1) Letters to my loved ones

 I am learning to write the room. 

Well,

I guess this is where I am now. Currently sitting in a hipster cafe on Rachel street. Right around the corner to my newest sublet off the park. This is my third new apartment in Montreal since "coming home," and my umpteenth home in the last year.

The music keeps oscilating between King Crimson, some kind of smooth jazz and sixties french pop. The coffe is phenomenal and they serve it in mismatched kitchen mugs. Today my mug is decorated with hideous eggplants. It made me laugh, that’s how ugly it is.

I can hear French, Quebequois, Arabic. There are students with messy pony tails talking to each other over the screens of their laptops about triggers and PTSD. Well dressed parents with their adult children sipping cloudy natural wine, it’s 12:15 on a sunday. The punk, pierced and dyed kids behind the counter, “clearly” studying music at concordia-  now we are listening to turkish techno- are friendly and my kind of normal. There isn’t a creep in sight. I feel incredibly comfortable and safe here. I can get writing done here. I can be myself here.

I’m dirty and unshowered. I’m smelly. A la limite j’ai broisser mes dents. Im wearing the sweats I slept in and I’m free bleeding without underwear. Don’t worry my pants are black. I have sweat stains on my grey Ramones shirt and my tits are hanging around free and comfy, and I smell. Have I mentioned that I smell? I’m gross. And I love it. I love myself, I love how I still brighten up when I smile at my reflection in the mirror on the cafe wall, I love that I am comfortable. I love the way I smell gross, That’s me! thats not Chanel. I haven’t worn makeup in years and I love the way my skin is luminous under my wrinkles and dark circles. Great skin, dark soul, lots of crying lately. But embracing all my disgusting imperfections as a part of who I am, of perhaps even my identity, makes me feel whole, and powerful, and connected to myself. Finally. So does writing to you.

So. Now you’re seemingly trapped by your loyalty to your friends (that’s me!) and are reading the fourth paragraph of this tentative foray into authetic writing. I realize that this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea so if you could, treat it as something to peruse when you think of me and want a little news. Like my copious instagram stories but with hopefuly more depth. I’ve started and never ended a million essays and short stories, they blink at me as untitled documents from the recesses of my laptop. Having a writing practice is hard to instill. I find myself texting you all, or monolonging to you from my headphones while you breastfeed your little yous, or walk your pooches or sit at the beach. Perhaps, with a little more intention, I could wrangle all those conversations in one place, and with my friends in mind I could create a narrative to write to. Or just create a narrative. A semblance of myself. When every outside part of you disapears So that’s it. We’re here now.

(I’m also unsure how much editing this will receive so, don’t read it if it’s bad! I’m really open  to criticims, so you can tell me if you feel like it, Or we never have to speak of it again. Either way, thanks for having made it to the fith paragraph.)

Some of you, dear ones, also have ADHD and the struggle is real. My phone is full of unintelligible notes, and long ass text messages waxing poetic about hyberbolic experience.

The intangibility of life, of my life feels illusive.

Sometimes I feel as though I do not exist, that my body will wither and die and decompose, all the while, my thoughts will have never even birthed themselves. (Now they’re playing classic Elvis, before it was CAN.)

I hope that i will find a little collection of myself here with you. A place to get together with all the facets of my mind and shine a light upon them. A disco ball of beautiful disjointed reflections. All I need is some glue to keep them together (that’s you.) Maybe this is what letter writing used to be, sans penmanship. The desire to stay connected with you all might not only inform my writing but manage to keep me relatively on track. Since the deluge of my life I’ve struggled to find routine, but little by little I’m staking my garden. The difference between the words Fertilizer and Engrais is funny to me.     

September, the most frustrating month, is almost done. It’s fucking cold one minute, a north wind cutting through your sweat pants so that you think, oh it’s not sweatpants weather anymore, and the next you’re carrying in your arms, a toque and scarf, a vest, a windbreaker, a multitude of wool. You end up sitting in the sun, on the still very green grass, next to a hefty pile of your wardrobe and doubting your life skills. How is it that I suck so deeply at interpreting September weather.

It’s also feels like false new year in a way. The start of the school year always felt like the real new year to me. The beggining of a new grade, a new identity (is this where we start to become obsessed with age? A sense of who we are and belonging?...)

It's the equinox, the planting of garlic and tulips for spring. The prepping before the long winter months that lay the ground work for eventual eventual eventual harvest. To me this is where things really begin again, below ground, in the dirt and in the darkness. Sometimes I wonder how people who don’t know and experience a changing climate can relate to these tropes. I suppose that most of them don’t, don’t care to and never will either. 

`
Now that my sad girl summer is over- i cried so much I gave my self eternally puffy under eyes, but I believe in trancendance, so either i will will them away with creams and sleep and exercise or I will forget that they exist as my appearance will no longer weigh upon me like is used to- Im crawling into automne, a sort of ease and happiness inside of me. As if I had cultivated this feeling in the reccesses of me, behind the veils of betrayal, and now that Ive emptied myself of dirty martini tears… k i lost this anology and Im not coming back to it. I am tired, and struggling but I am awake and still here. Show me anything harder, better, stronger.

I have three looks;

homeless, writing at the coffee shop.

dirtbag at the gym

working at a bar

         

I feel as though I’m carefully gathering myself at the foot of Mount Royal. I’ll spend September, October and November here, watering my friend Mary’s plants and sleeping in her abundance of pillows, (I have been sleeping so sweetly and deeply here, and the dreaming has been either not at all or intense.) I have a bed! On a bed frame! In a room with a window with a view of trees and downtown! It's the nicest bedroom I've had in a very long time and I appreciate it greatly. And I never make my bed anymore because I'm trying new things. I wish I could share it with you, the apartment by the park, not the bed, I wish you could come for dinner and talks and long walks on the mountain.

I don’t know what’s next for me really, but I know that I’ll travel again when i leave in December. I’m selling the car that I bought with Sanchez because 7500 OBO (This Tim McGraw song is fire,) shiping my summer clothes to my mother’s house and spending as much time in the libraries and on the moountain as I can. Maybe the analogy I’m trying to make is that I feel like I’m in an embrionic phase. Growing all my useless limbs in uteros=, waiting for the darkness to reveal a new life. I’m so dramatic, and I love it.

 I’m getting rid of the rest of my material possesions -once you lose “everthing” nothing really holds value anymore if it isnt practical-  the simplicity of owning as little as possible feels good, like really good in a way that’s hard to explain. It’s tranformative. I don’t feel the capitalist pull of advertisements; earrings in the boutiques, advertisements for washing machines. I don’t often desire things, which is insane because I never realized how much I did in the first place. How I lingered over the counters at the silver jewelery (that I would never wear anyways) how I watched the billboards flip and change revealing new options, new possibilities, new mes. I used to long for things I didn’t even know existed until I was being sold them, and now I feel very little in that regard. I feel a strange sense of satisfaction with what I have, and even with the gaps that exist, as if they are also part of the puzzle. I look at the fashion conforming bodies around me and I feel a very steady warmth and independance in my body. I am whole and complete as I am.I don’t need to look or be, or have anything to exist, to be loved, to be worthy. I can be honest with myself and say that I didn’t always feel that way, and I don’t miss wearing heels, ever. My poor knees. I think that I feel more confident knowing that I’m complete and beautiful with my short hair and weird tattoos and sad clothes, than if I were perfect and primed for the male or societal gaze. I’ve also develeoped a detatchement that I found relatively surprising, given that I own so little now, when I lose something I thought I’d be more, well attatched, but it’s the opposite. I just let it go with the rest of it all and pay it little mind. Things disapear and I tell myself,I guess I just don’t need that right now. Like my bike was stolen last month and I didn’t even cry. (Past Nicolette would definitely have cried.)

…  I’m struggling how to explain this to you and still be interesting. Writing is hard. 

Why I think it’s important to write this, I’m unsure, hopefully that will come to light in this paragraph… or maybe next week, we shall see I suppose. 

I’m working as little as possible, at a swanky, beautifully hip, enormeous bar in the Mile X. Two, maybe three long shifts a week I run around practicing my jokes and being social and get home very tired with swollen feet and a wrinkle between my eyes from squinting at dumb or inconsiderate people who want me to tell them about everything we have instead of reading the menu. That is my least favorite pet peeve, “excuse me what kind of pizza do you have?” well it’s written on the menu so if you want to find out you better learn how to read.

I make just enough to get by, sometimes a little less,  and the rest of the time i do, obstencibly, nothing. Or hardly nothing. Or nothing of substance really. I guess it depends on who you ask. I sleep as much as possible. Nine, sometimes ten hours a night. Sometimes more. How ever many hours I want, how ever many hours my body wants. I’ve begun asking, my body, not my brain, if we are done sleeping yet. I make never more than one plan a day and allowing myself the space to sleep, to be tired, to keep sleeping, amazes me that I never did that before.I know that society doesnt see me as successful (sitting braless in my pyjamas in a cafe all day paying for coffees with my piggy bank money writing to my friends…) but I couldn’t fucking care less. For the first time in my life I’m asking myself, how do I feel, do I want to do this, and the answers are surprising. I wouldnt go as far as to say that I have no sense of responsibilty but rather that my responsibility is to myself and to myself almost only. Rather I have very little sense of obligation, that feeling that followed me around since forever "I should do this, I should do that," it just doesnt really exist in the same way anymore. I still think "Oh I should do so and so," but I'm moving at such a slow pace that I'm, able to consider the validity of the pressure? And way more often than not, I'm like fuck that.

I’ve come to realize that by extending myself to others before taking care of myself, I was aiming for the wrong bull’s eye. The unlearning of years of self inflicted neglect hurt at first, but now it feels, well I don’t know exactly but I maybe thats why Im here writing to you, to be able to put it into words.     

Today is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. I’m trying not be creeped out by the idea of thousands of people all praying to the same god, I donno, does that make you feel a little creepy? Instead I’m trying to forster feelings of solidarity, as if i were harnessing my thoughts and prayers with theirs, as if the holiday was an amplitheatre, a rolling tide of thoughts, the greater the force of the wave, all that. So as with tradition, I'm asking for forgiveness and making a commitment to avoid the same mistakes in this coming year, and as with my personal tradition of looking outwards I struggled.

All day I thought of what I had done to wrong others and I did manage to mark my temper and my impatience as elements I would strive to change. Eventually I realize this, that what I want to ask forgivness for in the last year isn't what I have done to others, but what I had accepted for myself. The harm that I have allowed others to inflict upon me and what I thought was ok, good enough, such is life. It took me a long time to even consider this as something to ask forgiveness for. It feels still, selfish. But I know that it isnt, its the unlearning speaking. I hurt myself and I need to forgive myself and to recognize that hurting others is bad but so is exenpending yourself fo them at the compromise of my own sanctity. This year I will take even better care of myself, much better, I will recognise that failing myself is bad for me and bad for others because we are all interconnnected and i am tired of writing,

Thank you for being "here."

Much much love.

So much.

Coco