When We Were Giants

I was born in the same hospital as my mother. Not far from it, she grew up in a small house on what is now Canada Way. My grandfather used to deliver milk for Dairyland by horse drawn carriage on that hill, his old iron bottle carrier a plaything of my childhood.

I grew up in Coquitlam and spent the best years of my life stalking its pitches, ball diamonds, pools, trails, and ravines. In its back lots and on its twisting streets I clawed my way through the suburban trials of youth, some ending in blood, some in orgasm, some in vomit, most in laughter, and even a few in tears.

When I was a kid I used to get liquor bootlegged from the Liquor Store on Alberni. Across the street was the epicenter of Vancouver teen debauchery at the time, Shakers, in all its seedy, Tones On Tail soaked glory. It would, as the years passed, make way to Love Affair, unofficial headquarters of Vancouver’s revolutionary industrial music scene and the haunt of Skinny Puppy and New Order devotees alike.

As a man I would end up living on the same street that I once bootlegged liquor on as a fifteen year old boy. And while there is now just a large hole in the ground where I used to put that liquor to use, I could not shake the feeling of my past eternally residing in the very concrete of that strip of road as I walked it last week. A part of me secretly fell apart as I stumbled home in the dark, images of two decades of crawling that stretch of sidewalk converging on my brain like so many seagulls on bread.

It may seem to you to be no big thing this turmoil within me, this year of poison and pick locks. As if a fish in a tank I remain separated from more than just the world by the glass and the smallest of plastic treasure chests. I remain separated from myself, from the knowing of things easy, and from the solitude of this secret heart that has held in the highest regard this place that I’ve called home.

I hope that you are listening. I hope, as I lay here and watch the headlights of cars flash across the ceiling of this impossibly tiny room, my eyes dancing behind this cloud of barbiturates, that you can hear me. If only a whisper, an annoyance in your ear, hear this death within me and know that it is monumental. Like the silencing of a million voices, like the terror of those held helpless and forced to endure the seconds before their own deaths, hear me this one last time. And in doing so, say that you will never forget me.