YOU AND I share a secret place in Calgary, the Inglewood irrigation canal that is a few kilometres from our home. I show you this place one day when we go for a walk, tell you how I would run through the dog park and down along the canal while exercising, often stopping to wade my hands through the cold waters. In turn, you show me a place beyond the canal, where the railroads cut across Bow sîpîy[1].
After the annihilation leading to the death of our relationship has begun, we walk down to the canal after a weekend of stewing in depression. It’s a beautiful Sunday; pîsim[2] is there above us, massaging our shoulders until they brown. As we stride along a path, I stop and ask, “Do you hear that?” and you say, “It must be from the golf course nearby.” I have stopped us because I hear voices, almost from beneath, as if they were in the catacombs of the canal—a whimpering, maybe; an exultation? What are the trees whispering to us in this moment, what of the water, what of the rocks? We continue on this path you have walked many times, a handful of them to escape me after I have hurt you through words weaponized, and you take me to the clearing.
As we continue through the clearing, we come across a jutting of land and openness of water: Bow sîpiy is here, greets us through its steady rocking. Sometimes a wave is a wave. There are duck feathers strewn about, a carcass, and a firepit here on this little outcrop of land that believes it is a cliff. You say, “Someone has been here, caught a duck looks like,” and I think, “I’m so happy they used everything.”
We sit on the edge smoking cigarettes. You skip rocks across the lake, and I run my hands through the water, sift my fingers through silt. This whole journey reminds me of the film Stand by Me, which is one of my favourites; I feel like I am Gordie Lachance, and here you are Chris Chambers. In this vignette I play in my head, I imagine us having started that fire, roasted that duck, slept here in the tall grasses, let sîpiy sing us to sleep. I’ll ask, “Do you think I’m weird?” and you’ll say, “Definitely, but so what? Everybody’s weird.” And in that moment my belly will bloom because this is a moment I have craved since I was a child, latched on to the ghost of Lachance; I live through the intimacy I share with characters whose lives I have imagined. We’ll talk into the night, that kind of talk that seems important until, as Lachance narrates, you discover girls. Of course, we have discovered girls—but in this moment, we are also just two queer boys discovering one another, and the landscape around us, and how our bodies are now braids separated, culled for the smudging. How easy is intimacy, honesty, truth, when imagined in a dream or when we are apart? How we grind into one another, spark flints for the fire we let die, and feast through the blaze we create now, here, in this moment, as individuals. In this vignette, I hear you say—by which I mean I hear myself say—“I wish that I could go someplace where nobody knows me.” We have come here to see a body—which doesn’t exist, because this is a vignette; but we have come nonetheless. And so what I offer up is bodies in multiplicity: the river body, the earthen body, a pocket of air, a breast of rock, bicep of branch, me, you, us. We witness death here too, though in a different fashion from the film, more holistic than nihilistic, that continuum where death kisses birth—and is there even a concept such as division?
I come back into myself, having lived a full life in the briefest of moments while that rock skipped across the lake and your forehead pores swelled so much they began to sweat and your index finger, with its scythe-shaped scar, uncurled from the hook you bent it into—you and me, we have our own sense of time.
You smile at me, I giggle back, and we sit side by side. Across the river, a man fly-fishes. We watch him catch a fish and then leave, climbing back up the hill on the other side. There, a cyclist passes by, singing along to a song he intimately knows. sîsîp[3], niska[4], and ayîk[5] come to visit us as we sit together, kneecaps buckling, maybe even aching to hold one another, and pîsim beats time into our backs, which form continents of sweat. kâhkâkiwak[6] land in the middle of sîpiy, which is disturbed by the leg of a railway. There atop the railings they meet, cawing at one another, feathers extended into hands, greetings; they talk with one another, and we listen, smiling. What are these kâhkâkiwak talking about? Boisterously, they chat as if at a reunion or a send-off—and what’s the difference anyway? We sit silently, witnessing askiy[7] talk all around us, a pair of ravens saying, “I love you,” in a language not our own—yet maybe also one we know intimately? Raven is a sign, I think; these ones are here to demonstrate the ravenous appetite of finality.
Finality is a horrendous word; it eats, you know? It has teeth. I thought and still think of finality a lot, especially during that final weekend when we decided to sever and then spent every waking moment together healing. Finality—as severity—is a word that I need to erase from my vocabulary. It’s too linear, too colonial. We, of course, as Indigenous peoples, know that finality is simply an opening into continuity. But during that weekend I plagued myself with the word, I swallowed it whole and squawked up a stomachful of knots—meaning, there were continuums there too. My body rejects finality as an end-stop; my own cells fight against this invasion.
It’s funny, though, how mourning changes language, the grammar of being. Finality transforms morphologies into a series of becomings and grievings—but in that becoming I find how language wraps around wounds like a suture, and I am a compressor pounding meaning into broken chains. The first time I heard you call me Joshua in the aftermath, my dorsal was spliced in half and I was kinêpik[8] again, tonguing the decadence of a splitting letter: it was like watching how an A halves into a broken ladder, and suddenly I was trapped in the abyss of signs. Then I too worked up the effort to transform language: I called you by your name, or friend, and as much as it wounded me to do so, this act told me that transformation always begins with the tongue, that wonderful glossia. When I reminisce about you, I laugh, throwing my tongue into the air as if it were a newborn—and I find a hinterland of thrush growing there upon it. The biosphere, askîy, finds me here too, grows upon my buds: I taste snakeroot, rainwater, chokecherries, the taste of growth is nêhiyâwewin. This thrush, bush, forest-tongue, divides into treaties, a treatise with no subject, and my mouth becomes a geography of grammar. Nothing will ever be the same again, I think. Normal will have to be redefined; grammar, that slick tool, that scaffold, will have to die and lilt into a new language.
IN WHAT WAYS is a manuscript an exhibit? In what ways are these words animate? Maybe you understand these pages as an artifact, sacred words from an NDN; or maybe you read me as a sex worker of language, one who strips and fucks the page and spills himself all over it? Do you clone me? Do you seed me? Do you let narrative germinate? Do you shake the page and expect me to fall out? How do you read me? How do you envision me? Maybe I say I am a broken web, blown into singularity from a wind that knows no bounds? Maybe I say I am sand in an hourglass and you are peeking into granularity? What I will tell you is that this specific chain of letters, spaces, commas, punctuation marks, and white space is in fact an animate being. Through it, you survey my body, my memory, my spirits, my heart, my emotions. You, in this moment, own me, or think you do, even as I escape through the loophole of an end-stop, that damning boulder, that prick of ink that bleeds the skin.
NOW YOU AND I are in Nanaimo, BC, and I am visiting your temporary home. We are in a “sketchy” part of town, as you call it, but it feels familiar—as if poverty has a universal look across Turtle Island: the same siding, the same windows looking like eyes, colours, doors, roofing. Your bed is on the floor, your living room is beautifully nostalgic for the prairies, your patio is littered with cigarettes but well cared for. I crossed on a ferry just to meet you here, dolphins and orca greeting this lonely NDN far from his homeland. The wind salts my face, my pores clog, and I shine in the daylight as my hair tries to free itself from its braids.
I shower while you’re at work. Waiting for you to come back to this place you call home, I inspect the inventory of your identities. Smell is such a powerful tool of memory—I pick up your soap and huff before I use it. There are little whiskers attached to it, curlicues; even your body hair spells out stories to me. I bask in the scent of your armpits, your jawline, the way the delicate skin on the bridge of your nose has spread its oils here. I lather myself with your shampoo, heavily so, and I scrub the scalp clean of its dandruff. I rinse myself, dry my hair, and smell the scent of the towel afterwards. I linger like a ghost in the reeds of the fabric, taking it all in, because this is the first time I’ve seen you in the months since your move and I am a nostalgic person.
When you get home, you offer to show me around the town. We visit the docks, stroll through the downtown, sand and salt water pecking our faces. You take me through a path in Bowen Park, show me the totem poles that have fallen down and are returning to the foliage of their mother’s skin. Here: bear, frog, orca, eagle lie side by side, not in a tomb or a finality, but as elders turned newborn waiting to be birthed again into the soil from the roots of saplings turning into children once again. Later we decide to eat dinner, and you take me to the Oxy, a lovely little pub that turns into a karaoke bar later in the evening. We sit in the corner, order a pint each, and sip, massaging the link that is between us, lovers reunited over long distances. A cavalcade of older women jaunt in. One has recently undergone a divorce, and she asks us if we’re together. When we muster up the courage to say yes, she eyes us more closely: we might be queers who can navigate her through her breakup. Later, someone sings “Love Shack,” and suddenly the whole bar is up and dancing. You and I join the crowd of shimmying folks, across from one another, smiles wide as bucket handles. Your hair bounces when you hop, your hair again a curlicue with those beautiful curls that look like tendrils or foliage, and I am the NDN artifact, a totem pole, melding into them, rotting into nutrient. When the song ends, you go up to speak to the DJ while I sit with another round of beer for us. Then I see you standing alone in the middle of the dance floor, your eyes attached to mine. A song comes on: the twang of country and the familiar banjo of Dolly Parton. You sing “Joshua” to me, and I imagine myself as the isolated, mean, vicious man living alone in a shack with a black dog, while you, as the bouncy-haired Dolly, arrive just in time to find me pondering pandemonium.
I have come here just to meet you.
IN A LETTER you send me as we are in the middle of breaking up, you tell me that you “can’t see the forest for the trees.” In the moment of reading this, my mind becomes a viscous, flattened membrane, pulled to every corner, a stretched deer hide, pounded brain and all. Have I concealed the wilds of this act we call relations? Am I more blockade than blessing? How have you only noticed me, the Joshua Tree, when we are in this hinterland of an ecosystem? As a Joshua Tree, am I not a marker instead of malice? Here, existing as a dagger in the desert of a relationship withered into dust and stone, I see myself: my namesake, Joshua, the waver, the guide, arms upraised in a fashion that promises entrance to a land forgotten—but maybe it is me who has forgotten the system of roots that flourish into growth in a dead home, a dying landscape? I grow in groves fashioned from graves. I think of the Mojave, and I am a kernel of maize that combusts between the pressure of two molars—I need moisture, warmth, I need apocalyptic conditions to blossom into edibility, and I am looking for my sisters, already thrown into a pot of soup. Look at the tree of me and tell me there isn’t already a forest grasping for oxygen within me.
Even my bed feels like a canyon these days, my house a desert of a space. The nail holes you leave behind are screeching at me, and all I see are the bones of this home, memory leaking from the punctures, my walls quivering while we are both healing. I run my fingers over the wounds of our home, cartilage snapping. I find studs in the walls by seeking out nail heads and hang pictures over the scarring. The watercolours of a painted bear bleed into the bruised wall and all I have to offer as tincture is the sticky smoke of sweetgrass. I feel sorry for the holes. I see myself in them; I too am spilling memories from a broken abalone while trying to hold the balance of the tide and the weight of this contraption I call a body. How heavy a burden it is to maintain the structure of a home, the flexibility of a memory, the rigidity of a body.
There are days when I wake up expecting to see you across the chasm of my bed. Instead, I find the trace of you, ghost of sweat, the yellow outline of your thigh curled into itself, and I melt into the mattress coils and search in those metal rings for your voice, a cough, the rhythm of your exhumation. I smoke a cigarette on my patio, reel myself in. My neighbour, the tiny mouse I let live in my barbecue, scrambles beneath my feet. I suspect he has become used to sweetgrass embers and the burnt ends of sage I lay in a little bush out back. The grass has been recently cut and there are severed tubes of plants splayed in front of me; I turn my eyes away because I have endured enough massacres in my lifetime. I’m sorry I let the weeds eat away at us, but are weeds not also medicine? I make dandelion tea and I drink the root of you, sunshine and mud and sweat in a teacup.
You will be coming to our old home soon and I will be a red-eyed mess. You’ll tell me that I smell of medicine when you hug me, and it is true that I am bathing in the smell of cedar, sweetgrass, and sage. I let the perfume of medicine become a telltale sign of my mourning in these end days of our relationship, even as I am sorry it causes you anxiety. But I need to open the gate to my ancestors. This braid of grass was plucked from the hands of nêhiyaw iskwêw[9] in Mohkinstsis, this sage was a gift from Montana, this cedar from nohkôm in Manitoba: the scent of me, awa maskihkîwiwat,[10] is an expansive geography. Grammar slowly returns to me in the frozen second of its embrace. I laugh because I have no other means of replicating the feeling of breaking.
I TALK OF YOU, of us, to my counsellor in Calgary. She tells me that I need to “tame my illusions.” In that moment I catalogue her phrasing—because I think it’s beautiful, and also because it expresses a truth I consistently avoid. I have mastered being an illusionist, I am a Mesmer of a man. But I tell no one of this magic I house; instead, I throw up a shimmering veneer and cloak my mind in holograms.
Now, when I think about the ethics of writing non-fiction, I reach back to that moment and this woman counselling me into good health, miyopimatisowin[11]; I see myself sitting there swallowing whole her words like hard bread. What is nonfiction? How is it creative? Why do I add the C before the NF? Do I do it in order to hide? To vanish into the page so as to disguise the body of truth from you? How do I write respectfully and honestly if I am constantly seeking material out in the world and in the constellations of relations I hold near and dear to my heart, all in order to excavate them so as to narrate this to you? Perhaps I have been bad kin to you and to others—how I devour, never satiated; how I archive you into notations and am never fully listening. This is not something I do in other genres of writing. I conclude that it’s a defence mechanism. I become a house of mirrors, let others see me as they wish to and, more importantly, see themselves as beautifully moulded reflections.
When you and I break up, we have a long conversation into the infant hours of the morning. We laugh and share and cry in equal measure, and it feels good, because we have been avoiding these acts of vulnerability for so long. I ask you, “When did you fall out of love with me?” and you, sparked by our stoking an honest fire, tell me, “Eight months ago.” This comment shatters me, quaking down the glassware of my illusions, and my stomach becomes a dead star, an exhausted mouth, nefariously nebulous. I feel betrayed, almost used, and I blame myself for weeks afterwards, trying to find a medicinal root in the ecosystem of this pain. I am angry, but I don’t know at whom—maybe myself, for having believed in a mirage for months, watering bedrock rather than the fungi I thought could feed us the protein we so desperately needed.
DO YOU REMEMBER our road trip last summer? How we rode across the badlands looking for medicine in the hoodoos? My Blackfoot friends tell me that the hoodoos are sacred, that they are filled with spirits, something I so wholeheartedly believe that I will not camp among them. You and I make the journey over a weekend, singing songs and sharing light as we drive. We stop at Head-Smashed-In Provincial Park along the way, pick sage from the bushes in the parking lot; I still have those bundles in my maskihkiywat[12] at home. There, we see apisimôsos[13] standing on the drop, tongues wrapped around bundles of grass and seeds, and we simply witness them in their glory, reminded that life abounds even in spaces crafted for death. Marmots lounge, bathing in the sun, fattening and resting in nooks, splayed across concrete slabs. You know this world intimately and take the time to teach a visiting family about a particular type of bird. I stare at you in awe and wonder, my mind cascading with the stories that pour forth from your mouth. I bathe in your language; I dry myself off in the shelter of your sunburnt lashes.
We learn of Napi here, the Old Man, who comes running from the west as warm wind, forever chasing another Old Man who runs from the north shooting arrows and bringing winter. We learn about Napi making the earth and moulding people out of mud. “You must be people,” he says, making first a woman and a child. I’m reminded of my own creation story, of muskrat diving to the bottom of the ocean to grab a mound of earth and place it on the turtle’s back. I’m reminded of you saying once that you felt you had the ocean in you. I think about those churning currents you house and sometimes let crash against your intestines, body full of memory, water laced with trauma. I hope you learn to let the waves settle into the pit of your belly, make a well of an offering. I think, “M’boy, I have the earth in me—and don’t we make a beautiful creation story?” In my mind, I sometimes place us into another vignette: me, reaching down into the whole, that cavernous hole, where askîy exists in you, that rich clay. I take a handful, just enough so as not to waste, and I swim back up to the surface of your oceans. There, I take this hand of clay and smear it into the earth of me, that withering garden full of bare root, dry root, starving root, and let the flora of me feast on the most intimate soil of you—we bloom again and I am holy, slathered in silt.
Do you remember us stopping at the little diner, Igloo Café, in Fort Macleod? Our tummies rumble and you pull over at a place to snack—or so we think. I order a two-piece chicken dinner and you a hamburger. When the food arrives, I am presented with two of the largest pieces of fried chicken I have ever seen, an entire cooked chicken atop a bed of french fries. “A snack?” you say. “That’s a damn buffet.” And we burst into laughter, there in the summer sun of southern Alberta. Later, we ponder ordering ice cream, but I decide against it. We both know what happens when a Cree ingests dairy, and neither of us are prepared for the flatulence that will follow us into the car, into the night, into our blankets, my stomach a playground of foreign milk.
Halfway through our road trip, we stop in Lethbridge, where we decide I’ll go in to rent a room with a single queen bed and you’ll wait outside so we could both sneak upstairs without having to out ourselves in this little prairie town. We lounge on the bed and I take pictures, both of us giggling like children on this rickety mattress in this colonized town in this broken constellation of a country. Later, we have dinner downstairs in the hotel bar, order wings and beer, play slots. And, as is our tradition, we go to the casino for the evening, where you discover the Simpsons slot machine. We play into the night.
In the morning, we finish our drive down to Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park. I am afraid of rattlesnakes and you assure me that you’ll keep watch for them. We meander through hoodoos in the dry bone heat of the badlands, find thicket, listen to the love songs of birds, and emerge into the playground of stone whittled into hoodoos. The whole of Milk River is there, rushing excitedly. You tell me stories of your family, of your grandfather’s relationship to this river, of its connection with Saskatchewan, with your hometown, the Cypress Hills, the monarchs—you’re a teacher to me here, and I am studious inside your joyfulness. We sit in a hoodoo and ponder the dreams of stone, will ourselves to name this home as it ought to be: Áísínai’pi. Listen for the manitowâk[14] who place story in our nail beds. This is a place of interconnection, where the physical and the spirit worlds kiss; we are in the cavity of these worlds, colliding with one another, and I wait for them to wink at me, tell me to rinse off the soup of pupa in the waters. We hike to see “The Battle Scene,” a petroglyph etched into the side of Áísínai’pi’s cliff, a breast of earth. Here I see myself defeated as a nêhiyâw, but I don’t shy away from this shame; I thank it in this Blackfoot world where I am a guest. We survey the etchings of the battle, “Retreat Up the Hill of 1866,” and I look down at my forearm, at the fossa of my elbow, tricep, armpit, and find myself a pictograph: you are carved into the walls of me and I find joy in knowing I house you too.
As we drive away from this place, we listen to Loretta Lynn’s “High on a Mountain Top.” She giddies into lyric—“God fearin’ people simple and real”—and we see Chief Mountain steadfast in the distance, Nínaiistáko, and avert our eyes so as not to stare too long. okîmaw wâciy, hill of sweetgrass, overseer of Niitsitapi, place maker of divinity, we hide our eyes so as not to bring forth the end of day, or even days, that this hill foretells. We are weary during this drive home, hair burned, skin pink, stomachs barren wells. You nap, and as we pass Oldman River, I whisper, “See, Napi has come to wave goodbye.” I thank the trout, the prairie, the sheen of rainbow scales swimming into aperture, and the gracefulness of a creator not my own. Open me to aperture, nitôtem[15], the w/hole through which light travels, because I am full of terror.
YOU GIFTED ME so much in the few short years we spent together, nitôtem, kinânâskomitin.[16] There’s something profound about time for a queer person and an Indigenous person; I think of how many “foundational moments” I missed out on, ones that are so easy for others to have, like graduations, high school romances, slow dancing. Jack Halberstam writes about the registers of queer time, and in this moment, when I am alone, without companion, I am nervous of men again—because you built for me an oasis where my body, in its broken states, its withered states, its atrophied states, could be a blessing. In this register of time outside the oasis, I am learning to be comfortable with my body again.
Here, while I write this, I find you everywhere in my small hometown of Selkirk, Manitoba: there you are eating steak in Barney Gargles, here you are keeping me warm in my childhood bedroom, and over here you are still sitting with me around our firepit. I’m remembering too much, too quickly, this river throws me beneath its current. As I write, it is raining, and I think: even the sky is crying, kîsîk has come to say kihtwâm.
The greatest gift you ever gave me was to attend nîtisân’s[17] wedding. Do you recall?
I am my sister’s maid of honour, and I am nervous, sweating in the dry August heat. I look over to you sitting by nikâwiy, nohtâwiy, ekwa nohkôm,[18] and you throw me that shy smile—and suddenly I feel prepared to steer this event. You are a beauty of a man, sitting there in your baby-blue suit jacket, white shirt, black tie, your facial hair a bonnet around your face. I think: However did kitchi manito[19] ever think me worthy of such a gift?
At the reception afterwards, I help the wedding party clean up, and when I finish, I come out to the dance floor and find you there with my younger cousins. These are shy rez girls who shiver in the city, and you bring out their confidence, their joy—you enchant it out from within them and let them spill smiles across the room. I marvel at your ability to do that for people, to find your way through the copse of people’s pain in order to dive into their happiness. We all dance to country songs, and you two-step with my mother, and I am full of glee to see how my family wraps around you, lets you in, embraces you as kin. I go up to the DJ, request “Your Song” by Elton John, and stand across the floor from you. As the piano keys tinkle, Elton’s voice comes on. Throughout my life I have listened to this song repeatedly, imagining me and another dancing to it, slow, breath tempered and hot, until at the end we kiss, unabashed, nerved, steadfast against any eyes that may look on with desire, envy, or hatred. You hear the music and look over at me, and I walk towards you. We grab hands and interlock, dancing at that wedding—and I am in tears. I have longed for this gentle embrace all my life. We sway in circles on a cleared dance floor, nearly everyone in my family watching us, because they know this is my song, and you kiss me after it is done, and we hold each other for a few seconds that feel like eternity to me—and now, when I miss you, I remember us this way, two prairie queers celebrating the generosity of an accepting land and a blanket of a family.
No man has ever given me the cornucopia of maskihkîy[20] that you have, m’boy. In that moment, time collapsed and churned into a new world: queer time intersecting with NDN time. This fusion birthed a seedling of a world that I attach to my belly button and nurture continually—and my body aligns, however briefly, as a man who belongs to his true age. You have transformed my worlds for me, and I am no longer a changeling.
I HAVE LAMINATED you into the photo album of wahkohtowin I call my life, and you’re imprinted there. There are moments I highlight, such as the photograph I have of you and nohtâwiy on either side of me, all three of us hugging tightly in the dusk of St. Andrews. I have craved this wholehearted acceptance for so long, and you brought it about; you, who love my family so much, teach me what it means to truly respect a person. Or the photo of us in a hotel in downtown Vancouver: I am wearing red plaid and smiling, braces and all, still practising how to hide my teeth, and you are in a white button-up shirt with abstract blue faces painted on it. We are hugging in the bathroom, taking a selfie, smiles so big our gums are showing. You tell me not to be ashamed of my mouth. We walk down Davie Street, through Gastown, holding hands, and never once do we care who witnesses this. We make “blanket forts” in our hotel room later, regress into boyhood, naked, cuddling, making love, admiring the vastness of one another. And there is a photograph of us walking across the Cambie Street bridge in that same city, our hands around one another’s hips. The sun is setting, a tint of blue stains the camera lens, but we know what we are looking at: pîsim is there, kissing our faces like atîm, saliva and sweetness and dog licks and all.
I THINK ABOUT the word “ex”—another word I want to remove from my lexicon because it is a signifier I cannot attribute to you, nitôtem. What a disgusting word, with its colonial sentiment of ownership, its finality; and what a heterosexual word. The word “ex” performs what it says: it cuts, disfigures, it snaps meaning off history. Instead, we will define ourselves for ourselves.
During our breakup, we live together for nearly three weeks. I refuse to let you sleep on a friend’s couch out of care for your tender back. In this time, we revel in one another’s joy, share stories we’ve never shared, released from the weight of the encompassing robe we call a relationship. Unfettered, we are free to be ourselves, to see one another in new light, to share vulnerabilities and traumas without fear of triggering or offending the other. This is something we have not had in many months, this fluidity of being. Why are we so afraid to criticize one another? Why do we shy away from pain? I tell you that criticism can be a generosity, a medicine even, and critique can be a salve that sharpens joints and repairs tears. I know this now, and I return to my teachings, return to honesty; that is the only gift I have yet to give you. And I ask: Will you humble me, m’boy?
Why do so many of my kin and relations tell me to excise you from my life, to move on, to let go? Why do we, collectively, hold on to this idea that we must release the gifts we are given by others? Of course, I can see why many people would want to exorcise past lovers from their life, especially if they have experienced domestic abuse, rape, or emotional degradation, but ours was and is a relationship of transformation. I loathe that word “ex” for you; I refuse to call you that. You tell me that what’s left is the strongest thing we’ve ever shared, that the skeleton of our friendship has gotten us through to this point in our lives, makes all of this pain worth it. My counsellor tells me to think of our breakup less as a “letting go” and more as a “moving through”: we can carry one another like beaded medallions we fashion with pride, and dance with into the day, both bound to hide through the giving of a needle’s eye.
WHEN YOU BROUGHT your keyboard into our once-home, it was so large it had to have its own room—our second bedroom. You, a musician of a man, I ask if you’ll play me a song. I realize that this is the first time I have ever asked this of you, and I am full of regret. You are wearing a colourful scarf to hold back your hair, and the sweater I sometimes like to steal and wear for comfort. You sit down on the piano stool and I tell you to wait, I want to record this moment. You ready yourself. I lean against a bookshelf and you unleash orality. The keys ring out with a beautiful melody and you begin to sing Alison Krauss’s cover of “Till I Gain Control Again,” a song you tell me you listened to repeatedly during your decision process about our relationship. I’m brought back to a moment when I was watching you on our couch. You were lounging there wearily after a day of teaching at a nearby Hutterite colony; the blinds on the window were open and bars of light dangled across your body, dust in the sun dancing across your skin and hair. In this vignette, I moved towards you, hugged you, placed your arms around my neck, cupped your legs into the crooks of my arms, and lifted you up—and you gazed up at me, lips pouted to kiss, and instead I blew into your hair, let fly the seed pods caught there, and flowered my house into a terrarium. When I return to the present, you are mid-song and I am weeping willow, face soaked in tears. Yet I am happy in this moment that you have gifted me. I intend to hold you to your word that you’ll “come home again” in some limited, tangential capacity; and I promise to stand brightly, holding you, until we become daisies of men.
WE WALK TOGETHER and you teach me how you see the land. Starlings murmur to the soft thrum of the Bow’s ripples. You teach me about them, about how they’re an introduced species, a colonizing bird. They sing whirring songs high in the trees—birds of mimicry. I imagine them re-enacting this moment we are sharing: one of us in grief, the other a doppelgänger. Later, they become a haunting presence, endlessly remixing songs of mourning, saying your name when I walk this path alone. I imagine they mock me in a Shakespearean fashion, song rushing from their gizzards, confusing me to the point where I believe I am being asked for more time, and I panic, a prisoner to my fictional vignettes, unable to differentiate between what is health and what is ruin, my heart aflutter with a murmuration. Why did you steal the egg, starling? Why crack open the shell to fling out a growing wing? What are you trying to teach me in this moment?
When I return to myself, you are beside me, the scent of wolf willow wafting around you, a sweet musk.
You stop, kneel down, beckon me to look. Yellow flowers blossom in a patch of sunlight: buffalo beans. You tell me a story about this plant, how a girl in your hometown ate the toxic pea and had to get her stomach pumped. It’s a gorgeous plant, but vicious in its delights. This is a plant you know intimately; it calls you home, and in this moment, as your story anchors you temporally and geographically, you are healing. I lean in to witness the majesty of this. I think of telling you that buffalo beans are also waypoints, indicators of rich game, of bison being ready for the hunt. But I pause to see the prairie in you, your blue eyes alight. You are living sky, and in this moment I take the time to immerse myself in the pool of your iris.
We continue along the path, looking for the refuge of a particular spot we like to visit. A new bridge has been built to cross a little stream, a bridge constructed from a pallet. You say to walk quickly over it so as to maintain the weight on the board; if I wobble, or stumble, or stop completely, gravity will crack me in half. I listen, thinking more about the foundation of me than the unsteady piece of wood underfoot. On the other side, the sun looms over us; pîsim lets us know that they will sit with us, guiding. We are in the shadow of a power line, a menacing giant, whose rickety metal bones cast bars across the grass. We are trapped within its shadow—and we both stop to look up, shield our eyes from the sun, observe the power line in its tall-tale rapture. Everything seeks to overpower us, engorge us, to take away this journey we call an afternoon stroll. We stare down the tower, two Davids eyeing behemoth, and conquer this looming presence before continuing on. We walk to the clearing in silence, save for the medicine song of a consistent wind.
We sit along the edge of the Bow, feet dangling in the cool water, and I light a cigarette. Staring solemnly, stoically, at the contours of the river, our knuckles brush, bones aching to touch. You skip rocks across the body of the water, and I slice open a cigarette to say a prayer to sipîy. A kin of mine told me to pray for water when smudging, and I practise this when I light my medicines. He says he doesn’t yet fully understand this ritual, but it means something different to everyone, and that’s the point: we all have differing relations to bodies of water and the water in our own bodies. I think, “What better way to pray for water and healing than to go to the body itself?” I wave my hands in the tide and in nêhiyâwewin I ask sipîy to cleanse you and me both, to soothe the friction burn of peeling our braid apart, and to think of us in a sun shower.
When I’m finished, I see that you are watching me. I call you over, and together we let the tobacco offering be swallowed by sipîy. You tell me that Bow sipîy goes into the Saskatchewan River, which divides into the North and South Saskatchewan Rivers and ultimately empties into the Lake Winnipeg watershed before exiting the continent at Hudson Bay. You tell me this for perspective: “When you put down your tobacco in the Bow, you send medicine home to Manitoba.” I will never forget this lesson. I am praying for the good home, a refuge where I can store that which is us.
We sit side by side, both knowing what is to come next—although one can never properly prepare for doom. I ponder this evolving inquiry: In what ways does a relationship call for a division of the self? Is it cellular division? What kind of dismantling does a relationship require—or perhaps rather than dismantling I mean augmentation, that something must be lost or forgone in order to fill in the nuclei. I rub your back, feel the tips of your vertebrae, this broken part of you I ache to care for. When I think of your spine, and the dreadful accident that happened just moments into our relationship, I nearly drown myself in empathy. M’boy with the broken back that will whittle into a bear trap over time. Did you know the word for backbone or spine in nêhiyâwewin is mâwikan? I break the word down into its elements, search for covalence, find the following: mâwiso, to pick berries; mâwihkas, to cry after him; mâwimowin, crying for help or a cry of pain. Can I offer you solace, medicinal story? Will you let me craft a basket for you, brimming with the sage I save for you? M’boy with the pîkopayiw mâwikan,[21] I eat from the bowl of your vertebrae, give offerings in their convex. I pick berries, in full-iskwêw fashion, for you to feast on. I lay otêhimin pahkitinikana[22] in the discs between your columns, plants I’ve plucked with my teeth, held in the mouth, seeds I store beneath the tongue, kin I’ve laid down tobacco for. In those moments when you cry for help, body brimming with pain, mâwihkas, I offer wihkaskwa, braids of sweetgrass, which I weave in between the structure of you from cervical to lumbar. In exchange for namâwîyak, I eat the word, chew it into cud, regurgitate victory from violence, and spit out mâmawi, or “together, in full number, as a group”—I find you again, mâmawi-tahto, nîcimos. Even in these planes of pain, I find relations and I seek to transform them for you. It is my right as an elder in the making; I owe you reciprocity.
Knowing what is to come, I offer you this word: ka pîkopayik wihkihtowin, a breakup. See how these words revolve in continuums? M’boy with the pîkopayiw mâwikan, we are stretching nêhiyâwewin to fit around us for this impending decision, sheathing ourselves in language; we become pîkopayiw, broken; but look, m’boy, look at how linguistics hold us, animate us. As I do with your back, I do with our relations: I crunch language into new meaning, find signs in the gravel of my breaking molars, transform ka pîkopayik wihkihtowin into kaskamocâyâwin wahkohtowin—or, “we build up inertia in an enclosure to enact ‘all my relations.’ ” Let’s do this together, nicîmos kwêskinaw nitôtem, wichihin nanâtawihiwêw ekwa niya asotamowin koci nâtamâkêwin kiya wakinew kîkway ka pihtokepayik miyomahcihowin, nitasotam mâmawi kimîyosinaw.[23]
You rest your head on my shoulder and I wrap my arm around you, squeeze the softness of your torso, huff in your now-wolfen scent—it is almost metallic, that pleasant smell of sodium and wet zinc. I think again about finality and choke myself. But you say you love me, and the hold breaks. I tell you that I have never loved so wildly as I have and do for you. And then you look up at me, the sun drowning in the well of your eyes. I wish I knew how to slow down time, to enjoy, cherish, revel in the acts of love we gifted one another. I tell you I don’t remember our last good kiss, and I cry thinking that our final love act was a simple peck goodbye. I ask: “Can we have one last good kiss before we end this?” And you nod, say, “Of course.” You kiss me and I grab the coattails of time to archive this. Everything pours into and out of this act we share—so much that, if I were to narrate it here, I would fail before I begin. We hold the kiss as a man fishes across the river, cyclists pass by, a train conductor wails steam into the air. Beaver, loon, duck, starling, wolf willow, buffalo bean, grass, river, rock, feather all come to witness this moment of goodbye, and I hold the kiss steady. We have never been much for public affection—when you grab my hand in a movie theatre, scared by a horror film, I sometimes flinch—and the optics of queerness often terrify me in spaces safe or otherwise. But I hold you here, lips pursed, and I am packing in as much as I can fit, willing myself into becoming stone, or a fossil, or an arrowhead, or petrified wood for you to take with you. I wish I could have gifted you more moments like this during our time together. There is still so much I want to show you—and I will, but as I said, finality is obsessed with punctuation. When we pull apart, I lick my lips and savour the rue of your saliva, a distinct flavour: smoke, peaberry, zephyr. We sit in this peaceful sliver we have created, together, holding tightly on to one another, and now I am a man simply full.
In this stasis I call wreckage, I thank you for releasing me from the throes of what we’d called a flow. And while we walk back to our temporary home, I murmur my name to a starling so that it’ll follow you, guide you, and you won’t lose me in the mourning. I prayed to Creator every day during these difficult times: I smudged until my lungs blossomed maskosîy[24] seeds; I danced across the sky, flew to mother in a dream, drank the rich, musty water of sîpiy, baptized myself with amisk[25] in her dam; I shared kinosêw[26] bones with wacask[27], ripped the wing off a damselfly and glued it on my back; I split open the abdomen of a kwêkwêkocîs[28] and drank its luciferin; I chewed the sinew of maskwa[29]. I did all this to pray and say, Please, Creator, don’t let the world take this love away, and what I found in the remains of this sweaty, bloody mess was that sâkihitin had shape-shifted, planted itself into a new body—and now we are hooved and galloping in the afterglow of a morning transformed.
In that glow I exist, me, the Joshua Tree, guiding you to the good home that exists both within and without me—and I hope you’ll take me, at least as a seedling, into the gardens of your mitêh mîkiwâm.[30] I revel in your joy, m’boy. And I carry you with me, lovesap moulded into the crevice of this splitting heartwood.
1 river
2 sun
3 duck
4 goose
5 frog
6 ravens
7 the land
8 snake
9 Cree women
10 this medicine bag
11 nêhiyaw world view of living the “good life” (as in, a good way of being with one’s self, one’s relations, and the land’s self)
12 medicine bag
13 deer
14 spirits (animate)
15 my friend
16 my friend, thank you
17 my sister’s
18 my mother, my father, and my grandmother
19 the Creator
20 medicine
21 broken back
22 strawberry (heart berry) seeds
23 My lover turned/changed into my friend, help me heal and I promise to try to help/support you to bend into good health/good feelings/the act of feeling euphoric; I promise, together, we are good (as two people).
24 grass
25 beaver
26 fish
27 muskrat
28 firefly
29 bear
30 heart home