She loved many people, most of them more than me, and my love was cloying and imperfect. I lost her many times. Days, weeks, months later she would return without tears to my shabby and crooked apartment on Coloniale. And I would attempt ferocity and steely eyes, but I was powerless before her. Oh, Monique in new pants, Monique skating at Carre St. Louis, Monique opening a tin of tuna—each moment an act of singular and irreducible beauty.

Her dreams took on the form of divine revelation. Each morning she woke up astonished, unable to grasp the portent of her nocturnal wanderings, but certain of their implicit significance. They became puzzles to solve, ghosts to tend, arrows to follow.

Watching her eyelashes flutter and knowing at that precise moment she was dreaming, I imagined them taking form and floating like mysterious cave drawings in the dark above us. I wanted to pluck them from the air, to preserve them so we could study them later, but even in my mind’s eye they eluded me, curling away like smoke and then disappearing, a trail of phosphorescence reabsorbed into the ocean.

After she left in the morning I would put on the sweater she had been wearing. Intoxicated with her redolence I would wander the streets breathing her in. Everything shining.

When the waitress brings me the bill she sucks in her cheeks like a super-model and shakes her shoulders from side to side, “Good music tonight”, she says.

George Michael is playing.

Freedom.

I like her, although I am not entirely sure why. Maybe it’s because she’s wearing a grey t-shirt just like the one you had. Maybe that’s all there is to it. Maybe I like her because the grey t-shirt she’s wearing connects me to you, helps me to draw a line back to your body.

At the table next to me sits a couple. The man has thick fingers and puffy eyes, and the woman is skinny and looks reflexively defensive, like she’s used to evading attack. They are speaking slowly, as if English were their second language, but it’s not. They’re just drunk and concentrating, trying to summon something true from their well of hurt. He looks into his glass and then up into her wary eyes, “There is something about you I have been missing so much,” he says.

And the waitress, looking from side to side at the nearly empty pub, sighs as I dig out my credit card to pay the bill. I ask her why the heavy sigh. She tells me that it’s been a long day.

And then there is a pause, and in that moment the space between us fills with something.

It’s sadness.

It’s desire.

And we look at one another, our invisible lives inching closer now, everything closer.

After I got the phone call informing me that I had advanced cancer, I went to the New Edinburgh Pub. I sat at the end of the bar,  so thin and pale and hunched as to be little more than a shadow on the periphery, and ordered a half liter of red wine and a large soda water, and then quietly flipped through a newspaper for the rest of the night. That was over 20 years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday.

The New Edinburgh Pub, located on Beechwood in Ottawa, wasn’t too far from where my parents lived.

It’s a generic place, a standard Ottawa pub that looks like it was made from a Build-Your-Own-Bar kit. It wasn’t ugly, but there was just no mind paid to the character or aesthetics of the place, and it reflected nothing back to you. It was nobody’s first choice, just a space in which you could drink.

The reason that I went to this particular pub on that night is that I didn’t think that I would know anybody there. I wanted to be invisible and uncalled to. I wanted to separate from the herd,  step outside of my life and dissolve into the space around me. I didn’t want to see anybody who might call me back to my life or the one that had been expected of me. I could not bear my own sadness, let alone theirs.

My recovery from the treatments and surgeries for Hodgkin’s Disease took a long time, years, actually, and each night, I went to this pub. It became the bell I had to ring each day, the one that confirmed my survival. And in spite of my desire to be anonymous, to have nobody care about me and vice versa, I became friends with all the staff and regulars.

I went there late, in the drinking hours, and all of us there carried our weights. But the pub served as a place where these weights were lifted, and suspended from our lives we could just sit amongst other people, unjudged and unmeasured.

We all need rest stops like this. And when I think of this place I think of it as being as essential to my recovery as the hospital. I sought to abandon the world, but it was here that I found the world, and that world restored me.

Just the other day, about half and hour before I turned the astonishing and impossible age of 50, I was told that after decades, the New Edinburgh Pub will be closing. This is what the world does. It reinvents itself. And that the landscape of my past is vanishing is nothing new–it happens to everybody, on every single block of this world, but still, it’s a blow, a real loss. And I just want to thank the New Edinburgh Pub– Paul, the truly decent owner, and everyone who worked and spent time there, I want to thank them for being present and sharing that space with me.

Like the restaurant itself, the waitress working when I was there was easy to overlook. She wore her generic black and white server’s attire as if camouflage. Bespectacled and with practical black hair that obscured her features, she moved quickly, whether she was approaching a task or finishing one.  She avoided eye contact and wore make-up in the fashion of somebody who wasn’t accustomed to wearing make-up, as if it, too, were part of the disguise she had to wear for work.  Perfunctory and with her head down, she was a delivery system who offered up no clues as to what her life exterior to the restaurant might be like.

The place wasn’t very busy and she was getting off early. She cashed out quickly, without hanging around to have a glass of wine or something to eat the way that restaurant staff often does. In her friendless manner she hurried out the door, stopping when a homeless woman sitting on a milk crate said something to her.  They spoke for a moment or two and then the waitress took out her purse, gave the woman some money and then hugged her right there on the sidewalk. For nearly a minute they must have embraced, and then after having wiped away a tear the waitress left, moving into the rest of her unseen life.

M: I’m going to assemble our barbeque.

M: Yes, I am.

M: Yes, I’m serious.

M: No, Chris isn’t here. I’m on my own.

M: Really.

M: Just me.

M: Don’t be condescending.

M: All the pieces are spread out before me in the backyard.

M: No, I can’t put them back in the box.

M: Because I threw out the box.

M: And the instructions.

M: I don’t need them. It all looks pretty obvious.

M: I can intuit these things.

M: Yes, like I can intuit the presence of a ghost or when a waitress has a crush on me.

M: You’re very funny.

M: Do we have a screwdriver somewhere?

M: I don’t know what type of screwdriver, one that works, I guess.

M: Really? Screwdrivers have names?

M: Phillip is a funny name for a screwdriver.

M: Are you making that up?

M: Whatever.

M: I found it.

M: Geez, there are a lot of little pieces here.

M: And they all look kind of alike.

M: No.

M: No, I am not going to turn on the webcam.

M: You’ll just have everybody at work watching! I know you!

M: Remember how the pastor said you had to believe in me?

M: Well, he said something like that anyway.

M: Just believe in me, dammit!

M: Oh, hell.

M: Do we have any Band-Aids?

M: Very minor accident.

M: Wasn’t expecting the dog to jump up on me while I was attaching the black thing to the silver thing.

M: Really muscling it, you know, and then Heidi started to lick my face.

M: It all just kind of sprung back into me.

M: Knocked my glasses off.

M: Might have lost part of a filing, too.

M: No.

M: No, I’m not positive, it could have been an old piece of a peppercorn.

M: Actually, I think I would do well on Survivor Island.

M: Probably finish in the top three.

M: Fuck!

M: A squirrel just took off with a small black thing.

M: He’s sitting on the fence with it. Mocking me.

M: Mocking squirrel fled in the face of barking dog.

M: Small black thing now gone.

M: Feeling flushed. Hate global warming.

M: Going to lie down and turn on AC for a bit.

M: Yes, even if AC does contribute to global warming.

M: Return to project later.

These are the text messages I sent to my wife Rachelle:

Me: Just stopped in at One for a drink, should be home by 6.

Me: Yes.

Me: I do think we’re made of money.

Me: Look, my fantasy sports teams have been doing very well the last couple of years.

Me: And I won a Deal Or No Deal scratch n’ win ticket the other day.

Me: I’m fucking rolling in cash.

Me: Paying off the car doesn’t make you a saint, you know.

Me: Right. Just the person who does all the heavy financial lifting.

Me: The hostess sat me very far away from the site lines.

Me: You’d need a shovel to find me.

Me: Yes.

Me: I am wearing my bike helmet.

Me: I don’t know if she thinks I’m an elderly bike courier.

Me: She probably just thinks I prefer solitude.

Me: I look pretty intellectual.

Me: Thoughtful, soulful.

Me: A man who looks like Roger Sterling just refused to sit in my section.

Me: “No, no, no, honey, no way I’m sitting there,” he said to the hostess.

Me: His hand around her waist.

Me: He’s now sitting in the rich men with big cigars section.

Me: Yes, I guess it’s like I’m sitting in the scratch n’ win section.

Me: It’s like instead of arriving via a fuck-me-I’m-rich car, I showed up on a mobility scooter.

Me: One with a little dog in the basket and a Hamilton Tiger Cats flag at the back.

Me: The waitress serving me is kind of chunky, too.

Me: Probably why she’s working this section.

Me: I bet she got the job because she sleeps with the mayor or something.

Me: Look, I have too had a job.

Me: Well, things are tough in the media right now, you know that.

Me: I guess I could be something other than a writer.

Me: No.

Me: No.

Me: I don’t want to work in the box factory that Allan manages.

Me: Because.

Me: I have lots of potential.

Me: You can still have potential in your 40s.

Me: Oh, I’m sorry, I just got distracted by a woman with long, superstar hair.

Me: It was like a flash of light when she tossed it and everything smelled like the beach!

Me: She looks a bit like Jennifer Lawrence.

Me: By the way, what shampoo do you use?

Me: Oh.

Me: Shopper’s, eh?

Me: Yeah, it’s good to get the Optimum points, I guess.

Me: If you don’t care what your hair looks like.

Me: Wow!

Me: Group of men who look like pro athletes and their supermodel girlfriends just asked me if I’d like to have a drink with them!

Me: People really are just drawn to me.

Me: Love you, probably be back late! xo

Me: Don’t forget to take the dog for a walk!!

Encumbered by a stern resting face, she’s locked like a laser into the world of her iPhone. Forced and slightly unnatural, she makes a point of never glancing around but lives inside her self-constructed bubble bringing small, impulsive miseries upon employees through calls or texts. After about 15 minutes her companion, hurried and apologetic for being late, arrives. The stern-faced woman is passive-aggressive, telling the new arrival that she had no choice but to go ahead and order, and then making unnecessary and pointed noises of completion with her cutlery. She then launches straight into business, a vampire sucking information from her guilty and compliant victim.

There are two waitresses serving the half dozen or so tables and both of them are lovely. One is tall and thin with a trace of brittleness to her, as if she hasn’t quite found her place in the world and might be looking for some time yet. She wears over-sized, bold glasses meant to add some complexity to the generic beauty queen image she projects—this, something she worries about, you can tell.

The other one is young and dewy, striding optimistically forward. She’s completely comfortable with who she is, and being good-natured and cheerful is not a mask she puts on when she goes to work—she wants to meet the world exactly where it stands.

An older woman, over-dressed for the weather, has the long, grey hair of a sociologist. She’s proud of it and considers it a political statement, pulling it into two practical pigtails that she fastens, one with a red band, and one with blue. She’s very particular, almost stubborn in her manner, and when she stands up to dust the crumbs off her placemat and onto the ground, it’s as if she’s beating a carpet out on a clothesline. Efficient, economical and unsentimental, she wants us to see her self-reliance, how she’s always been happy to live alone in this world. A train then trundles by, and everything shakes. Somehow, the patio then seems to dislocate and separate from time for a moment, and the world becomes a little richer, the passing aroma of electricity and oil drifting through us like history.