Sitting across from me, elbows against the blue tablecloth, you rub your chin, flecks of guacamole and vegan sour cream on your plate. In your dorm room, with a view of the whole city, we sit cross-legged on your patterned bed, eating fruit candy and watching photographs. I can see the Pier One Imports candle in your window, comfy alley scavenged couches, your loose sweater, Nag Champa. In the basement your boyfriend doubles over a sheet of carefully traced names, rolling dice, speaking in tongues. I eat too much food and feel sick and stay up late, avoiding my own thoughts with orange juice and television. Make myself sick with green olives and cooked yams. The weather exploding pink and dark slick streets and the air crisp and turning cold. In the park a German couple plays with their toddler son, making the kid race towards one parent and then the other, parents holding up a pink beach shovel and saying on your marks, get set, go. Your cat jumps and curls its tail along the windowpane. We talk about words like queer and community and we wonder how it would feel to have children of our own. I tell you about Real Housewives of Orange County and Jersey Shore and Queer as Folk, Secret Diary of a Callgirl and Canada beating Slovakia at hockey, 3-2. You say you don’t watch much television anymore because it’s just noise, that’s why you left your parents’ house, they needed to have the set blaring all the time. You forget to make enough tea and we eat popcorn with thick chunks of salt and I worry, worry, worry about all the things we haven’t said.

When I was twelve I wrote a poem. It wasn’t very good. It was melodramatic, a little over the top; it was about feeling pressure from older friends, feeling forced to push myself too far and too fast. The ending was melodramatic. I entered it in a contest– a few pieces would be selected and performed on stage by a youth theatre group. They chose my poem. Over the next few months the director called me on the phone and we discussed staging, interpretation. I felt nervous and important.

The last time we spoke, the director asked me what I wanted to do with my life.
“I want to be a writer,” I said. “It’s what I’ve always wanted.”
On the line, she paused. “You don’t have to become a writer,” she said eventually. “It’s what you already are.”

I felt uncomfortable then, as I do now, claiming the word. It’s like when I was making myself throw up every day but didn’t want to say I was bulimic. Words mean something, mean too much. I don’t write as much as I want, don’t deserve the title “writer” when I’ve only been published sporadically, when I don’t write for hours every day, when a lot of the words I say don’t convey their meanings, when I’m young, when I have so little experience and so much to learn, when…

Being twenty feels stifling. I want to be the kind of person who works hard and builds a life with room for pleasure and for rest. I want to do old-fashioned things like provide for my family, build a foundation, take care of the people I love. I want barbeques and movie nights and walks in the park and the house, picket fence, the dog. At the same time, I’m gnawing at myself from the inside. I want to break everything open, expose the core. I want to show the red, pulpy underside of the face everyone sees. I want to talk with words like anti-oppression and justice. I want to live out concepts like integrity and wholeness. I want to figure out why I feel so fractured so much of the time and why there are so few places in which to express my frustration.

I’m at a point in my life where I need to figure out why this matters. Why, when the internet is crammed full with so many fantasies and anecdotes, would I stay up with a headache and mug full of water, trying to convince myself that I can convey something this way?

I write because it will always matter, even if no one is reading. It’s the only way I know how to get close, to get really close. I’m not good at speaking, playing music, sending thank-you cards, cooking meals that linger on the palate for days. I’m not good at a lot of things.

I need to convince myself that this is okay– this uncertainty, this feeling of discomfort. There’s something here that needs to be explored. It’s not the worst thing to be splayed wide open, to be vulnerable. In the end, what does it matter? What can be lost in trying?

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. I don’t really have a good excuse. It just gets to me sometimes, writing into “the void.” I know that there are real people reading this (and that not all of them are strangers!), but I can’t help but feel silly sometimes for having this website, sharing all these barely-formulated thoughts and questionable snippets of writing.

I guess I’m having a doubtful moment. I love writing so much that I hate it. I go through periods of forgetting (distracted with school, life, focusing on other things) but then I’ll be taking a shower or walking in the snow and it hits me. Writing. I just have to. I have to write because my grandmother and my mother both wanted to write and were never published. I have to write because I promised my seven-year-old self it’s what I would do. But a lot of the time I just wonder, who cares? Considering the state of the world, do words really have power? Is this purely narcissistic? And if so, how can I justify writing?

I appreciate it when people are honest, so that’s where I’m coming from as I write these words. I’m not going to stop posting because it means something to me, having these small words to share with you. But I’m sorry that it’s so infrequent. I am still grappling with all of these questions. I definitely don’t have everything (anything) completely figured out.

But, for now, here’s a new(ish) piece, that I wrote for Ariel Gore’s lit class this fall: Coffee, Magic

It’s winter now… stay warm.

Love, Vanessa

When will it snow?

The weather keeps hovering somewhere around zero degrees. Right when I was ready for the first cold snap, it started to warm up, and now the air outside is muggy, almost tropical. It’s windy on St. Laurent, raising the leaves in swirls and eddies. When I listen to Tegan and Sara on my headphones, late for class, I like to pretend I’m some cinematic character, and the leaves help. It’s a music video set, and I’m mouthing the lyrics to Take Me Anywhere, stepping through orchestrated flux and coming out with perfect, wavy hair on the other side. (In this alternate music video world, my hair is long, caramel-coloured, wavy down to my waist. I know, I know– it’s fantasy).

In real life, I walk through the swirling leaves and they rise too high. A big maple smacks me across the cheek, propelled by the wind, and it stings. A woman passing by looks up at me and laughs. I smile, because I don’t want to be the kind of person that takes life too seriously, but my cheek feels red. Feels silly. I’m not a twentysomething hipster queer twin with a cute haircut and a record deal… just me, again. (Twenty, sure, and queer, but no twin and no record deal…)

My hair is growing out. I experience a moment of panic when I realize that I could potentially look like my grade six social studies teacher. She wore her pants high, way past her belly button, and kept her hair cut in a flyaway bowl cut. I’m walking down towards campus in high-waisted man pants and a growing out trying-to-be-chic queer cut that’s leaning towards nerdy. Time to reassess my fashion choices.

I’ve been wearing more makeup lately. I always loved putting it on. I love the potential for transformation, even if it’s just a vague, tantalizing marketing ploy. Part of me is worried that I’ll start feeling insecure, like I’m not enough if I don’t leave the house without “my face” on. (My generation– we’re so scared of turning into a 50s caricature that we can’t even commit or do the laundry without an existential crisis).

I’m caught between wanting to catalogue each moment, like Kinsey with his gall flies, and just letting it go.

I’m still here, in this place. Thinking about making too much noise with the door closed and mysticism, Guru Nanak and the Aztecs. Here, at the end of the day, it’s all jumbled up in my head something awful.

A pop-up reads, “We can’t get to this space right now. Please try again later.”

On the wall in front of me: a painting my sister did when she was a teenager. It’s Chagall. The colours are muted, dark green, brown. Earth tones.

My brother was visiting for a week. He left a note taped to the wall: love, respect. Next to the Chagall there’s a corkboard with postcards from exhibitions I’ve never been to.

Some of the things I’ve been thinking about today: the men we talked to in cyberspace when I was thirteen. My father. The two weeks left until I see B again. Nelly Furtado. The way the caste system in India impacted women. Whether my life is full of too much goodness to last for long. My favourite pin, the one that says “I feel like ee cummings at a punctuation festival.” How it’s adorable to watch the parents on campus, asking enthusiastic questions of passerby and embarrassing their children.