog from the frames of my glasses, unzip the first layers of down, loosen the wool around my neck, pull one then two pairs of mittens from warm and wet hands and settle into my seat for the long ride into dark morning.

The snowflakes fall fat, slow – almost apologetic in the way they drift softly in an attempt to excuse themselves from the shoulders of passers-by. Pardon me, oops, excuse me, they’d say in swirling whispers.

The winter dampens the noise of the city, cushions the chaos of rude traffic, softens the belch of industry, hushes businessmen yelling into cellphones. Slowly, the city is padded with the Styrofoam crunch of packed snow under tires, underfoot. With no rush to be anywhere in particular, traffic crawls, creeping down side streets, the rumble of engines lost to white noise.

With every sound suddenly so dampened, the world moving so slowly, I can finally hear my own thoughts.

Sometimes I get these words stuck in my head – just one at a time. I repeat them over and over and over again and again not because I want to but because my brain gets stuck like a sports car high centered in a plow bank of snow – a constant loop of letters spinning without gain or change, the same song stuck on repeat.

Calculated. I am calculated. I calculate moves carefully, chess board strategy – sequencing a chain of reactions. Calculated gets stuck up there, I can touch the letters – round and soft, interjected with sharp swords – swift and strategic in their placement. The word talks in my mind, tries on different voices, speaks different languages: prémédité; kalkuliert; calculado; gerekende. The voices, they’re hurried sometimes – in a rush to spit out letters too bitter to keep in. But sometimes, sometimes the voices are slow, carefully forming each letter, slurring them into one another. Caall-kul-ltd.

The squirrel gets on board on Jasper and 116, its cheeks full of saved food, its coat shivering with the chill of winter wind, eyes glassy, nervous, darting back and forth from door to window to the bear’s face, who’s drowsy with hunger.

Loss. This word is hissed sometimes up there – serpent and slithering, a flicking tongue, four letters, a gentle start to a slick, slow end. Loss – a forgiveness of something once held dear, letting go, a loose kite string floating higher and higher, or a treasure sunk deep in high water, filtering below the surface lower and lower until nothingness – black, murky, the treasure of memory. Perte; verlust; perda; het verlies: lllossss…

This word, it sleeps in the corner of my mind, wound tight around other thoughts, slipping between full sentences, interrupting logic, a low, slinking ssss, a muted soundtrack of letters in my mind.

The chatter on the bus competes with the chatter in my mind, each loud, persistent, vying for attention via auditory hallucination. The bird, chirping: calculated dress is a consequence of the interactive genetic algorithm; design is of the origination of the Latin ‘designare,’ you know? It means to symbolize some plan, a calculated placement of feathers, the bird coos, puffing feathers, ruffling wings.

The bear wipes his mouth with a dark paw, growling under his breath: failure, destruction, privation, defect, misfortune, risk, not gaining, not winning. Bearing a loss.

The chatter is loud today.

Jasper and 124. End of the line: tightened scarf, zippered jacket, mittens pulled on.

Soft steps off the bus, plowing through quieted streets, the chatter – it stops.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Instant. Gratification.

Our culture of instant gratification…

 

“…offers something strangely compelling about the long tease.”

 

“…[is] killing a couple’s capacity to stay together for the long haul.”

 

“…take[s] away from the art form of a music album.”

 

“…gives a whole new meaning to the expression collective memory.”

 

“…focuses the effects of the sexual pleasure drive on a person’s emerging personality.”

 

“…questions legitimacy.”

 

“…is very important.”

 

 

« …questions the point of planning, anticipating, and developing long-term goals.”

 

“…leads us to overindulge in activities with immediate rewards and delayed costs.”