Create – Spirit of the Wolf

After wandering for days with my mind, body and spirit split from each other, I decided to do what I could to bring them back together.

Sunshine could tell that I was still being affected by my mother, so he did what he could to draw me out of myself. I wasn’t speaking a lot, and I had forgotten that I was on a journey to find myself. I had stopped trying.

“Family is awful sometimes,” he said “They know how to hurt us the most. Why don’t you come and see my mom with me? It might make you feel better.”

I was a little shocked. “You still talk to your mom?”

“Yeah, of course I do,” Sunshine said.

I gestured at the concrete jungle around us, the people milling about on the streets too busy with their own tasks to acknowledge us. “But we’re here.” I said, as if that explained everything.

“Well, she let’s me live my own life, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a relationship. When I get tired of being here, I can always go see my mother for an afternoon.”

“She let’s you live like this?” I was still hurting from what had happened with my mother, still not able to see on the other side of it.

“If you mean that she lets me live my own life, but she’s still there for me, then yes. She does.” He gave me a wink and a cigarette. “Come on, I’m taking you home to my mom. You need a hug.”

“You gave me a hug this morning.”

“Not the same and you know it.”

We took the bus to go see her. It felt like an extravagance, and I wondered when it would feel normal being in one world but coming from another.

On the bus, Sunshine and I sat in silence for a while, and I enjoyed the hum of the traffic and the sound of conversation. I tried to hear the music within the noise, the beauty within the racket, trying to distract myself from the torrent of water that still threatened to take me over. My emotions were all over the place and I found myself filled with sudden bursts of anger and shame. I tried to put that emotion into writing, to let the words flow from me, but they were stuck, too concerned with the fact that they might hurt someone else as much as I was hurting to come out onto the paper.

When we got to Sunshine’s mothers place, she greeted us at the door with a bright smile. She took me into a hug right away and it warm and comfortable. “Call me Sarah, everyone does, even this one.” She jerked a thumb at Sunshine. “You’d think he would have learned some manners by now.”

“I learned my manners from you,” Sunshine said with a smirk. Turning to me, he said “Don’t believe a thing she says. She’s lying.”

“Takes one to know one, son of mine.” Sarah looked at me, really took me in. “I’m sorry, but where are my manners? Come here, I want to give you a hug.”

“You already gave me one.”

“That was hello hug. Not a hug to help you heal. Come here, I won’t bite.”

“Unless you want her to,” Rainbow said cheekily. “I’m going to make a cup of tea, Do you want one, Jamie?” Not waiting for an answer, he went into the kitchen.

Sara wrapped her arms around me and this time, the hug felt different. It felt motherly and comforting. She held me while I cried, and I let the tears fall from my eyes. Sarah must have known that they were soaking into her shirt, but she didn’t stop hugging me. She said nothing, but made gentle noises while I cried and patted me gently on the back.

When the tears stopped, Sarah stepped back from me and held me at arms length. “There now, you look a million times better. You can’t hold on to all that sadness, Jamie. It eats you up. Instead, you have to make something from all those emotions.”

I shook my head. “My words keep getting stuck.”

“And so they will after a great upset. But you know what I believe? I believe that the greatest things are created when we’re full of emotions. Keep writing. Here,” She went to the kitchen and got a journal from a drawer. “I keep them around for Sunshine. He’s always writing something. Now you can, too.”

“Thank you, Sarah.”

“Never you mind. And don’t you worry, your mother will come around to the changes that are taking place for her, even as your whole world has changed. You’ll find each other again.”

“Mom, can I put brandy in my tea?” Rainbow asked.

“No you certainly can’t.” She slapped his hand as Rainbow reached for the bottle. “And don’t you worry, Jamie. I’ll be your mom for now.”

“Hey,” Sunshine said. “You’re my mother.”

“I have plenty of love to go around, I can be mom to both of you.”

“Fine, I’ve always wanted a brother anyways.”

We all sat with our tea, the steam coming from the cups, and I finally felt that I was going to be okay. I heard the water in me begin to rain and I wondered what would grow within me. As the rain continued, I flipped my new journal open to the first page and took hold of a pen, ready for the words to come.

There was a justice on the street that hadn’t been in my life before.

In my life that had been, bullies sometimes went unchecked, those that were different were hurt and often there was no way to find retribution. The street held a kind of law and an unspoken rule of conduct. If someone was down, you held them up. It someone had been hurt by someone else, you stood up for them. I’d come to realize in a short time that you protected those that you were close to. It was just something you did without thinking about it.

Fast friendships formed and these people cemented themselves into your life and it was like you knew them right away. It was like this with Angel. I hadn’t known her at all when I had first met her, but now I searched her out whenever I was at YSB or the square. She filled my life with light, and I tended to gravitate towards it, not to drink from it but so I could bask in her glow.

It was healing to be next to her and her warmth filled over into my life. She would often draw her chalk art on the pavement of the square and put a hat out to collect change. Her art was so beautiful and lifelike that it looked like it could rise up out off the pavement and come to life. I was amazed that she could create such beautiful art with chalk on something as hard and unfriendly as the pavement. It seemed like a wonderful kind of balance whenever Angel worked the chalk into the cold pavement and brought it to life. Angel found life in the world that hadn’t been there before, and I marveled as I watched her work.

“Did you want to write something?” She asked.

I shrugged. “Well, nothing I write will be as good as your art.”

She stopped drawing and gave me a stern look. “Don’t say that. You’re a beautiful writer and your poetry is incredible. Why don’t you write a poem to go with my drawing. You can take your time with it. Here,” she handed me a piece of white chalk

I held it for a moment, watching her bring a woman to life within a forest of leaves. She looked out at me from within the window that Angel had created for her, and I could see her looking up at me. I looked into the woman’s eyes and began to write her story, scratching the white chalk onto the pavement.

I watched as both of our creations came to life together, my words taking inspiration from her. “She looks like she’s looking up at me from behind a window.” I told her. “Or like she’s outside looking within.”

Angel nodded and worked window lines in front of the chalk woman’s face. Only a few lines had been added, but it brought the chalk painting alive for me, made the final words of my poem come out and tumble from my fingers.

“There,” Angel said. We sat back and looked at our piece of art, my words a balance to her world of colours. I hadn’t noticed, but the amount of money in the hat had grown quite a bit. When the day was over, Angel handed me half.

“I can’t take that,” I said. “I wrote my poem for fun.”

“I painted my lady in the window for fun, too. We both worked hard in our own way and should both get paid for what we made. Fuck, I made more today than had it just been me painting. We helped each other.” She put the money into my hand and folded my fingers over it. “I mean, you didn’t see the people going to walk by my art, but they stopped to read your words and what you had written. We did it together, Jamie.”

We gathered up our windfall and headed towards McDonalds on Rideau Street. We could treat ourselves to something. I usually got a Fillet o’Fish and Angel would get nuggets or a Big Mac. We could eat in the restaurant and be near a washroom, pretend that we were normal, just for a moment.

I remember getting our food and thinking about the poem I had written. Eventually, both the drawing and my poem would be gone, never to exist again. It’s not like Angel and I could take a copy of her drawing, and I hadn’t thought to write down a copy of the words I had left behind.

I was okay with that.

It was our give to those that had given us the money we had in our pockets. The art and the words belonged to them, and we had left our magic in the streets. I wondered if others would be guided by the flash of the woman’s blue eyes or the curve of the vowels I had penned.

In that moment, I thought of the chalk dust we had marked the pavement with like stars, waiting to lead others to where they would find their magic.

Tag: Create

Chapter Fourteen – Temperance

Chapter Eleven – Justice