I stopped being vegetarian over a year ago because I wanted to be honest. In quiet moments I knew my intentions were not rooted in the depth of my heart's compassion, but in a gnawing righteousness. A desire to be pure and good, so, in other words, a fear of being sullied and wrong. It was in the sharp dizzying smell of the nail salon a summer ago that I heard Ram Dass say “if you are vegetarian to become good or pure, go eat a hamburger and start again.” And I was doing just that, starting again.
That summer comes back in fits and spurts. With summer shining its rays through March, calling us back to her, I have been thinking about every summer before. How they have changed my life, but never how I expect and in ways that only prove important retrospectively. Last summer, I fell in love, buried my childhood dog, worked at the tumultuous vintage store underneath my apartment and had the worst August of my entire life.
The vintage store at the time seemed like an experience that was already in the past. In that, it was a means to an end. I was writing the story about how every writer has a day job they were working before that they can look back on and nod humbly about. (things were hard before and now they aren’t). I was sure it could paint me in a good light. Through it I could become someone who has paid her dues. I could shake off that sordid feeling of being just another person with well-off parents, completely undeserving of the privileges it afforded me. It was only at the end that I saw it for what it was. Just another opportunity for my heart to open a little more, another opportunity for presence and grace.
Saw dust coated every visible surface. The linoleum floors were coated with a thick layer of grime and dirt. Furniture was stacked from floor to ceiling. Once in a while we would get a beautiful solid wood mid-century piece, and like the prized possession it was, we would place it carefully on top of all the rest when we closed and the next morning put it back on display out front and center. What was most notable to me when I first entered the store was the collection of old dolls and puppets arranged neatly in a row on the top shelf behind the counter. They remained there till the last day. There was clutter everywhere. The type of clutter that was almost an art form. The kind that could only be created in collaboration with deep time. Not years, but decades. There were jars of pens most out of ink, sticky notes plastered everywhere, scrap pieces of paper with little notes, pink order forms, little trinkets, his daughters drawings, toys, nicotine gum, little candies and calculators. Nearly everyday, the owner, Marco, would ask me if I had seen his glasses and together we would rummage through all of it.
Marco wished me a merry christmas and said that he missed me. I wished him a merry christmas as well and told him I too missed him. Which to my surprise at that moment felt true. It was no gnawing longing feeling, but a tenderness in my heart that I knew was best felt at a distance. A safe space to let fondness bloom.
Up close, I rebelled against his authority and with the burden of the whole store on his shoulders he scrutinized and criticized me. He told me one afternoon, that a woman had been inquiring about buying the store five years back and had gotten a feng shui specialist in to assess the space. The specialist took one look at the support beams on the ceiling painted a bright green and shaped like a cross, and said, if you take this place you will be bearing the weight of the cross. Marco would go on to tell me this story four times over. I had gotten the message loud and clear. He has been bearing its weight for more than my entire lifetime.
On days when sales weren’t doing well, when nothing had sold in weeks. He would call every twenty minutes for updates on his drive down to the store from his new place up north and tell me strategies of how to sell to customers, pitching high then reducing the price slowly so they felt as if they got a bargain. When he arrived he would stomp around exclaiming at the mess and grabbing things from the counter and throwing it in the garbage. He would call the landlord that was evicting us for renovation a bitch, and detailed to me their latest spat over the phone. He would tell me that he had been hauling around junk for twenty years while his friends got rich and he stubbornly stayed with this business because he is an Aries and can never listen to other people’s advice. He complains about his back and his shoulders and rearranges the set up I made outside to attract more customers. It is in these moments when small mistakes are the most treacherous. I would screw up an order form, he would question my intelligence and I would become cold and distant. These days were the worst. I would glare at him when his back was turned, and pull out my laptop when he went outside to chain smoke cigarettes. I took a lot of pleasure in stealing this time. The next day he would arrive with some homemade bolognese, or a chicken souvlaki from the restaurant down the street. He would ask me if I was hungry and we would eat together in silence while an unspoken truce was being formed.
On the good days, when customers were flooding the store and we got a big sale from a local bar on some plastic chairs he got cheap at a warehouse sale, there was an exciting buzzing energy in the air. These days felt like magic. I would convince myself that it was the spell I had placed inside the drawer of one of the desks because I was sick and tired of hearing Marco complaining, but who could know how this invisible energy worked. I would make Tik Toks that would blow up and news stations would be contacting us wanting an interview with Marco about the closing of the store. He would call me excitedly over the phone, joking about his legacy in this neighbourhood. He was giddy like a gambler that had just hit a lucky streak. These days we would be laughing, teasing each other. He would take the most unflattering picture of me mopping the floor and I would chase him around the store getting him to delete it. I hardly cared about the photo, but it was fun to be silly in this way. To share a rapport and have these little inside jokes. On these days, he would thank me in an earnest and honest way and invite me to a family barbeque, though I would always decline. Then the store would empty out, no customer in days, and the cycle would start again.
The only parts of his life I could glean were during these better times, or in a stray conversations with the one other employee that casually mentioned that Marco had used the stool I was holding to defend himself against his adult son who in a drug-crazed stupor had tried to attack him. There was a picture of the two of them on the cork board by the computer. I made the most out of these details and made a life for him in my head. I summed it all up: the porn in his browser tab when I was searching something up on his phone. The tenderness he shows to his daughter who is only four. The story he told me of meeting his girlfriend who is only a few years older than me (she worked at a bar that has long since burned down and offered to drive him home because he was too drunk to drive and the rest was history). I thought about all of this, and somewhere in between it I considered him, in a strange way, my friend. Though I would never admit it, there was a part of me that wanted his approval. I have a feeling he also wanted mine.
In August, he said he might not need me as much anymore. He needed to hire more men to help him move out and he couldn’t afford to pay too many employees. A silent fury calcified inside me like a grudge. I thought about all the energy I had handed over, all of the emotional exhaustion, the roller coaster of feeling, all of the highs and lows. I decided then and there that I didn’t need this whole thing. I spent many nights reiterating what I deserved and what I did not to myself. It became a taxing calculation that was always in need of being reworked. I didn’t come back the next day, or the day after that. When I passed by him as I was leaving my apartment I gave a quick and curt nod or a tight smile and walked by quickly before he had a chance to engage me in conversation. I felt righteous. Fuck him. Who else knew how to make a post go viral and get hundreds of people in to the store? Who got him all this media coverage? Had I not proved my worth? A few weeks went on like this.
grudge
grudge
grudge
One afternoon he called out to me as I was walking down the stairs, “I tried to call you.” That sentence was so intimate. It made him seem vulnerable. Me up high, him on the landing below, small and shifting in place. He seemed sheepish, unsure of where we stood with each other, but aware that some line between us had been crossed. He needed my help with the store. I said, “I have to see.” I had never gotten his call. I considered that the invisible force field I had but between us was so powerful that his call had not made it to my phone. A week before I had considered hexing him, then thought against it. I felt dismissive, hurt even, not vengeful. I wondered if even the thought of hexing held its own kind of power.
I tossed around this conversation in my head all day, and in the evening, something changed. My heart broke wide-open. I wept hysterically on my unmade bed while my lover bewildered stroked my back. Through all of the sobs I kept trying to tell them “my heart was closed to him. my heart was closed to him.” The realization was sickening and then it was a great relief because I had at last told the truth to myself. I gave into it totally and completely. I could hardly believe that the beloved had taken the form of a fifty three year old balding Greek man. I could hardly believe that there was a part of me that wanted to be unconditionally loving to him, even devotional.
There was a Greek man shaped hole in my heart.
I was ready to start again. I worked at the store the next day. All the way up to the very end when you could see the walls and the ground and we were now selling the furniture for cheaper than what he got it for. Everyday, we would make a new discovery of something that had been hidden under all the chairs, and dressers and desks: an old amp from when he used to play music, a tape recorder and a book. As the store emptied out I was determined to see it through. Marco got more nostalgic as the days went on, like the old objects, memories were being dislodged from his time here: the better days, when the store doubled as a hangout spot in the evening. They would sell coffee. They even had live music. They would set up couches on the front stoop and everyone would stop by and stay a while. He would point to where the string lights would hang across the ceiling. Nostalgia made him generous. He would often buy me lunch.
All of August felt like a ticking clock, for the both of us. He had to figure out how to clear out the whole store. I had not found a new apartment and it was a week to September, then four days, then three days, then two. I would wake up in the middle of the night gasping for air teeth clenched so hard there was a constant radiating pain in my jaw. Meanwhile, the construction that had already been undergoing to completely gut the apartment next door was shaking the walls. Everyday was a new crisis. I would arrive to find a fire truck out front and the whole store wrapped in caution tape because bricks were falling off the facade. Another day, when opening the store the key snapped in half. I rushed to a housing visit with each half of the key in my hand.
Everytime I told him that I still hadn’t found a place yet, he suggested that I could stay at his house in Laval for free while he was up north. I could water his plants, help him sell stuff around the place. I was warmed by his kindness, but I refused. He made this offer five times over.
On the last day, when everything was packed in the large truck, we hugged each other. The only hug we had ever shared. We thanked each other, not as a courtesy or even a social formality, but because we both meant it. We wished each other well and parted ways.
Marco also wished me a happy new years. I didn’t respond to this message. It is still sitting on my phone. The days and then the months that have passed make it almost impossible to respond now. There is nothing tying us together after the store. Our relationship hinged on its aching and dilapidated structure.
“Don’t be a stranger,” he called out to me when I left on the last day.
If I think about that too hard it can make me cry.
Another collage of right now, early spring.
Happy post spring equinox. I have been surrendering. I have been letting it go.
On a snowy long drive back from Northern Quebec to visit my lovers family we were listening to other world podcast and someone was sharing their near death experience. He recounted that he was in a field surrounded by people who felt familiar and was telling them his life story. He said, “even in recounting the harder parts of my life, I didn’t feel sad or heavy telling it, after all it was just a story.”
Maybe death is like taking off a tight shoe.
Or maybe it is like flying too high on a swing.
Or maybe it is like when your a kid and you drift off to sleep at a party and someone carries you in to the other room.
Or maybe it is like coming home from a long day and recounting your experience.
All I know is that I’m sure it is totally safe.
Love always,
-Thai x
This made me cry in a good way