Signs and Omens: the first time

The first time it happened was during the summer. Life had finally calmed down. After a year of travelling and looking for a new way to lead my life I had returned to Ottawa and decided that any new life I began must grow out of the old one.

I went back to the city I left the previous September, and I returned to work, on a regular freelance basis for the same company I left before my sojourn in the west. I did not return to the same man or the same address. In fact, I had fallen in love, or thought I had, with someone who lived so far away that where I lived in Canada would be irrelevant until we either agreed to be together in his city or agreed to part company.

There is really no reason to go into the details of how love motivates me. I think it motivates about half of humanity to real action and that half is usually in love with the half that considers love to be a secondary consideration within the context of an orderly life. God thinks he’s funny, he seems to like the poetry of irony – he likes the big, dramatic, painful lessons, I suppose it’s a matter of perspective. On a minute to minute scale, in matters of intimacy and degrees of anguish experienced by the human heart, I don’t think he understands human beings at all.

So, I was in Ottawa on a hot summer day, with a man in the back of my mind and an erratic work schedule. My apartment was small but gifted with a good view and a fresh breeze. Things seemed stable.

I woke up one August morning and went into the bathroom. I turned the tap in the bathroom on and the water ran red.

For a few seconds I just looked at it in disbelief. It was the colour of a dissolved brick. I left it to run. It didn’t change. The color never wavered, it just stayed red. I turned off the tap and went into the living room.

Outside the day was cloudy again. It had been an unseasonably wet and grey summer, more like the west coast than Eastern Ontario. It promised to be a muggy day. I knew at once that I was looking at another fork in the road. I could accept things as they were and move directly forward or I could go back to the taps and try again.

I imagined a growing chaos in the streets below my balcony. The water in the pipes would be just one small sign of many, all coming together to form a kind of pre-apocalyptic landscape. Over the course of the previous year, buildings around the city had burned to ragged shells of brick and broken glass. It seemed as though more and more of the streets were torn up for construction but no men were working on the sites. It became difficult to get to work, every day I needed to find a new route, every day more and more of the streets around the office were blocked, even dug up – just pits, moats of broken cement and dirt where the bus could not pass. I could see the busses starting to change routes in ever diminishing circles around the transit station.

I could see panic just under the surface of the people I passed on the street.

I could see my hiking boots in the closet and the old backpack I bought for school wrinkled and stiff in the blanket box against the living room wall.

I knew I could turn toward my closet. Pull on my jeans, get out the boots and the backpack, turn the key in the lock and simply walk away. I had done so many unpredictable things over the last twelve months, nobody would notice one more.

That was the first time it happened. And that time stays with me.