my plaza [excerp+]

I spend six weeks painting the walls of my apartment from a greyish-pink to white. As penance for not having read her before, doubly culpable as a woman and bibliophile, I decide to listen to Woolf’s entire oeuvre as the walls, cupboards, ceilings blank into pages for new experiments of living. I am thirty-one and I bought the place with friends at the last moment we could. Our new neighbourhood, Parc X, I come to know for its Edenic cement-yard gardens, its moveable forests, each restaurant discard bucket piled on Jean-Talon become a pot for what next door they tell me are plants you can’t find in the grocery store, its length-of-me chain-link squash, porch-sunning neighbours greeting each other in English, Urdu or Greek, sometimes yelling from across the street where loud cars twining shrutis and bass roar, windows down, so loud your throat shakes. I had moved further from my beloved Plaza but within reasonable walking distance, far enough away to steep my Plaza psychogeography in absence, brew a cognitive map.

Soon I would be haunted. I’d look into an upper corner of the bathroom, a spot that had been particularly hard to reach with my weak wrist and brush, and an image would flash in my memory: Mrs. Dalloway, cab-gazing at Piccadilly station, feeling far out at sea and alone--feeling that it was dangerous to live even one day. A BMW screeches to a halt with its nose to my hip on Grand Prix weekend. Two elderly soigné men yell bitch! from inside the car, more than once give me the finger after I smack the sleek hood with my palm (palm left to smart for an hour) on a trench-coated walk to the Mile End to visit Virgo , now my ex, who might have been too busy for my cheeks-flushed-rush-walk-swell-of-pride tale, emphasizing that when marching, looking over my shoulder thrilling, in the telling, accidentally, his young new hire, who seemed to appreciate, eyes aglow, what it means, as a woman, to stick it to a man, to rich men, cruising urban space, even via very few words, a mighty slap to the hood, my palm injured more than the luxurious car. Piccadilly, where three years later I would emerge onto the streets of London, alone, disoriented, with three months ahead of me to work out (the Council paying for my ride) something of the relationship between sound, time and urban space. In London I made fast friends with a fellow Aries  who’d walk me part-way to my Hackney attic after nights out drinking at The Rochester Castle, a Wetherspoons, a type of McBar, where we’d order cheap sweet booze off an app on our phones so we never have to stand up from the soggy picnic table out back, fence hung with string lights, who’d make fun of me with Fireball-breath for my West Coast drawl and “Tames” river then complain about millennial pandemic life, the disaster of working at a tourist trap in an underground bar, itself an arcade therefore a Plaza-cousin, Leadenhall Market, a thin staircase calling me hence, leading me down to my future friend who off the bat complimented my Dolly Parton shirt, saying “I would wear that,” aka. rhinestoned roses on acid wash denim with silver thread so of course I liked him, working long hours at the tourist bar, not even one free meal, amid illnesses and poverty I’d come to learn, his mum sick in Oxford, his cat nearly dead, friends long moved because the city’s too expensive. My Brit Aries  twin (though four years apart) who’d meet me in Abney park cemetery, Poe’s treasured haunt, to smoke a joint and gaze at the decrepit tombstones and statues, their stony death masks furious, strangled with vines, vaults by our ankles cracked as Moses stones, picking a bench, realizing an hour in, the joint smoked, teasing I’ve never seen anyone eat a croissant that way, we were sitting by the tomb of another James another Sarah who, like us, shared a birthday, who, like us, were four years apart. Had I, too, time-travelled to be here beside our shared grave, over which to share a croissant and a joint? Yes, he’d walk me part-way home so as to ensure I, lone Canadian, might avoid any grave danger. At times, especially at Wetherspoons, I’d worry I had abandoned my research for a short-lived friendship, that I was five drinks deep with tomorrow a write-off and no pages to show. Early days in Parc X, I'd flip on the light in the hallway and see where the paint has slopped onto the rim of a fixture and hear Woolf ask, What does the brain matter compared with the heart? In London, I felt frightfully alone. At home, I had painted Virginia, something like longing, into my walls.