These are the remains of some of my lost and most favourite collage art, made by me almost a decade ago – all in tatters now, and much more trite than I remembered them being, in a room I cannot enter.  But it is nice to know they still exist, despite the ethics of ownership.

I was speaking with a high school friend about that last night – decades, a decade.  I suppose it strikes us now, as sixteen was quite a memorable year.  Will twenty-six be memorable, will it come close, even brush past the (yes, melodramatic as all hell, but still) the fury and flutter of those days? – so, so much longer, than the days of now.  Qué será, será!!  …but I know it will be better than the last: December 2009.  A long December, indeed.  Chasing a manic boy around downtown Vancouver, trying to figure out why he was not with me, at the Hotel Vancouver, not a cheap joint, the most expensive in the most expensive city in North America, actually, where he had rented a room for us, trying to escape my lumbering, muttering, threatening landlord – who had only become a threat when the boy decided to write all over the walls of my suite with permanent marker (yes I’ve done the same!  But it was always my apartment, at least in part, thus I, or a coalition, wanted, those words, to be there – and they were not profane, they were poetry) that I would later paint over by myself, always by myself, always.  When the boy drove his motorcycle over the lawn, when the boy lit a gigantic bonfire in the backyard (small just was not good enough, and I can understand that!  But I cannot understand the disrespect, the answers that came in the form of “fuck offs” and laughter – “get the fuck back inside, woman!”, and harder laughter), when the boy stormed out of my space and insisted that “I threw him out!!”, when the boy urinated in my upstairs neighbours’ mailbox (how creative) and lied to me about it, making a fool of me as I wrote the landlord a letter – “he would never do that!  He was inside, with me.”

Yeah, right.  He never was.  Thank Goddess he never will be.  Thank me.

When the boy finally left a bruise on my forehead and threw me to the ground, upon attempting to whisper three tiny words in his ear.  I got three in return.  You stupid bitch.

Why he took his stupid “profit”, and threw it in a coffin.  Not given away, nor burned, but spent on garbage – he could not recall quite what.

Why he wouldn’t eat a bite of one of the two-hundred dollar meals he kept paying for, then complaining about as soon as they arrived, why he told me to meet him again, again, again, but never showed up, why I deserved to cry, why he would not stop yelling until I cried harder.

Oh!  What I could do with two hundred dollars right now!  First I would buy some acrylic paints to replace the ones that Laara Cerman – an artist? – of Vancouver’s ‘Cake Imagery’ stole from me, though she has free access to such media through work, and through the so-called ‘collective’ that she kicked me out of , “a collective”, indeed!  (She had never even heard of cerulean blue…  ) That she stole even though she makes six figures a year, something I will never, and have no desire to, accomplish in my life.  Previously claiming that she, like I, wished to be able to live on $20,000 per year for the rest of her life.  Deceiver, dissembler, dressed-up in dreadlocks.  “Creative Retouching”, you tout?  You would not know creative if it bumped into you like a bogeyman in the night.  And that summarizes the plastic saint who I lived with during September, October, and a few days in November – before she slammed on the brakes; before I made my break.

Those I lived with during July and August may have taken all of my money, but they also took care of me. I think those months were the highlight of the year, the year that began in December.

January, one woman packing and unpacking an apartment for two.

February, the disastrous trip to Peru – sickness and a wicked white witch of the Amazon.

March, when the pain finally set in, the physical, the moaning, when bed became home.

April, when I finally fainted, and was wheeled into an operating room.  (Yes, Nate Fisher, of Six Feet Under, it is those giant, globular lights that you remember, nothing else.  That is because they are terrifying.  They are the most frightening things I have ever seen.)

May, when the pain finally set in, the emotional, when I realized none of them were human.  When demands for post-surgical sex and demands from Simon Fraser University left me half-mad.

Which month was worse, April or May?  I cannot recall.  If I could, I’d be wrong.

June, the only good month of my two-thousand-ten.  Magick gardens, possibilities, renewal.

Smashed to bits with a hammer in July.  Indeed, you are The Fool.  You stepped off that cliff long before you knew me.  Knew my face, my name – as that was all you ever knew.  It was not my fault – you refused to listen.  Always being one up was too dear – so rather unfortunate, that you are The Zero.

Heroes wear hospital pajamas with pride, they do not complain until their own things come back.  They make their own things, out of thin air, regardless of the sterile smell. 

Regardless.

Indeed, I am the High Priestess.  Next year’s decisions are miles away, but I have faith that they will be better (could they be worse?).  Today I will make new incisions – paper, glue, mind, spirit.

Fearless.