soundpony @soundpony - Tumblr Blog

Mexico work trip photo dump. Yes, it actually was a work trip. No there aren’t more pictures of the work part.

I am 200 minutes away from psychic freedom.

San Francisco tour stop photo dump go

I’m all bummed out about having nowhere to post my random thoughts without Twitter but then I remembered that I have this space so here goes:

I DISLIKE THE BAND NAME WET LEG FOR REASONS I CANT QUITE COMPREHEND

Alright folks! Let’s revive this zone with an update. Here’s a slide show of some recent action to get you up to speed:

I’m returning to tumblr. Please don’t read any of the cringey shit I posted here below, I was using this space as a place to blurt out ideas for a book I was (still am?) loosely entertaining writing but I just read some of it over and it was not great.

A personal trip.

Chapter xx

May 21 2019

In Toronto’s Union Station the entrance hall is called the great hall. Maybe all entrance halls at all train stations are called the great hall? It’s possible, I don’t ride the train a whole lot. It’s 2019, I travel constantly but always by air or van or tour bus. The train sort of fills in the blanks, the rare moments of personal travel between professional trips when I cant really afford to pay for a flight for myself and I’m not going all that far anyway. Or in Europe, the train is always the most convenient for personal travel in Europe. Unless you’re traveling with two suitcases and a guitar but that’s a story for a different book someday maybe.

So I’m taking the train today, from a personal weekend visit to Toronto from my current home in Montreal. I preface it as current home because it’s all very uncertain. I was about to say I currently feel less sure of where I am at and where to go next than I have ever before but I paused before writing it to really think about that statement. And dear god no. Is this really the least certain I’ve ever felt? Jesus Christ no. But do I feel uncertain? Indeed I do. But then again I think I have always been in a state of transition. Like this place. Like this Great Hall.

People enter, move through. All going somewhere. Coming from somewhere. Stopping only to wait until they can continue moving to where they think they are going. Where they intend to go today. With feelings of anticipation that that place will be a destination. A completion. I am currently guilty of this incorrect sensation today as well. I feel like I am going home, like I will arrive there and this, whatever this is, will be complete. Can I define what this is that will be completed? Will its supposed resolution offer any solace? Do I even really need solace?

Four days ago I was arriving here already in a existential fog. It wasn’t until I was off the train and searching for the exit that I realized I was entering a Great Hall. There was no sign for exit, at least I couldn’t see one. But there was a sign for The Great Hall.

The first song I wrote after Chris’ death was a simple delicate little ditty about wanting to have my hands cremated. He had recently been cremated and I was the dubious owner of a small metal box containing a little plastic baggie with a portion of his grit. Someone I knew so well and felt as close to as my own self had been evaporated and pulverized into grit. I wanted to know how that felt. I felt the urge to have a hand removed and cremated. My hands felt like they wanted to experience it. I wanted a baggie of their grit, to share in that phenomenon with him. So this song came out of me, cute, pretty, lyrically repulsive. I didn’t have a name for it.

Shortly thereafter I found myself at the counselor’s office. I spent a lot of time with my counselor. I was likely still on weekly visits at this point. I don’t recall her name, I will look it up - it feels important to give her detail here. She was an older woman, some who aren’t as old as me might even say old woman or elderly. Somewhere in her 60s, but as of now if someone is younger than my mom they still aren’t old- they can’t be because my mom can’t be old. So she was older.

Older. Small. Short grey hair. Her office was in the back of one of the old churches downtown. In what used to be the priest’s quarters. It had been updated nicely inside but retained the old charm, dark wood, strangely angled ceilings. We took our session this day out on the patio, up on the second floor. The area was surrounded by trees, well contained from the street. I remember the rustling of the leaves and that they were gold against the blue sky… even though I know this had to have been in May and the leaves should have been green. This was the strangest time. It’s so hard to know if what I remember was real or was not real, and whether or not that even matters at all.

I talked about that urge to have my hands cremated, or maybe even just a finger or the pinky toe? Do I really need a pinky toe? The urge of course was broken down to wanting to be where Chris is. Where is he? Well, she explained, he is in The Great Hall.

The Great Hall is the space of transition. Moving from one state to another, one set of conditions to another. You are not yet where you are going but you are no longer where you came from. He is in that transitional space.

So I called the song Great Hall and moved on from there.

Finding myself today in this real Great Hall, you can feel that state of transition. Some people moving quickly, some moving gently, all moving. Some certain some not. Me, I am here, I am in transit, but currently waiting. Hovering here physically but symbolically as well. I’ve always told myself to follow the wind when I’m unsure. There’s no wind right now, no obvious gusts metaphorically or in reality, but my train boards at 4:30 and that is enough direction from the universe for now. Get on the train, go to the place currently called home. Call this particular journey over.

I don’t reflect on these things because I am trying to explain them, it happens because these things are forcing me to understand them. They jump up in my face and claw at my eyes until I look at them and let them show me what they are.

Walking down that path last night, a duck swims up. Is that actually a fucking duck? Come on man, I already accepted that you invited me down that path for that walk. I already saw the water and the moon. I already followed the wind. A fucking duck is very heavy handed. Hamfisted you might say.

stone hands moving slowly

In the weeks that followed my partner’s death I felt like I needed to document everything. I was having a profound and indescribable experience and often my mind would narrate it with blistering clarity and potent wisdom. A large part of me wanted to write these narrations down. But time was tight, I was consumed with living the experiences and rarely sat down with the intent to write. And when I did nothing would come out of me.

Well, that’s slightly untrue, some things came out of me but they were never the poignant verses that haunted me all day, they would instead be things like “this feels like a dream” and so on. And I would be frustrated by the trite bullshit that seemed to be the only thing my brain could get my frozen hands to scratch out.

So now we are rolling along to the seven year mark since his “passing” - which I’ve read is considered by some in the field of grief to be the amount of time it takes to fully process that kind of loss, and also coincidentally the amount of time it supposedly takes for your body to regenerate itself at the cellular level. Which is very fitting, of course I would be ready to move on from the pain if the cells it was born into have died and been replaced. But that’s a tangent for another day, maybe.

Regardless, here I am. I have wondered this whole time if by the time the change came in favour of restoration of normal life function I would still have the capacity to recall my profound experience with appropriate clarity. I’ve always felt like no, it would be lost. I will never feel that depth of weight again, that feeling of the blood in my veins replaced with concrete, utter stoppage, complete suspension, contrasted with the manic lava and extreme movement in a sudden need to flee. The sensations that I wanted to describe at the time which may very well be indescribable are now all but gone.

It is highly unlikely I will ever suffer a loss so tragic again - barring the off chance that i might actually bear a child and then somehow lose it tragically while it’s in my care, but other than that the partner death at a young age in the height of love and in my presence is probably the greatest pain I will have to endure.

And really, lucky me.

But it does mean that the vision I had of my narration of the experience being passed on to other observers is totally lost.

And then today, my cat of 11 years, Thomas, was diagnosed with lymphoma and given 9 months at best to live.

So if you do the math on that I had him for four years before I lost Chris and I’ve had him through the last 6.85. He has been a glorious constant, a little fuzzy rock, in the abyss of whatever death was at any given instant.

I know, it’s a cat. It’s trite. It’s embarrassing to make a deal of it at all. But I need to impart upon you that he is no ordinary cat.

My god, I feel like I’ve read that line so many times before “he is no ordinary cat...” it’s trite. There’s no way to not be trite about any of this is there? It’s death, in the end it’s trite, tacky, a seeking of appreciation to express the pain around it... But fuck that for the time being he is a powerful inimitable being. Thomas is a god among creatures. He has a way about him, I could call it a swagger, but I know it’s greater than that, he has a soul that has seen more than I could know. He lives with a comfort, a joy, a passion, that cannot be created out of effort but that one must be born with. He is a living embodiment of virtue, and I am not fucking around here. He is a supreme being and I am beyond honoured to have had him arrive in my life.

Thomas showed up on a very strange day.

My grandfather had passed away the week prior. The funeral was planned to take place in the tiny town on the barren prairie where he had spent most of his life, raised his family. Our family now lived in the big city, a healthy 8 hour drive from the place.

Scheduled for the night before was to be the first performance of a band I was in - for context I am one of those attempted artists. Someone struggling for her whole life to create something in the hopes it might finally interest enough people to make it a financially viable endeavour but yet is compelled to keep creating it even if every drop of it is bullshit that no one ever wants to hear or see, yes a classic modern artist. So it was important to me, however bullshit the whole thing may have been, to keep that show as scheduled.

My parents needed a ride to the funeral, I don’t recall the exact circumstances of why they needed me to drive them, our family is complicated when it comes to logistics. I am sure there was much debate with my sisters and their husbands as to who would drive and when and how and somehow the deal was struck that I would complete my performance with said pointless band sometime the night before and then drive my parents overnight to the middle of the barren prairie so my mother could burry her father in the town he had raised her in.

This meant very much to me. My mother is my closest ally. Our relationship has suffered at the hands of what I consider my widowhood prior to her having had a similar experience, but she has always been my true best friend. And her father was a large part of my life as a child. He was the only grandparent I ever knew and his funeral would be the first I would attend in my life - which at the age of 27 indicates how fortunately naive I was to death for so long.

And so I took on this task, of a pilgrimage of my parents in my minivan to their tiny hometown, with a pride that I would maybe now describe as a level of martyrdom. I will sacrifice my night of rest and my own comfort at grandpa’s funeral so that my mother can have peace. When really, I could have cancelled my bullshit show and left at noon the previous day. But no, I am a power a vision of strength in this story please let me have that.

And so we did it. I picked them up at midnight and we drove all night. Dad fell asleep in the back almost instantly, but mom and I relived the road trips of my childhood, tuning into whatever AM radio station we could find and singing along to the oldies together.

When we were less than two hours out the sun began to break. If there is one thing that part of the world is known for it is the impact of the sun on the horizon on the massive prairie sky. The colour of pink it created cannot be explained. It was more neon than i have ever seen. It filled the world with pink fire. Reflected off of sloughs and lagoons for 360 degrees of surging fluorescent bliss.

We pulled over to take photos. Grandpa’s sunrise. How many he had seen and loved in his life. This one was for us. I will never forget it. Before you was burning roses, behind you was the cold navy of the night receding. The duality of death and life and rebirth in one moment, a poetry he would have not likely spoken as a man presented to us in his own palette.

And so we finished the drive, I ran over and likely killed one skunk as the sunrise shifted from pink to gold and the glare was right in my eyes. The smell hung on for a few days after.

By the time we pulled into the parking lot of the bed and breakfast at which our family had decided to convene full and proper daylight had taken over. I staggered out of the drivers’ seat and sat down on a sweetly ornamental park bench near the check in office.

Out from under the car before me shot an orange ball of fur that landed in my arms. It was a kitten who decided my face was worth licking. It was Thomas.

I feel an urge to keep writing this story but it’s not why I came here tonight.

I came here because I feel like now, now that enough time has passed that I am not paralyzed by my own loss, now that the concrete has washed from my veins, now I might be able to write. And just when I thought my relationship with the pain of grief might be passed my beloved feline companion is dying. And it’s restoring me to that place that feels like a suffocating but familiar blanket. I feel refreshed enough that to write it won’t kill me and am again dancing with death just enough that I might be able to accurately recall the experience.

Thomas. To you my gratitude will forever be. Who were you in that last life. Who will you be next.