Holding Still for as Long as Possible (6 page)

It didn't matter that I understood what was going on physiologically in my body. My neural thermostat was fucked up. My body went into fight-or-flight response for no good reason. Blood rushed to my heart and legs, away from my fingers and face, causing my extremities to tingle. My stomach shut down, throat constricted. All these things are helpful when you're faced with an oncoming bus. Need to lift a car to save a baby? Awesome. Sitting at dinner? Absolutely incapacitating.

Afterwards, at Kennedy Station, Maria and I were a bit awkward with each other, overly polite. She ate one of the chocolate chip cookies her mother had wrapped in Saran for her, offering me one. I declined.

“I'm going to tell my mother about us,” Maria said. “We need some independence. I mean, I know we have different houses now, but we need to spend some conscious time apart.”

“Yes, definitely.”

On August first, I had moved all of my possessions into Roxy's second-storey apartment on Gladstone. For just over a month, I'd had my first real bedroom alone since I was sixteen. Still, Maria and I continued to hang out a lot. It would have been unnatural for either of us to pretend the other didn't exist. And it was still easier to share a bed with Maria. The sounds she made while dreaming instantly pulled me into sleep. Alone, I dreamt about my teeth falling out, about getting shot fifty times.

When I got home, I dropped the remaining bit of Rescue Remedy, a flower-based tincture I'm certain is one hundred percent placebo, into a glass of water and spent the night watching
Designing Women
reruns on Roxy's
TV
in the living room. On a piece of paper, I wrote out a list of my shifts at the café, and the three classes I had registered for. So far independence wasn't my strong suit. I put my notebooks into my backpack with the two textbooks I'd managed to buy, and laid out my clothes on my bed, in hopes I might actually make it to class the next morning.

As I sipped at the Rescue Remedy, I knew the bitterness was probably a lie. I was an hysteric, a wandering womb. I might have made a great Victorian lady, dying in a tower somewhere, pinching my wrists until the wilting finally killed me.

[ 3 ]

Amy

This morning I woke up in a slug's casing of my own regret, pushing the duvet to the floor with my shoes. I had evidently fallen asleep fully clothed, heels and all. My mouth opened reluctantly and my extremities tingled. The clock read 7:15 a.m. Josh was due home soon. I managed to curl upwards only to fall back against the mattress with a moan.
I hate this day
. I cursed the sun with all its expectation.

I'd always been a morning person, one of those cliché bright-side-of-things people who drive normal folks crazy. At summer camp, I used to jump out of my sleeping bag at 6 a.m. for the polar bear swim, fuelled by the frigid temperatures and the euphoric calm of dawn light. Now I liked to jog around Trinity Bellwoods Park as the sun rose.

So it was unusual to feel this way, to wake up grumpy and disoriented.

On weekend mornings when Josh and I first fell in love, we would open our eyes around the same time, as if good timing had tapped us on the shoulders. Feeling the flutter of Josh's eyelashes across my back triggered instinctively the flutter of my own. One of us would press “play” on the stereo. We stubbornly played cassettes, even though we'd been raised on
CD
s and digital files. We made perfect mixed tapes. I made dozens of videos of him, followed him around with my camera asking him questions. I must have edited more than twenty short films that had my love for him as the only narrative thread. Pure beauty.

When we kissed too long in public, our friends would insert forefingers into open mouths with wrinkled gag-poised faces. Josh wrote e-mails home with subject headings such as
Bliss
, and opening sentences like
This is what everyone talks about. This is It. Amy is the One I never used to believe in
. He'd blind-copy me on them — we had no secrets. I knew all of his passwords. We shared a bank account.

Our elevated state of rapture lasted much longer than most and was therefore experienced not as a honeymoon phase but as a constant state of euphoria. We joked about getting a submissive houseboy for lazy Sunday mornings, so that we could have breakfast delivered in bed. We'd wrap around each other, ease into the day lazily, like melting ice cream cones accepting their liquid state.

When my mother met Josh she said, “Amy, I can see you with him for a very long time. He seems so solid, so good for you.” She'd not been so supportive of my lovers before Josh, just quietly tolerant, making some efforts but nothing overwhelming. It wasn't a gender thing. She had liked my one girlfriend just fine. She had liked Jason, my high school boyfriend, all right. But she really took to Josh. She'd send us envelopes with clippings of anything in the news related to paramedicine or hospital issues, with
True
Heroes!
written in coloured pencil crayon in the margins. She bragged about Josh to her book club when they read a book about the health care system. It felt as if Josh fit into all the areas of my life that had once felt separate.

I have a tattoo on my lower back that says
Hope
. When we got the tattoos, we were twenty, and in that stage where we still did things like have sex in cabs. Back when I felt somehow invincible, we got each other matching tattoos for Christmas. I still loved every inch of those letters, albeit a bit differently now.

I remember Josh pulling me out of the cab on our way to get the tattoos done and sitting me atop a bright green
Now
magazine box, and kissing me. If you've been kissed like this, you know what I mean. Heart-attack city, hair-ballad worthy, “throw all your money away for one more chance at love” kind of kissing.

The sun was going down and we hadn't left the apartment since Boxing Day, hadn't talked to anyone else, had turned off our phones, unplugged the computer. I was wearing a bright blue ball gown and he was in a '70s-style tux, and we didn't have anywhere fancy to go. We weren't high, just feeling momentous.

I'd been videotaping that whole day, watching through the camera lens the way Josh moved. At dawn, I had stood on a high stool in the corner of our bedroom, had caught him waking up from a beautiful angle, kicking the soft blue sheet down and stretching out his body. Our bed surrounded by Christmas paper and abandoned clothes. Usually he didn't let me record him so much, but his guard was down. “I like the way you see me,” he'd said, “so I suppose I don't mind so much.” You'd be hard-pressed to find much photographic evidence of Josh's existence, but on occasion he let me document
us
.

I met Josh when I was nineteen, through our mutual friend Roxy. She was teaching me how to edit movies on her computer, and there he was, asleep on her pullout couch.

“My friend Josh came to town to have chest surgery, so we have to be quiet.”

“Where's he from?”

“Guelph.”

“Huh. How do you know him?”

“We played in a band together last year. He used to come to the city to drum. Now he's moving here to go back to school and stuff.”

“For what?”

“To be a paramedic.”

“Weird.”

“I know.”

I was drawn to him immediately. Chemical.

When we first started dating, every once in a while we used to have this conversation:

Him: “You're going to leave me for a girl, right? 'Cause you're really queer?”

Me: “No. I date girls and guys. Are you going to leave me for a straight girl?”

Him: “No way, uh-uh. Why leave the perfect woman?”

It seems funny now, that we used to care about those things, be hung up on the politics and the way we were seen. But I suppose it's natural to question, given the hostility of the entire universe outside our safe bubble of progressive folks. Josh never, ever looked like a girl, even as a kid. He went on testosterone at seventeen. He's never not passed. He just looked a lot younger than he was, like a teenager. It bugged him.

He never really went back to Guelph, except to get his stuff and move in with me. We graduated the same year, he got a job with
TEMS
, and my internship at the film centre turned into a job. We were pseudo-married with careers while most of my friends were still dodging student loans and working at Starbucks.

By the time I had unzipped my dress on the second floor of the tattoo parlour, I was no longer concerned that the cooler-than-shit tattoo artist thought I was a tattoo-virgin wimp. She looked like a Suicide Girl, one of those online pin-up Goth vamps from the popular website of the same name. And like all those girls, underneath the red hair dye and sleeves of ink she had the body of your everyday prom queen. I stood there as she smeared my skin with Vaseline and placed the transfer sheet on a few different areas. I acted as if it was totally normal to have a stranger inches from my breasts.

“So, what do you do for a living?”

“I'm a student.”

“She's a filmmaker. You should say you're a filmmaker,” Josh said.

“I've made
two
short films. Hardly a filmmaker, yet.”

The tattoo artist shrugged.

I had started out making experimental videos. Josh was the star of my first linear documentary, him having such a fascinating life story and all. The film was abstract, no actual talking heads, just text of his experiences and visuals taken from car windows and roller-coaster rides, the sky and the road blurring in patterns. He liked to plug it, pretend I was a few short credits away from Cannes.

I was mildly afraid of needles. I had an aversion, is more accurate. But that day I felt committed. I'd never been tattooed before because I'd watched my older sister, an early '90s hippy, get all the Grateful Dead bears down her back, a peace sign between her breasts, and a psychedelic
phish
on her ankle. Now she had to wear tights and long blouses to her law firm, even in the summer, and was considering laser removal.

I'm the youngest of four siblings: lawyer, surgeon, physics professor, and me, the artist who provides my parents with plenty of worry and lots of whispered speculation, the accidental baby twelve years younger than the rest. I am the beloved baby girl, the family pet, since lawyer and Dad are allergic to dogs.

Josh, tattooed since he was a teenager, grinned at me. “You don't have to do this, baby. But if you still want to, the pain isn't as bad as you might think. You can ask her to stop any time.”

The tattoo girl nodded, examining the crumpled-up paper with our design on it.

“Why don't you go first?” I zipped my dress back up and sat on a grey office chair across from the tattoo bench. I pulled off my boots and rubbed the warmth back into my toes.

“Sure.” Josh told the artist where he'd like it placed, and she pressed the transfer sheet down on his lower back.

I taped the whole process, watching as the letters appeared on Josh's skin, as blood was wiped away, the artist admiring her work at every step. She had a steady hand.

When I lay down and decided, finally, on the exact same spot on my lower back, Josh held my hand and kissed my shoulder.

“Brave, bravest girl,” he whispered, buttoning up his tuxedo shirt.

The needle went in and I hardly felt it at first, I'd been expecting so much more pain.

Afterwards, we lay side by side on the tattoo parlour floor with our shirts off, our arms raised, and our heads turned to the left in faux sleep. The tattoo artist panned our bodies with my camera, lingering on the matching raised black letters. We were marked, and we had our whole lives ahead with this word. We were attached by it. I remember thinking that.

I always thought in terms of opening credits, and decided that scene would be ours.

That was years ago now, and eventually everyone becomes ordinary, right? Lately Josh had taken to waking up first, having a shower, eating a PowerBar, and checking his e-mail, all before I woke and felt the bed cold like a leftover pancake. He smoked in the backyard while I ran strawberry or eucalyptus bath gel over my body, sighing into the steam.

I'd channelled my restlessness into the acquisition of scented lotions, gels and powders, increasingly more expensive. I even built a new shelf to accommodate the bottles and jars, a nail between my teeth, hammering in a bright red rack beside the mirror. I got a little nutty and colour-coded them. Green apple facial scrub. Chocolate mousse shower gel. Cotton candy conditioner. Brown sugar exfoliant. Candy cane lotion. Martini cologne spray. Josh had watched me through a sliver-sized bite of the open door. “You look tough, like you used to,” he muttered, claiming the muscles in my shoulders were more defined, sweat pooling in the divots.

I didn't feel my body much. I could smell it, watch my feet moving, but I didn't feel inside of it. Things that used to be seamless were now fraught with customs. I wanted things to feel good and normal. They didn't. Good and normal felt as far away as Whitehorse. But we were so clean. Skin brushing against each other in the hallway, plum scents and sparkle traces left behind.