pilgrimage

...this one's for k + m...

Tonight I met a woman who thought she had met me before. She's visiting from Montreal and we were both in the audience for a dance show inspired by rice. She was so thoughtful and articulate. We paused to speak on the stairs in the theatre, she a couple steps higher so I had to look up to her. I can't remember her name.

When I asked what brought her to Vancouver she said, "how do I explain this?"

She went on to tell me how eight years before she had come to the city to visit her son who was living here at the time and dealing with mental illness. "Two months later he didn't feel there was anything for him to live for and he took a bunch of pills. He killed himself. Now, I come back every year in May, when the rhododendrons and the azaleas are blooming, because it reminds me of the last time I saw him alive."

"You're on a pilgrimage," I said.

"Yes," she said, touching my shoulder, and added, "thank you for your tears."

Then she continued down the stairs and away from me.

When I die, will my mother go back to the place where we shared our last happy moments? Will my friends hold dinner parties in my honour and prepare all my favourite foods and complain because my versions were just that tiny bit tastier? Will my past lovers cry in the bathroom, transported to tears by finding one of my long hairs clogging their drains? Certainly I will be remembered, but for how long? How long? And if I'm dead, will it really matter anyway?

I want to have many lovers - romantic and otherwise - and for each of them to only have me. I want them to turn away from the world when I go: certain that without me there is no meaning to life. I want their experience of me to be the manifestation of a singular love.

But love is like sourdough starter: the more flour and sugar you feed it, the bigger it grows and you have to make bread or else it will overflow all over your counter and make a mess. The only way to stop the growth is to freeze it, in the dark and the cold. My love is an active culture and I'd like to keep it that way. Demanding all of another's love and attention will lead to a deep freeze, to stasis. So I'm willing to share, trusting that some biological magic will ensure that when spread around and fed properly love becomes thicker, stronger, more dense, concentrated and packed with punch.

We can all use some sustenance on our pilgrimages, and love is our manna from heaven.