“What I surpass is always my past and the object such as it exists within that past. My future envelops that past; the former cannot build itself without the latter.”
— Simone de Beauvoir
Bellevue was a blood clot on the map, hardened with heartbreak. But it wasn’t easy finding a place in Montréal. Happening upon the listing and suspiciously alluring rent, I disbelievingly trudged back to Bellevue to inspect my home.
Reaching the impasse on Crescent St, I remembered her, the girl who slunk out of a door numbered 55 and down the tiled stairsteps of H’s house in Bellevue, a paling grey terrace with a yellow mailbox. I thought I saw her walking along Crescent St, but it was just my reflection. I saw myself in a shattered mirror leaning against the base of a streetlamp, its chipping frame falling off. My initial recognition dissolved and crept into the mirror’s cracks. The facial contours under the streetlight and the sharp chin peeking above my scarf. I didn’t know this stranger. I only knew the girl H held and said was his. Cleaved from him, I was a shadow furrowed away from its owner.
H’s old house was tucked away in the bend of the cul-de-sac, a buried memory. I remembered H’s cat, Clara, slipping through my fingers and past his door. I remembered finding Clara poured into a pool of golden sunlight on the red Persian rug, copacetic, blending in with the rich fibres. Her orange fur made her seem like a whorl of the amber wood floor. The memory lulled me, but door 55 was shut in my face. The huge arched window H and I both looked out of once was warm like a hearth, and I heard the faint clatter of cutlery and wine glasses singing high and clear.
The cat was never affixed to that house, always slinking under the window onto the leaf-strewn street. Clara weaved an arterial map through Bellevue unbeknownst to anyone else. I would like to see her again, have her lead the way, but they’ve all moved from Bellevue. I sloped down the familiar bend away from 55 to get to the inspection.
My landlady told me then, ‘Bellevue is great for young singles like you.’ What makes me a ‘single’? I am still a movement towards H, still wanting to be tethered to him. I smiled and stared out of my bedroom window into the garden. A grey wisp of a cat, a stranger, padded along the fence and dropped onto the tile of the backyard. I watched her melt into the garden chair underneath strung-up laundry and decided this wasn’t a bad place to live.
I have a good room here, but it is never warm. Curled in bed, I stare into the tall ceiling at dust floating in the last cuts of light as the sun fades. Suspended like floating snow, the dust descends in an inert film. I stave off the memories that visit me. They are moments that are dead and limpid, in the recesses of my mind like the dust cowering in every corner of this room. My bedroom window looking onto the street is jammed, and the sounds it lets in— a grating siren, an engine crying in the dark, laughter from the street— are arrows from the past. The candle flame flickers in a languid dance. Its golden tongue licks across my wall, dimming as the wick sinks in the melted pool. I recede into dreams of the past, folding in upon myself under bed sheets, and the cold indifference of the world falls away. The smoke of the snuffed candle fills the room and the wax hardens, mooring its stuck wick.
I wake to the moon, a hurtfully bright pearl, boring into my eyes through the window. The snow falls wet and sluggish on the inert streets. The candle on the nightstand searches my dark features with its light. Life drums into me feebly from outside. It crawls into my tear-dampened sheets and insinuates itself under my skin. I am paralysed by the possibility of all that never happened, potentialities that are stuck in the past like blazing stars whose light reaches Earth from eons away. Thai takeaway from hours ago surges in my throat; the fleeting taste is a stale reminder of the past I am already distanced from. Memories of H sit sapped in my head like those sucked-dry beads in oranges that were once filled to bursting. The pulp is tasteless and transparent on its own. I have no appetite but I need something to slap the soles off my feet, pull me out of the disaster of nostalgia.
I weave in and out of supermarket aisles of food stratified on shelves. A bag of dried prunes on the bottom shelf grazes the ground. I stoop low to reach it. My back that had curled in bed for days, like a dead leaf, is immobile. Knees askew, I nearly fall backwards. An estranged vertigo rises to meet me, the same one I felt an age ago, back when my heels hung off the back of H’s staircase steps in precarity and I felt the world slipping out from under me. I was wearing a white dress and his fingers disappeared into its lacy folds when I fell into him. My vision clouded as if I wore a veil. I swam through a darkened corridor, and a door swung closed. I was a moth, blended into the white lace of the curtains in the streetlight-washed paleness of his room.
The curtain falls and I am here again, suspended in the tight air of the supermarket corridor. Every rustle of plastic bags in carts reminds me of H slipping on his shirt and doing his buttons and belt buckle before leaving. The memories gush like blood from a missing tooth.
I turn into the aisle of momentary blisses to distract myself. A man reaches up for a bar of almond and sea-salt chocolate, and the smell of his shampoo knocks me back. I am reminded of the smell that would softly gather in H’s hair. I used to bury my face in the nape of his neck and inhale. Nothing can bring me closer to H.
I slink about the pavement outside the grocer, not knowing where to go. Our footprints that used to shuffle together through the snow are gone. I cannot retrace my steps back to H. Snow falls quickly now, my steps are erased as soon as I trample them in. I find myself at the convenience store two streets away from H’s old house. Unconsciously pawing at my wallet in my bag, I prick my thumb on a safety pin. Good love is like a safety pin that pricks you slowly, unspooling you when you search for something else; another sedative, a distraction, a momentary bliss, a condom among the lint of the lining of my pockets. Usually, I’d go with H here to buy contraception in the dead of night. I’ve never needed a convenience besides that one. I don’t think I needed anything besides H back then.
In the glass door of the fridge in the convenience store, humming with electricity, I see the strange and trembling creature H made. She lived in the echoes of H’s warmth, surrounded by the turrets of his neighbourhood and the craning trees lining his street, forming a heavy canopy over her head. With resistance, with pleasure, she let his landscape pervade her. She became a narrow fissure in Bellevue’s porcelain façade of terrace houses. I make a hot coffee instead, give the man behind the till a dollar. He’s not the regular who used to serve us. I don’t want this man to know me as I am now, alone, nothing.
Everything is clearer in the reflection. I look back on the day I knew it was over with H, his going-away party. We dispersed amongst hugs and hellos. I settled into the hum of constant conversation and drinking. I caught sight of H in the reflection of the glass door opening to his garden. We must cultivate our garden, says Candide. H was my garden, my world. He was among the clusters of people turning their heads together to talk in tangled tones. The sun leaked through strips of tattered clouds like lace ribbons. Looking at H’s liquid movements, his hair all stringed with sunlight, I was pierced by the frightening quality of a love that had reached its peak. My heart hardened to a dense point like his pupils sometimes did, tiny black pupils sinking in an expanse of blue. The tree behind him was bare in those last days of spring. The trestled pattern of the naked branches was so complicated, but in the reflection of the sliding glass door it resolved somehow, stark and clear. The moment disappeared as soon as it formed. The arrangement of the branches and the little tattered clouds and the million filaments of his hair singed gold by the dying sun — they shattered in an instant.
After I met H, every piece of myself wanted to chip off like porcelain to be mended by him. I felt a sensation of release when he shook my shards out of place, and I tried to sweep them in his hands as if he would absolve me by seeing my every crevice and illuminating every crook. I looked upon myself from his protracted stoop. I was a speck suspended in his gravity. As the cold pricked my ankles peeking above my socks, my feet walked in tandem with H’s, mapping out a justification for my being here.
I was drawn back to relive this dead perfection, to scrape floorboards and corners for traces of H, to search for him in the splinters of the trees that bent over Crescent St like his torso bent over mine. It’s a mirage.
In the orange deluge of the streetlights, I veer towards H’s old street to see him again, but this time I forget the way — the path that I had cut through so many times to get here is stamped in. Love thy neighbour as thyself. I am shuddering out of the outline of myself that H carved out with his hands. It hurts like the pangs of birth do. I have lived in H’s sea, in his life’s current, following the ripples he made with my trailing skirts. I lived in his long shadow snatched long ago by the sun. I sniffed at the trail of a memory long after it was trodden on by the traffic of time. I’m not the same girl he knew.
