An entire day of wakefulness, a single moment of clarity…

Everything is okay now.

My country just spent millions on Bush’s 24 hour “relations” visit for security alone (even Loo had four RCMP patients one day during preparations) with no talks of our cattle farmers continuing to suffer through the U.S. beef ban, Tool’s latest album is still my least favourite, I’m scared of losing my sex drive, some of my best friends are going through some stupid shit that I can’t do anything about, the latest Half-Life 2 patch has dropped my frame rate by more than five frames-per-second while the stuttering continues, and I swear my iPod is going to run out of batteries on the bus ride home.

But I got a full eight hours last night.

And I’m ready to conquer the fucking world.

I remember once when I was younger, say about nine or ten, my parents took me for a car ride. I had no idea where we were going, because I never questioned them whenever they told me to get in the car. I’ve always been a victim of humming engines, and even today I find it hard to stay awake while riding in a car. I fell asleep and eventually woke up in a parked car with my seatbelt still on, uncertain of how much time had passed or where my parents had gone. The surroundings were unfamiliar, the parking lot, half-full, even more so. I sat there, expecting my parents to come back any second.

Not knowing how much more time went by, I started to question whether or not they had purposely left me there, some decade-late, do-it-yourself, abortion. “No”, I thought, “They wouldn’t just leave the car, it’s too much money”. When I couldn’t fight against my suspicion any longer, couldn’t convince myself that they wouldn’t just leave me in this lot like a baby on a doorstep, I started to cry. I didn’t know what to do. I gathered up the courage to leave the saftey of the car, and locked the door, knowing that in doing so I wouldn’t be able to get back in, but too scared of getting in trouble if my parents were ever to find out.

Wandering around the adjacent plaza, my face a complete sobbing mess, I looked for them through the store windows. Excuses, apologies, promises to be a good kid kept racing through my mind as I wondered from store to store, being careful not to let my eyes off the car. Eventually, I found them in a light fixture store, chatting with a sales clerk about some wood grain ceiling fan. I went in, approached them, and all I could say was, “Where did you go?”. They told me, matter-of-factly, that they went shopping and that I should have stayed asleep in the car. After finishing their conversation with the clerk, they left with me, and we all went home. I was shaken, but happy that I wasn’t discarded because of poor marks of bad piano form.

And even though I wish that the entire incident didn’t happen in the first place, a part of me wonders what it would be like if I had never found them. Perhaps a resolution.

An end to the stipulations of a conditional life.

Quite a few weeks ago, on another Sunday, I woke up with Loo sleeping next to me. I could never sleep past seven because of my work hours, and Loo rarely gets to bed before 11 the night before. Our schedules were, and still are, almost an eight hour shift away from each other. This doesn’t put us in the greatest of moods, and makes us say things that we don’t mean (on my end, at least, I can’t speak for her).

Like on that Sunday, after waking up and sitting in the IKEA PELLO for an hour listening to my music, I was grumpy to say the least. I wasn’t tired enough to sleep, but I wasn’t rested enough to do anything.

I decided to just get out and walk, not suspecting how beautiful the autumn day was. Everything I loved most about the fall was in that morning; the light chill in the air, the layers of colours, the manifest atmosphere. The walk was brief, just along the canal and back, but it was a shiver of the senses that only comes out a few days of the year.

When I returned, I still wasn’t in the best of sorts. My frustration about our mismatched schedules was starting to come through. Loo got up and we argued, trying to figure out who was to blame. In the end, I realized that it wasn’t either of our faults, but we were both paying for it.

Even though we argued, we ended up resolving things, a little wiser, and still just as tired. Another hurdle jumped, another obstacle that won’t get in our way again. I like to think that only good came out of that morning, and that if it didn’t happen, I wouldn’t have experienced what I was meant to.

Like watching joggers kick up the autumn leaves strewn across the pavement.

The more you call, the less I care.