Belated Belated Entry: Hamilton, Ontario

God damn my throat is sore and I can’t decipher whether the cold brew, the cigarettes or this 2-hour-long grimace I’ve been harboring is to blame.

And I made the mistake of sifting through some old writing of mine.

From the bowels of my computer and the bowels of my blog and the bowels of my journals. Bowels, with insipidly obvious symbolism: A process, diarrhea, constipation, shit. I don’t know. Shitshitshit.

Like scrutinizing old photos of yourself alone or old photos yourself with friends. Last night and this morning was inevitably laden with allegorical I can’t believe I wore my hair that ways and what happened to that t-shirts and fuck I haven’t spoken to those people in a long times.

What I found to be the most interesting was the slow plummet of comparative sureness between early entries and late entries.

I wrote How to Move to San Francisco in my first week, as if I knew how to move to San Francisco. As if I was sure enough to tell myself or anyone else. I should’ve written it then screwed it up into a little ball then chewed it until it was but squishy fibres of damp paper and ink. I’m pretty glad I didn’t though.

Literally eating my words seems a little cliché, banal almost, even for me. 

I will however give myself an eon of credit for foreseeing the incursion of the bell jar within the first month;

And for recording three sure things that I was sure of then that I’m even surer of now:

The first is that you can acknowledge your own insignificance in a way that complements your ego rather than rescinding it. The second, that real and true are different beasts, and the third that nothing is ever as it seems.

I’ll tell you a story.

During my third week in San Francisco I saw this giant black and white Great Dane for the third time and I remember beaming because it made the big familiarly unfamiliar city seem smaller. I waved at the dog he didn’t wave back I kept walking. 

Later on that day I was walking down 23^rd Street into the mission and someone yelled at me out of a car. They asked me whether I was working later that night; I said I wasn’t because I wasn’t. I mean I didn’t have a job and I was yet to decipher how I knew them but it didn’t make it any less true.

I walked closer to the passenger door. A guy and a girl in the car. I’d never seen either of them in my life. They’d mistaken me for someone they knew well. She said how are you settling in, I said I was ok and that I was finally getting past being sick. He said they’d finally found an apartment and they were so excited and they were on their way to Dolores Park and if I’m free later I should come by and hang out.

“See you later, Trish!” they hollered as they drove away.

Trish? I don’t even look like a Trish.

I put my music back in my ears and I kept walking. They had been so excited to see someone they knew in a city they had just moved to. I was their friend and to them it was real. I don’t really know why but I didn’t want to remind them that no, nobody knows us, no one cares we’re here.

Mostly because some people don’t like that, that thwarting insignificance, but I do. Also because of the warm hope in their faces.

I guess what I’m saying is our exchange wasn’t true but it was real and sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes it’s more than enough.

It’s funny to me to think about how I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Hamilton, Ontario writing about, these San Francisco strangers, this exchange. The lessons I took from it, what it made me realize.

It’s funny to me to think how they’re probably wondering why Trish was being so cold and why she never showed up at Dolores Park or even bothered to text them. Probably they never thought about me ever again.

It’s funny to me to think that I went on to live and work in San Francisco for a year. I posted happy, pretty photos of my adventures and wrote sad, ugly entries of my adventures.

I understand that this anecdote fulfills my three sure things in a rather tailored and elegiac way but nothing is ever as it seems. Nothingnothingnothing.

I think I mean it like this:

When I got a job at a diner and a bar and and not at a newspaper or a magazine friends from back home wrote me hopeful messages of don’t worry you’ll find something and don’t give up. But I smiled when I woke up and I smiled when I was walking to work and I smiled when I was pouring coffee.

I also mean it like this:

When I had an eating disorder I received more compliments on my appearance than I ever had in my adult life.

I think I mean that we instinctively broadcast our highs and hide our lows because we’re scared or because we’re vain or because regret sometimes feels like a giant Cyclops try-not-to-stare-me-in-the-eye kind of beast. 

And I think others broadcast our highs and hide our lows because they pity us or fear us, or because they think we need reassurance because they do.

People talked to me about moving from San Francisco, California to Hamilton, Ontario in a strange you poor thing kind of tone – in both San Francisco and Hamilton.

Tattoos, piercings, punk music you seem more like a San Francisco kind of girl to me they said. And for a while I believed them: a self-fulfilling prophecy of displacement.

But then I laughed thinking about the devout Christian geologist I met in Alabama and how I thought it odd that someone so into rocks could also be so into Jesus. So yeah, I can be a San Francisco girl and a Hamilton girl and an Auckland girl. And I’ll always be the crumbs in your bed sheets, drugs on your nightstand kind of girl. I can be whatever kind of fucking girl I fucking want.

Needless to say, How To Move To Hamilton is not a how-to guide. It’s not anything guide. If anything it’s a time-stamp. Hello Ontario, I’m here.

In a week it’ll be one month. Feels longer and shorter and like all those other antonymous assessments I seem to make about everything.

The first three nights here I cried myself to sleep. Heaving, cotton balls in your throat, crying. I guess I hadn’t considered how it would feel to be homesick for more than one home.  

The first three nights here I dreamed of foggy seascapes, messy amalgams of Ocean Beach of Sentinel Beach; rolling hills that resembled both Carona Heights and the Firth of Thames; tree-lined streets of Duboce Triangle and Ponsonby and Wellington; the full drinks and fuller hearts in Lucky 13 and 500 Club and Grand Central and The Elbow Room.

The first three nights here felt like my heart had been stolen by San Francisco. Or stolen and then broken in two places.

I anticipated it though and I didn’t try to fight it or hide it. I let the sadness come, then the anger, then the flat no-point-getting-out-of-bed-today, then the anger, again.

For a stint I tried to sit older. Like I’d been a part of history or like living in San Francisco was a qualification. Like San Francisco hadn’t been a lovable Judas to me. 

But then I got a tattoo and then I got drunk. I met a girl who thought I was funny and some guys who think I’m a catch and I remembered how dad alwaysalwaysalways told me that it’s not where you are but who you’re with.

We passed around a flask and we talked openly and we bonded quickly, the way strangers in a support group can, the way strangers who’ve seen aliens can and my internal monologue stopped mimicking the you poor thing kind of tone. 

I have two adopted dads and an adopted mom and an adopted dog.

I have an apartment with two lounges and a bedroom and a kitchen and a bathroom and terrace and fire escape that gleams in the sun.

I have a boyfriend with rough hands and a soft smile and tattered trousers and a record player.

I have a friend with pretty eyes and a pretty mind who increasingly seems like my parallel.

I won’t tell you how to move to Hamilton, Ontario because I don’t know.

I will tell you though, that your heart, or anything, can go from stolen to given if you simply change your mind.