This is her story.

Etna, CA, 2001. A boy who loved me but could not speak it because it's not hard to love, but it's hard to love well. A mother's expectations. I left this and more, scared of the tanning bed smiles and a silver plattered future, and headed for the mountains with crystals that speak. And there, part of me ran off to a place where there are only empty spaces and points of light. I look for her sometimes, most often with people who have fire and tales, but she is long gone, and I hope she is happy.

Jazzland, Vienna, 2002. I wanted to wear my hair in tiny wavelets moussed tight against my face like a 1920s silent cinema star or at least pin an obscenely red flower in my hair, but this was no flapper era, and I thought the white man couldn’t sing the blues.

A dim underground brick cellar. Over 500 years old. The Jazz Greats on the wall. Wooden tables and little church candle stubs, a dark ages throwback in the midst of a Soul reunion. I cramped myself between a young man with a broken finger and a very old gentleman in a grey suit, both of them bopping their heads, tapping their feet, and once in awhile, when the energy shook him, the old guy would pop out some short crazy dance gesture. And all of us in that beautifully dark dungeon pretended we were somewhere, someone else and drank to keep our lips wet and our fantasies going.

Los Angeles, 2004. He was soft as rainwater, but his heart was a tangle of knots and numbers. I was hard and sharp as obsidian, but my heart spilled, overflowed, with words and loose threads. I could not deceive myself from a troubled life, my love bigger than something I could box neatly and tie with a string. Loud and raw and exploding. I knew this and was sorry for it; there was much pain here. I could salt my heart or choose between two realities. In one, I jumped for joy, the way creatures do, and children do and adults don't do. In the other, I would spend my life wondering where the leap went.

Where the Northern Lights Live, 2005. I have circled the world round and round, endlessly, and with each place, part of me lingers behind and the me that leaves is different for it. I wonder if cities have Volckringer patterns of people, faint imprints of selves, and I wonder if they go about their business in some sepia-colored world we can't see. If I went back to Brantford, would I glimpse a 19-year-old me forever sitting on a bed, terrified of what I'd done and what I was about to do?

There is always another beginning. Nothing, ever, is that neatly tied up like brown paper packages or Hollywood movies or modernist novels. Whatever we build is temporary. Loves and buildings and entire civilizations get torn down indiscriminately. So we start over, we hold hands and bare bodies, we cook good food, and we remember what it was like before. Before the change or the heartbreak or the bombs. We fight to hold on. We fight to let go.

"In my dream, the angel shrugged and said, If we fail this time, it will be a failure of imagination & then she placed the world gently in the palm of my hand."