Scapegoats for Speeding Cars

Photograph by Chloe Xueqi Tan. 

"There's not enough nightlife in this city," we say half-past midnight, dodging women in cowboy hats and buckled boots. You hypothesize derisively that there was a show at the Commodore, the Vogue, the Pearl, the Roxy, or all of the above. The golden maple leaves have yet to make way for darker nights. Darker nights have yet to make way for better ones. A mirage of glitter embraces our weekly pub as regulars filter out the doors. A few faces are familiar before the gates lower like it's time to go home. I scramble to seek refuge in the glow of the street corner. We're tucked under the awning and I see the neon lights aren't the the end of the tunnel so much as the Corona Borealis birthmarked on your wrist.

Granville Street has never been this alive, and it's still not enough to transcend silence. This is the first time my word count exceeds yours, which makes me more bitter than the windchill. We are standing in the cold and looking at each other in the light. A month ago, you petered out on the curb and insisted public school doesn't count when your parents pay property taxes. I imagine you in Catholic school seven years after it was secularized. Mothers and fathers climbed a flight of stairs to a Gothic revivalist building in la ville aux cent clochers, relinquishing holy water and cross necklaces to men in black suits. The children tossed their "Evolution vs God" DVDs and began to curse in English. That was the beginning of the Bouchard-Taylor commission. You walk into a building named for a saint you don't know. You function like a fighter jet because there are just as many names for you as there are for the holy. Why did you care if it counted?

In my hometown, private schools were towers and fences and rumours and mystery. From the architecture, we suspected there were impermissible rooms filled with ghosts and old wives' tales. The public could catch a glimpse of the Costco-sized parking lot and mosaics the tone of jewels. When it snowed, my schoolbus circumvented black ice and blazed past the cathedral, demanding our heads turned sooner than later so as not to miss the sight. I turned my nose despite dreaming I could pocket the gems in the windows and stack them up like a rock collection from the Rice Museum. I had seen the stones in my mother's jewelry: soft sand, drops of the low tide, and kaacha aam, all of which belonged to us. At that time, it wasn't enough.

I wish we rolled the tapes of Sailor Moon cassettes and biked the hills before they became subdivisions. It is not a selfish desire. Part of my hope is that you would have loved it. In the early morning, there were deer marching through the fields as if they had read the development applications and showed for their last days at home. Through the moonlight, soft dandelions disappeared into a mass of tangled grass, shadows replaced with the indistinct bodies of canines too small and scared to make us cry wolf. We may have found solitude in our compatriots, the coyotes, who were blamed for heartbreak over lost kittens, scapegoats for speeding cars. And we would survive together.

This place is not unfamiliar to you. At the dinner table in my childhood home, I learn your name in Mandarin means "sent from heaven," which means I have an impossible wish. I begin to feel that living is a series of impossibilities stemming from the lump in my throat that formed as a middle schooler and never left. And if the past cannot be changed, I must find something else to hope for all my life. I am twenty-five years old and I want to grow up with you on the floor of my bedroom in a country I no longer know. We were meant to be severed at the intersection of Granville and Robson, submerged in hues of dark blue with the ranchers and wranglers of the only city that had ever chosen me. And I had to choose it back.

 

When I say goodbye and reach for a beanie at the bottom of my bag, I think to myself that I might take one of the trolleybuses instead of the train. They run on wires that sometimes fizzle and pop and make you wonder what they've seen. I'm not sure where one would take me, and I feel ready to find out.