It’s as if the adult world has been rendered small, simple and fun, and as we boarded the ferry for the three minute journey to the airport, we felt like children getting on a ride at the CNE. It was first thing in the morning and a dense fog hung mysteriously around us, covering everything.

We could not see where we were going, and this created an atmosphere of adventure and whimsy, and in this context all the businessmen looked particularly ridiculous. Each one of them in a suit that suggested the distance between the corporate status to which they aspired and the disappointing status that they’d actually been assigned, they sat in isolated, self-important concentration. Brows furrowed over spread sheets and columns of data, their too-large fingers hunted-and-pecked on miniature keypads, and it was all a little heart-breaking. Like kids pretending at being adults, they attempted to project that what they were doing was of vital importance, but you could tell that inside they all knew better.

Inside they still wanted to discover a waterfall.
Swim with a knife clenched between their teeth.
Find the hidden treasure.

To our son Jones, who is nearly two, everything is a wonder. He is on the edge of language, and his words, mysterious and uncontainable, are still holier than ours. Excited, almost breathless, he exploded onto the ferry with bright, astonished eyes. He ran around pointing, naming everything he saw. The businessmen all kept their heads down—there was important work to be done—but an older couple watched, smiling as this new world broke into day around our son, aware they were in the midst of a tiny God now bringing his universe into being.

Under the awning girls in tube tops giggle while their boyfriends watch them, imagining lifting their twisting and smiling and screaming bodies up, and carrying them out into the cooling streams of rain– the moment and everybody in it, becoming slick, beautiful and imperishable.

Madeline:

Somebody far in the distance is strumming a guitar. Just beneath the hum of the fan, I can hear it drifting in through the open window. It enters so softly, as if a daydream of romance that’s now free of its moorings and lost in the streets.

I look across the street into the illuminated parking garage and as if summoned, there’s a young and attractive couple in Rock n’ Roll clothes holding hands. I have to look through the dark into captured light, and the way the garage is lit makes it look like a theater and the couple is on stage, and they are so very happy they might actually be skipping. When they come upon the striped parking garage gate arm, they delighted even further, and bending back they both did the limbo beneath it, still holding hands, laughing and smiling at one another, unaware that anybody was watching.

Love,

Carter

A sprawling outpost on the edge of the city, the place has always reminded me of an airport. It’s insanely busy, there’s a multiplicity of languages and cultures streaming through the corridors, and the store, the things that they sell, are never truly what the consumer wants.Ikea is more of a way station, a place in your life where you pause, and finding an acceptable but temporary solution, move forward from who you are toward the glittering horizon of the person you’ll one day become, a person who will eventually be able to afford the sort of “adult” furniture you might one day pass down to your children. And so, when you find yourself at Ikea on a Sunday afternoon, you discover, in both a figurative and literal sense, that you are not where you want to be. Ikea, is not your beautiful house.

Perhaps as a result, most of the people there, like commuters, have a slightly dazed and unhappily obliged expression to their faces. However, one couple looked happy, like they were starring in their own movie and the rest of us were just extras there to lend contrast. Located somewhere in their beautiful twenties, they were animated, as if playing games in an amusement park or falling in love while ice skating.  Wearing a shiny, silver miniskirt that showed off a splashy array of tattoos, she was a platinum blonde with a kind of retro burlesque vibe, and he, well, he didn’t look quite as confident as he was dressed, but he was trying hard.

They were in Ikea as tourists, treating the place a bit like a museum where the exhibits weren’t the storage solutions and furnishings, but all the weary, humbled people shopping there. It was a cultural excursion for these two, an anthropological journey that was meant as symbol of the quirky, self-conscious lives they were trying to fashion for themselves. She, independent-minded and unpredictable, loved the carnival food on sale there, the secret passageways through the intricately designed shopping trails and the way that things were piled up like giant toys, and he was planning on getting a tattoo of the Ikea Monkey to commemorate the great day, both of them smiling secrets at one another, certain that they would never grow into the compromised, dream-beaten people they imagined blending into the background all around them.

A blonde, Russian sex bomb, she has a different bikini for each day. Reclining in the sun he rests his head on her ass as he reads The Wolf of Wall Street, while she, reading what looks like a Russian supernatural thriller, kicks her feet back and forth in attempt to gather attention.

Simultaneously imperious and kittenish, she’s too obviously desirable to make eye contact with anybody else. To look her in the eyes would be an insult, to disrespect royalty. And so even though these two alphas are begging to be watched, everybody is looking away, pretending that they don’t notice them and that they don’t want to be invited to this crazy sex party they’ll never be invited to. No, we all look off at the horizon of water and sky, thinking of other things.

He defines himself as a man of action, and he loves the the ferocity of the ocean, of the power he will master. She prefers to pose by the poolside, stretching her body and tossing her hair, mastering desire. He’s encouraging her into the ocean, but she doesn’t want to get in. She’d have to take off her sunglasses. He sets an example, showing off, really, by diving and rolling easily through a wave as only a pro wake boarder might. He splashes water at her, but more contemptuously than playfully, as if irritated and saying, “C’mon, you’re in the tropics, enjoy it!”

She’s being bullied and she knows it.

Too small to withstand the surfer’s waves, she decides to recline in the breaking water like a calendar girl, shifting attention back to her, but the wave pushes in and knocks her over. Annoyed she stalks up to the resort where she immediately covers her head in a blanket and begins to furiously text. Moments later she goes into the pool with her big floppy hat and sunglasses and stares angrily off in the distance, literally pouting. The wake boarder returns to her, and just stands there not speaking. Posing in the sun is enough, the opportunity to do so all either of them really want from the other.

The person on the other end of the connection was just going to get taken advantage of, “fucked-over and left to rot, dammit!!” His manner was so florid and over-the-top that I wondered if he was actually communicating with anyone other than himself, the phone serving merely as the magic portal for his interior dialogues.

On the patio at the Second Cup sat three teenagers. “Did you hear about the cannibal in Miami?” the Asian girl asked. Smiling, she leaned forward and relishing each word she slowly added, “He ate the face right off a guy while he was alive!” A campfire ghost story told over steaming cups of coffee.

Two other teens, both younger, walked toward toward me. One of them was heavy and had the wounded look of a bully-magnet. He was upset that his younger brother was getting his own bedroom at an earlier age than he did. The look of hurt and anger on his face was so sincere that it was both funny and sad, and then after a moment, a little bit scary. Engrossed in his own misery, he passed by this flier posted on a newspaper box:

A little further up the street a Native man was selling dream catchers on the sidewalk. The woman he was talking to looked enthusiastic and hopefully flirtatious. She had a last-call hue to her, and braless beneath her sundress she was hoping that the sunlight was catching in all the right places. The man was looking at her, a little bit pleased with himself, “ Chile?” he responded, “I used to sleep with a couple from Chile a few years ago.”

A skate boarder, cut off by a car, shouted curses and banged his fist on the trunk. The car came to a stop and everybody on the sidewalk slowed down– curiosity, anxiety and excitement now humming like a hydro wire. The window of the car powered down and an open-palmed hand emerged followed by the face of a middle-aged man. “I’m sorry,” he said, “it was my fault. I’m getting old.” The skate boarder, taken aback, wasn’t sure what to do, so he just got back on his board and slipped invisibly into traffic, as if a fish free from the hook, now cutting deep into familiar waters.

A woman who was probably around 50 hadn’t been paying any attention to this little drama and was walking through the cluster of pedestrians stalled on the sidewalk. She had a salon tan and was wearing red jeans and jangly jewelry. Speaking firmly into her phone she said, “I love you. That’s all. I love you.” And then she flipped her phone shut and smiling to herself, or to anybody who cared to notice, walked past the Shopper’s Drug Mart and turned the corner.