Walking back from finalizing the details for my new place I realized I’ve entered into what I call the lasts leading up to a move. In this case—the last weekend in my apartment. To celebrate I’m making a gigantic dinner made up of all the things I’ve collected from the various markets around the neighbourhood, eating as much of the food in the house until I feel like I can’t budge, and then forcing myself to make the fourteen to fifteen trips from the apartment to my car to fill it with stuff to move. Then I get to have fun and post pictures and write.
But—of course—before the pictures, some more words. In Part I my dad and I walked around CityPlace on a bright summer day. This time, along with my sister, we did a night shoot along Queens Quay on a warm summer night.
The exhaustion is setting in. When I sit and rally my thoughts for words they do not call back. I want to do something at least a little bit fun amidst the work I need to do this month. It’s almost over. I’ll I hear is sleep. But I want to write—finally I see them, the words I know will one day be sitting on a page. I can see the book. I see the beginning—the ending. It’s in my hands. I’ve done it. …I want to write.
These pictures are from September of last year. At this time I’ve only just figured out the lack of proper darkness in my bedroom and over‐abundance of nighttime noise is slowly depriving me of the sleep I need each night to keep me from slipping away, but I don’t know how tired I actually am yet. Tonight I know I’m exhausted, but I understand why. Back then I didn’t. I can see it in the pictures. They feel tired. They’re unfocused. I see the lack of a solid foundation.
My photos are my notebooks and my compression algorithms. They are my bookmarks and placeholders. I write from what I feel and remember feeling when I see them. They are notes to my future self. For a while I couldn’t look at them because I didn’t like what they were saying. Now I understand I can’t pick and choose what I want to hear from myself. It works better when I just listen. What’s the point of time travel if you’re just going to argue with the past?
As I’m writing this I’m looking out over the street from my desk’s new position in front of the giant wall of glass that is the one side of my apartment. It’s better like this, without the giant couch filling the room and blocking the windows. I wish I’d done this sooner, but at least I get to enjoy the view for my last month and last weekend here. And I now know it’s perfectly possible to live without a couch.
It’s Monday night. I started this post on Saturday afternoon. This is how chaotic things have become—where I spend three days writing something and it ends up reading like the same: a little more clunky than I’d like. Normally I’ll write a post in one shot with very little editing. It all just ends up happening and I end up happy with it. I don’t really see it happening that way for this post, so I’m ending with some old writing from years ago inspired by some of the many the lasts in my life. Yes—it’s poetry. And it’s the best kind of poetry too: high school poetry.
…And after going through my computer I realize I only have a hard‐copy of this poem, and it’s packed. So—we’ll come back to that in a few days.
In the meantime…
