Miscellaneous Word Document — March 28th, 2023
4:00 AM — Taeko Onuki
I wake up before dawn,
the darkness hides its breath.
I chase after the stillness.
The words can’t be found.
Whenever I think back,
An answer can't be found.
In the black fog past midnight, all is diminished but the rain and the meandering of a lone car. There is something western about driving to fill the empty trail of the road, not that I would personally know. Nightly, solo. Paris, Texas. My father would drive my sister and I from our townhouse in Vancouver down the I-5 to Los Angeles, only breaking for a single night in a barebones motel frozen in the ‘70s which was the only accommodation that made the cut for my father’s budget, a vicinity that now might be nostalgia-poverty-adventure porn for a young type. Northern California mountains. Slaughterhouse. Desertscapes drifting into an immeasurable expanse. Driving is an inherent joy even after losing his right leg to a car accident. He frequently drives down from the Okanagan to the lower mainland since he needs a car to get around the city but also because the route is sheer wonder; Manning Park to Princeton must be the only route worth taking. He has a ’74 Chevrolet Nova he bought well over fifteen years ago to restore. It has been on the backburner between all his home renovations, moving, taking care of my sister and I, but it still waits patiently.
The night predicating sleep and post couldn’t be further apart. Waking before one o’clock might be interrupted sleep but I had started at three which is the perfect hour to rise. Before three, the day has yet to come to an end, not here in my mind nor out there. Now the day waits to begin, here and there. We’re suspended in between. Innocence blankets a dreaming city or rather, vulnerability exposes its gentle nature. The discord of the day is distant and reconcilable from here. I can see the harmony in the aftermath of yesterday and sift through the things that are content the way they are. There, too, I find the disrupted matters, resting in interlude.
At four o’clock, I rise. I bleach salt and pepper eyebrows a couple days too late and wash last night’s dishes. I savour the crunch of buttered toast and coffee while finishing Drive My Car. I’m neither here nor there. I’m in a car driving off somewhere on this damp night, probably listening to a Fleetwood Mac CD. CDs. To be young feeling old is contradictory when no one’s knowledge of anything comes close to ‘enough’. That may well be my youth speaking, presuming that I’ll forever be overwhelmed by what is unknown about the universe. Yet while I’m reminiscing floppy disks and CDs, I notice there has been an immense succession of change in my minute existence thus far. Nanotechnology, 9/11, a recession, the first Black president of the United States, the 2010 Winter Olympics, the pandemic, an upheaval of Roe vs. Wade, the marked change of the alarming heroin chic ‘00s diet to the big bodacious bodies of the ‘10s. I suppose some of these changes could induce a premature defeatism, giving way to a decided determination, all stubborn, old.
I keep my blinds shut but I can see the soft hues of blue peeking around the edges, the murmur of day that I can still refuse. Pitter patter on the windshield, the wiper squeaking like feet in the tub. I don’t understand how you could come out of a Fleetwood Mac situation and ever return to who you were before; some things taint you for good. So you learn to live with being tainted.
I don’t want to watch reality television but I will. I don’t want to surf these Reddit threads but I will. This morning I am reminded how vital the slumbering winter is, offering the darkest mornings of the year. Hugged by the warm breath of my apartment, I can retire early and write incessantly in this remarkable window, circled by nebulous visions. Earlier nights, relatively speaking, are for debauchery that only seem to will in incapacitated days — I wonder whether those nights are still for me compared to this special waking hour. Or perhaps this hour is merely a glimpse, and unattainable, only arriving by way of divine virtue.
Minor Revisions: July 11th, 2023 (for punctuation, clarity, and to conserve privacy)