in my constant inventory, i’ve devoted myself to filling all of the notebooks that i’ve started over the years. i found this gem from one of my writer’s bootcamp classes:
Montreal Jazz Fest, 2007.
She had moved into a summer sublet with cantaloupe-coloured walls and knew that her relationship was coming to an end. It was too humid for long-distance. She had just gotten back from visiting him in New York, and he was already slated to visit her for their first jazz festival. That would bring their total time spent together in recent history up to a month. Straight. In two years. What a development. She was learning that she didn’t like this amount of time together, she liked having her own life, and that he didn’t have much of his own. He wasn’t interesting, so she wasn’t interested. Not long-term. The 36 hours of real time and three months of anticipation was previously working in his favour but he was now slated to invade this tiny space. She checked the time and pre-suffocated. Later that night, the musician from Somalia would keep playing despite the monsoon and everyone stayed, filling the streets to soak up the rain like experience-starved sponges. She felt him pulling at her, but she wanted to dance and drown. Her eyes were burning, and she wasn’t sure if that was due to her eye makeup or if it was acid rain because, well, when it acid rains, it pours. She agreed to duck into a doorway with him, not at all panicked when it appeared that her phone was water-logged because if it was damaged then he wouldn’t be able to call her-four days, six hours, and seventeen minutes from now when he went home. Back in the sweltering melon, she sat on the floor, clothes fully stuck to her, and stared at her reflection in the mirror. Her hair was very heavy so she plugged in the clippers and started to relieve herself of the weight. “Don’t you want to wait-for a professional?” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a rabbit, drawn in pen by the lease holder and replied, “Nope.”
metrotextual 