the anachronist

The interesting thing about perspective is that it’s not something you are aware of. For instance, if you are a pretty person, with huge trusting blue eyes and an infuriating independent streak, you have no idea that the world smiles upon you because you look like a storybook angel. You realize these things, and so much more with time, but during the first burst of life on this planet, you unquestioningly absorb these positive attentions. The very same physical traits that draw favour from some, elicit suspicion in others, and expectations that in no way match reality. Later you can identify what must have been a large Santa’s duffel-sized variety pack of resentments and projections wrapped in all styles of packaging, and all because of an arrangement of facial features and evolutionary fitness related genetic traits supported by 400 years of marketing. 

  When you washed up on these shores, the only thought was that it was a safe haven from the mainstream, far flung and mysterious enough to disappear into. A place to safely discover and identify the parts that needed healing, and to do so anonymously, emerging strong, proud and capable.

 What it is, is a place like any other, containing people, like any other, bodies that house minds, arguably pre-equipped, locked and loaded with psychological traits that can be pulled in any direction, depending on the area in question’s dominant culture. 

Enough analysis.

Back to you. You don’t know who you are. You know you seek comfort, and nature’s embrace, and the salty promise of the vast expanse of Ocean, a murderous, ghost strewn canopy to which countless of travellers have pinned their humanity upon. 

And him. Another one like you, a fellow unruly progeny, another to find civilization to be anything but. He had only to open his arms to you and shelter appeared, soothing heartbeat to heartbeat, two intractable wolf puppies rolling in the sand. He showed you what was beautiful; in the beginning, you only found those out of the ordinary spots because his geographical knowledge led you there. There was the story of the tree with the woman’s name embedded in its trunk, done by the Devil’s hand or by God’s, indelibly etched in the moment she was hung as a witch in the tree by the villagers. You related to this story, your own persecution complex made real by these historical revelations. And it was such a lonely place where such things could occur, and where people take delight in the revealing of how commonplace monstrosity existed, and always in the past, as if humans before had no bearing on humans today. 

  It turns out, this story, even though it was written in a book and published, was not exactly true, not at all. The violence against a hapless accused young woman, at least in that particular incarnation, had not occurred. 

But these stories sustained your marooned sense of otherness. A lawless spit of land apart from the mainland. The men spoke as if gravel was embedded in their larynx, and with each beer raised their voices a decibel. They expounded, harassed each other as women milled on the periphery of this wordplay. You didn’t interfere, but once, stating something that seemed obvious to you, but not to that Fisherman. It was a historical occurrence that had happened over six decades ago, and clearly, not yet available up for rational debate. Overwhelmingly, people seemed to support absolutist, simplistic answers to complex historical and current affairs, and acted with fury if ever challenged. Eventually you saw your own perception shaped, you saw yourself watching shows like TMZ, you yourself thinking Canadians were soft, pampered fools with a lack of perception themselves. The back seat driver to America’s Daddy at the wheel.  

   It was a lesson in humility, keeping your mouth shut, listening, absorbing, not jumping at every ‘offensive’ term. Part of you enjoyed how easily you could move between cultures; the critical stance afforded by your otherness, a flaxen haired beast of no nation. It was hot, it was colourful, it was anything but boring. It isn’t exactly right, this separation. With time you become acquainted with human fragility, and woundingly so, were to witness select acts of cowardice. But to think you are other, you discover, is simply not true. 

  You remember the company of trees as one recalls family gatherings. There was a time when the markedly naive aspects of your own conditioning allowed for this quiet communication, a world where the people had all happened sometime in the past. You hunted evidence of graves, looked for bottles and crockery, speculated whether the mounds deep in those gnarly, twisted woods and thorny near impassable shrubs, were, in fact, ancient earthworks . The ever present wind drove you to madness, at night, sounding like people arguing. At one point you realized, it was also the married couple you rented from screaming at each other in the shed below, but one night, descending cautiously in order to distinguish wind from argument, you find there is no one there. 

  
 It is a place that is no where but in your mind. 

    
It is the past. Anonymous but personal, shared and apart. It housed a younger body and an even younger spirit. It is grounds for fertile seeds, sprouting stories like wayward oats.