youth

Things Left Unsaid

Posted on by Nokyoung Xayasane

Things Left Unsaid
Nokyoung Xayasane

If she were honest with herself, it hadn’t turned out how she hoped it would. Her expectations had gotten the better of her. 

Sam stood leaning against the kitchen counter. She had thrown the pregnancy test into the trash before Eric got home from class. There had been a part of her that had hoped the test would be positive and another part of her, a larger more looming part, that prayed the opposite. She was no longer a religious person but praying seemed to be the best route. Please, she had prayed. I’m not ready. Maybe someday but not today.

If the test had been positive she knows her mom would be happy. Mai would be a grandmother like many of her friends whose kids hadn’t kept going on and on with more and more schooling. What’s with all the schooling, she’d say. What is it you’re learning exactly? 

The owl eyes of her teapot and cups stared back at her. The sink was empty of dishes but she had to get used to not having a dishwasher. Washing the dishes was like taking a shower—her thoughts wandered and vaulted here and there as the soap suds dispersed. Shower thoughts. Dishwashing thoughts. 

“Everything good?” Eric asked her while he held the refrigerator door open, scanning the contents for an after-class snack. Sam was still slightly amazed and annoyed at how quickly Eric had lost weight ever since he decided to cut out beer and processed meat from his diet. He shed the pounds like it was nothing. A preening heron on the edge of the water, regal and distant. 

He had come from a divorced home where his mom, an eccentric novelist, filled his plates with her latest concoctions of gluten-free, cauliflower-crust pizzas and meatless nuggets. He seemed to have gained weight in an act of rebellion. But now that he wasn’t under her iron apron, rebelling through food wasn’t as high a priority. 

Eric had lived with his mom and his aunt Celeste, a professional volunteer. She hadn’t been paid for any of her work, but she loved giving of her time as a museum guide or food tour guide. She also volunteered at the homeless shelter. Sam refrained from correcting her and saying “unhoused.” It was around the time of Eleanor’s first swipe at a novel that she adopted a cat and named him Kevin. Subsequently, John, Alfred, and Pam followed. Sam found the human names endearing, but still got confused when Eleanor would talk about Pam’s latest poop or Kevin’s finicky eating habits. They were Eric’s siblings. Round, rotund, purring.

“Yeah, I’m good. How was class?”

“Like every other day. I hardly talk to anyone. It feels like I only use my voice when I get home.”

The thing that had drawn Sam to Eric was their conversations. He would play devil’s advocate and it would get her all worked up. How could he defend bestiality? Easily. He spoke in a reasonable tone, hardly ever raised his voice, and listened, really listened. He never reacted. It was a dance, a collaboration of thoughts and ideas. She fell in love, not with his ideas, but how he presented them. She could put their conversations on mute and just watch his hands and face, extrapolating, reaching, and then finding solid ground. To not be able to do that everyday must really bother him.

“You haven’t made any friends?”

“No, not really.”

Eric was the kind of person who made his friends in grade school and just stuck with those same people. Ever since they had moved to Toronto, he would visit them as often as he could over the weekends. It was as if his real life were back with them and this life with her was a interlude until he could be with them again.

“Speaking of chatting: I had coffee with Padma today.”

“Oh, nice. How’s she doing?”

“She’s good. She talks a mile a minute. She seems like she has all these thoughts rolling around in her head and she needs to get them out as soon as possible. I find her kind of intimidating. I feel like I need to take a nap to recover.”

Eric smiled. 

Padma lived close to them on St Clair and Bathurst. Eric and Sam had chosen St Clair and Dufferin because his friend from Kitchener had moved to Toronto before them and lived close by. His friends were still a signpost for him even in apartment hunting. Padma was also from Kitchener, a university friend of Sam’s. Someone highly intelligent and heavily involved in politics and the social sphere. If there was a left-leaning protest, Padma was there. Sam found her passion energizing and then eventually exhausting. Sam preferred quiet activities like poetry readings and conversations in dimly lit rooms. She was a writer herself. A poet. Not something most people would understand given all the science courses she had taken throughout her schooling. But words drew her in. If there was a stanza that rang true and painful, she was there. It was a door opening. She held her breath and walked through.

“I was wondering. You wouldn’t mind if I had a chat with her, would you?”

Eric had been thinking lately about going to law school even though he was currently enrolled in lab tech courses at York University. That was also a reason why they lived at Dufferin and St Clair. 

“No, of course not. I think she’ll be able to answer a lot of your questions. Give you a better idea of what being a lawyer’s actually like.”

Padma’s career as a criminal defense lawyer kept her busy. In all seriousness, Sam couldn’t see Eric as a lawyer. He was more of a collaborator, artistic. From what Padma had said about her work, it seemed like it was every lawyer for themselves.

“Yeah, I think so, too.” He paused. “You sure you’re okay?”

Sam smiled. “Yeah, just tired.”

“Right. You need a nap to recover.”

“The introvert’s life.”

For some reason, years later Sam remembers how she talked about Padma that day. She had said Padma had intimidated her. In her eyes, it made her sound weak and fragile. In a position of disadvantage, in a state of admiration, almost. She wonders how Eric remembers it. Perhaps he took note of it silently, unconsciously. Perhaps it allowed them to stand beside each other and be compared without his knowledge or theirs.

There was a time, Sam thinks, when they were happy. It wasn’t as if they were unhappy—just kind of settled, in a certain routine. Eric got bored easily which may explain why they had moved three times in the last three years, almost every year, and for some reason, usually during the winter months, the worst time to move. But he always had help from his friends and bandmates. Being in a band was as if you belonged to a club whose members belonged to a larger club of other musicians. It was kind of like the nod that bikers give each other as they ride by or runners who raise their hand in greeting to another runner in passing.

“I don’t really think about it,” Eric said. Sam tries to remember what she had asked him. It was something along the lines of, “Do you ever think about tomorrow?” Or something less flowery and more pragmatic. 

“I don’t really think about it.”

“Maybe that’s the problem.” She had said this softly and in a non-accusing tone. She had never brought up the pregnancy test to him. Eric, who never really thought about tomorrow. Except when it came to potentially becoming a lawyer? Perhaps that was only a glitch that can be seen from a distance when time has passed. A character oversight that only makes sense later on.

Eric had been the first to move out. He had found a place quickly and with two friends she had never heard of before. She was staying until the end of their lease. Two weeks in the empty apartment and then she was moving uptown to Yonge and Eglinton with her university friend Candace.

But until he had found a place, they lived together for two weeks after deciding to end it. Sam was in a state of mourning and they were both in denial. They acted as if nothing had happened. They were bidding their time and wanted to staunch the wound before it bled out. And the best way to do that was to pretend like they were still together. At first they had tried not touching each other, even in passing between the kitchen and living room, but that seemed strange. They made a decision to act normal, whatever that meant. It was a form of self-preservation. A form of self-inflicted insanity. 

They went to the movies together. It was an outdoor film festival at Christie Pits. Sam looked at the screen. Moving figures and ricocheting sounds bouncing off the nearby houses and buildings. A dark world lit up by one small screen. Lives were unfolding with cinematic precision, one cut moving on to the next, self-assured and self-propelling. The score rising and falling, now hushed, barely a whisper, hardly a sound. She looked around her and saw the blue light of the film reflecting off people’s faces. Eric looked up and away, mesmerized. She reached her hand out and grabbed onto nothing, just empty air.

Late Afternoons on Air

Posted on by Nokyoung Xayasane

Late Afternoons on Air
Nokyoung Xayasane

Here she was, waiting for him. She tried to see herself as others would. A woman, sitting at the bar, nursing a mocktail enhanced by an egg-white substitute. The bartender said it was made of peas, a vegan alternative. The vegan part didn’t do that much for her but she wanted to taste something different, a different texture, whilst drinking her slightly less expensive mocktail—some type of texture or flavour, something, anything.

She had arrived an hour late because of transit and yet he still wasn’t here yet. Traffic, he had said in his text. It made her feel better that she hadn’t been on time, waiting here for him, the minutes ticking away until an hour had passed by. She too was living her own life, busy enough and not-well-planned enough, to be a full hour late, and yet he had surpassed her here, still. 

It was a trait he had. Did he swoop in and out? Or was that how she saw him? What are our ideas of people but mere fabrications, small slivers of who they really are, snapshots in time, solidified in glass, unchanging, unwavering even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

She sipped on her vegan mocktail and imagined sipping on warm tea brewed in his mom’s kitchen, from his mom’s teapot.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “I can’t find the teapot.”

“Hmmm,” she said. “If I were a teapot where would I be?”

“It’s not in the kitchen,” he said.

She thought for a moment. And then made her way to his mom’s bedroom. She grabbed the teapot from her bedside table. “Found it!”

She smiled. She had been so young. And now, a middle-aged woman with fleeting, moored memories from 16 years ago. Tea was the precursor before their podcast recording sessions. Edwin had come up with it for their university’s literary magazine. Co-hosts before everyone and their cousin had a podcast. At the time, it was new to her, almost nerdy, an old world, voices drifting on the air, unattached to bodies, ethereal. Little did she know, ephemeral would’ve been a better way to describe it. Short-lived, fleeting. But never gone.

They brewed the tea and brought it downstairs to the basement, into a room with a glassed door. His podcast station. She had never really participated in collaborative creative projects before. She was a poet who wrote solely on her own, for herself. Having someone read or hear her work seemed unimaginable, yet here she was, in their first podcast session, about to record her own voice. 

She smiles now at the way he helped her feel at ease like a good director would—just natural conversation to take her mind off the recording. You felt at ease in his presence, safe. He was the teacher at school who believed in you despite what everyone else thought. He saw you.

One time he had said she was rare.

“If there was a graph that represented people,” he said. “There would be a cluster here in the lower left half. That’s everyone. And one lone dot in the upper right. All by itself. That’s you.”

She had scrunched up her face, unable to believe but wanting to, wanting to believe.

“An outlier,” he said. “You’re an outlier.”

Someone calling her rare. Well, you could say that was the beginning, and she hadn’t even known. Like she said, she was young, she hardly knew anything about life.

After the recording session, they went into the basement living space, past his bedroom. Light from the late afternoon filled the room, long bands of orange lasering their way to the brown couch. She doesn’t remember why or how but he sat on the couch and she on the floor, probably she felt comfortable there. And she rested her head on her arms which lay across the couch. She sat almost at his feet. The imagery. She chuckles now. What did they talk about? It seemed—everything. He was someone who was curious about everything, but mostly the arts and philosophy. An academic, really. Who wanted to remain in the ivory tower. Although this would change soon enough. 

He would record his session later, and after their tea break, they would record the intro and outro. Later on, she would listen to that first podcast, over and over again. Her voice heavy with emotion as she read her poem. Their intro and outro, alive, like live wire. She felt like she needed to walk around her neighbourhood after that first listen, her voice on air, his voice on air, late afternoons on air. 

Whatever happened to them afterwards, they existed there, frozen in time, floating on sound, wavelengths encased in time, unchanging, the beginning of something. They were on the verge of something. What it was she couldn’t name. But she felt it. 

The door to the bar opened. The light of the late afternoon streamed in, bands of light across the mahogany of the bar.

He stepped in and scanned the room for her. An hour late. He raised his arms into the air, wingspan like a great bird, the initial movements before a great embrace—a gesture she loved. His smile, open mouthed and unabashed. She basked in his warm glow. She was sitting at his feet in his mom’s basement. “Something’s never change,” she whispered.

“What?” he asked, his arms still outstretched.

She walked towards him and entered his embrace, engulfed in his embrace. “Nothing,” she said.

if you were a little bit older

Posted on by Nokyoung Xayasane

middle_distance

if you were a little bit older
Nokyoung Xayasane

They say you can’t have it all.
Who are these people?
What are their credentials?

I would like to have sex
with you
and still talk to you
afterwards.

I would like to stay up
late one night
just talking to you
about the nature of evil
and of goodness.
The next day
is a rainy Sunday morning.
I would like to order two pizzas
with your normal quirky toppings.
You like to combine toppings
that make no sense.
We usually get six sodas
with this particular deal.
The sodas stay in the fridge
for months
because we don’t drink pop.

I would like to watch Netflix with you
and fall asleep on our couch
with our orange cat between us.
We’ll get very indignant or upset
about the state of American schools,
the commericialism of the world,
or whatever topic
in whichever documentary
we happen upon
that afternoon.
We’ll worry about it for
ten to fifteen minutes afterwards,
the sting of humanity still strong and raw.
But then you suggest we go out for pho
or maybe sushi, all-you-can-eat, of course.
You know I only like to leave the house
for food.
We go out to eat
and I take photos of the food,
overhead shots of course
like a pro food blogger.
I tell you to ‘act natural’
and sometimes your hands are
in the photos.

That’s all I have now
photos of disembodied hands
in sepia-toned images.
It proves it was real,
some part of it,
the Instagram-filtered part
where everything is beautiful
and clear and perfectly positioned,
perfectly experienced.

I put those pictures in a drawer
in my mind, of course,
no one prints photos anymore,
except for that one time
I wanted to be old-timey
and I printed 100 photos
because I wanted to know it was real.
That we were real.

Now those photos are all I have.
They show
what we were and what we could’ve been
if you were a little bit older
and I was a little bit wiser.

I would like to enter a time machine
and remember your pretty face
and electric soul, as Lana Del Rey would say.
Those late summer afternoons
when I turned to you and you turned to me
and we fell asleep
on our couch
in our tiny apartment.

Yes, I think I would like
to have it all,
in my opinion.

and we will know no pain

Posted on by Nokyoung Xayasane

evening_train

you and I
Nokyoung Xayasane

If I had been
25
I would’ve fallen
in love
with you
straight away.

The wrecked boy
with a
tender heart.
He is lost
in this
big ole world.
His bark is
worse
than his
bite, as they say.

And the girl,
she was
always in love.
She was
always in love
with love.

She looked for love
in libraries
and in bookstores.
She lies in the grass
in the park,
a little bit
drunk.
Her skin eats
up the sun
and the air.

She tries to recall
a time
when she wasn’t always
saying goodbye
to the things and
to the people
she loved.
But she can’t
remember that time,
not at all.

It was a story
someone told her once
from long ago.
That love mattered.
Love lasted.
People never changed,
people never disappointed.
Those are fairy tales
she stopped believing
when she turned
6
years old.

So, you see,
it was inevitable
her
and
him,
you
and I.

Let’s sit on
a patio like
it’s the
first time and
the very last time.
Come with me, he’ll say.
And she will say,
Okay,
I will follow you.

Where should
we go, I wonder.
Anywhere, you say.
Everywhere, I say.
Okay, take my hand,
and I’ll take yours.
We’ll be fine,
just fine.

We’ll be like
the city lights,
bright and sleepless.
We’ll be like
the groggy
summer days,
a cold beer
in the park.
I’ll meet you
after your shift
as evening sky
seeps into morning,
and the drunks
make their way
home, battle worn
and weary.

We’ll walk the streets,
ragged and broken
and
young and reckless.
I’ll bend over
to tie my laces
and you’ll look
at the curve of
my body.
You’ll brush your
callused hands
along my face
and we will know
no pain.

We’ll be
beautiful
together
you
and I.
Just you wait
and see.

The morning sky
will open up
at last,
bright and clear
and endless
and true.
We’ll forget
that we were
ever lost
and that we
were ever broken.
Our laughter will
ring out in the sun.
I will hold your hand
in mine
and we will know
no pain.

but we kept dancing anyways

Posted on by Nokyoung Xayasane

I_am_not_beautiful

This will always last for us,
Nokyoung Xayasane

So much
was happening.
Did we even know?
We did.
But we kept dancing
anyways.
We just kept
dancing anyways.

And I thought,
we will never be
this young
and this beautiful
and this free
again.

So we just kept
dancing.
We just kept
dancing
anyways.

This will
always last for us,
I said
but
I didn’t believe it.

Nothing lasts.

So I just kept
dancing.
I just kept
dancing
anyways.

The music,
it stopped.
I ran
to catch
the 1:30 train,
and I thought,
This will
always last for us,
but
I didn’t believe it.

Nothing lasts.

So I just kept
dancing.
I just kept
dancing
anyways.

And I remembered
you were dancing
you were dancing, too.

You too
were
courageous.

And we kept
dancing.
We just kept
dancing anyways.

We shone just as we were

Posted on by Nokyoung Xayasane

Indio, California (19 April 2012)

Indio, California (19 April 2012)

California
Nokyoung Xayasane

Do you remember
our car ride
through California?
The sun and wind,
those ten days.
All of it.

No road
could hold us.
I didn’t care
for roadmaps,
and neither
did you.
We existed
in this
closed box,
headed on
a journey
of no return.
The wind
and air
and sky
all around us.

We shone
just as we were,
didn’t we?
You saw me
just as I was.
I loved you,
boy,
I loved you,
didn’t I?

We drove along
the streets
of Los Angeles
in our rented car.
Remember,
I didn’t want
a roadmap
and you never
cared for them.
We rented a hotel room
in West Hollywood.
The room was lit
by a single
bare bulb,
the sheets
were thin
and itched,
the carpet
was threadbare
and worn.
We threw
the sheets up,
and hurried
beneath them.
We were
never so close.

At night,
we met a man at a bar
who told us
we must go
to Venice beach.
We did.
We shared fish tacos
on the boardwalk.
We ran
along the beach,
the seagulls
glittering in the sky,
the sand endless,
our laughter
effortless and wide and clear.
We shone
just as we were.

Later,
the deserts of Indio
opened up for us.
You in your rolled up jeans,
me alongside
in high-waisted shorts
and an oversized hat.
There were
endless throngs
of beautiful people
in sunglasses,
white fringe,
expounding on cleanses,
contemplating yoga stances,
bare-breasted women
and musicians
tongue kissing on stage.

The music
began,
the stages
flooded
with lights.
You looked at me
and I felt
the world
beginning
and beginning
again and again.

The sun scorched our
bodies brown,
we glistened
with the midday
heat,
the music
never ends.
It never stops.
We danced
and danced
and danced.
We smoked
with strangers,
we laughed
until we cried,
we kissed
until we were sore.

When night fell
our second wind rose.
I heard
the music
pick up again.
I was
who I always
wanted to be,
there with you.
You were rain
drenching
the cracked desert
earth.
We were
who we
always
hoped to be.

I love you,
I said.
I’m glad you exist,
you said.
And the world
kept beginning.

(1 March 2016)

whatever it is we remember, we’ll remember this

Posted on by Nokyoung Xayasane

The last lights of summer (Little Italy, Toronto, August, 2015)

The last lights of summer
(Little Italy, Toronto, August, 2015)

whatever it is we remember, we’ll remember this
Nokyoung Xayasane

whatever it is we remember
we’ll remember this
that once we were happy
and we held on to some sort of belief
in something beyond our bedroom walls
we once strained against the glass
that looked out onto the world
and we hoped for magical nights
when the air was warm but the wind was cool
when we gathered with friends underneath Christmas lights
that sparkled
even though it wasn’t Christmas

whatever it is we remember
we’ll remember a time
when we were young and beautiful
the world bowed to us
everything was possible, attainable
everything could be measured by the span of our hands
we held the world in our palms and
swung high into the air

the stars pushed out above
the songs from our childhood
our singing was no longer a form of helplessness
we remembered that once we knew nothing
and we still don’t
at least, at least
we are no longer afraid
at least we are full of wonder still
and the lights that glittered on that patio
that night
in that city we called home

we remember we loved and were loved
and all of it meant something
if only for a little while
if only for a brief moment
and we’ll remember nights
when time was within our grasp
but we lost it all the same
we spoke in fake British accents
in 24-hour phở restaurants
we held on to some kind of freedom
that was fleeting but we held on nonetheless

what we know now is this:
we’ll always be okay
we are sometimes surprised when
we hear our voices lifted above the tumult of noises
the traffic careening down streets that led to places
we thought we would never see
but stepping out into the street the wind lifts
our hair sticks to our lips
our bodies are nothing more than
air and dust and bone and breath

what we are we know
this will always last for us
what we know is time will stand still for us
but we wander nonetheless
we wander nonetheless

(August 2015)