We're dead somehow, but somehow we're still breathing.

I'm so tired. Exhausted, really. I haven't even been here a week and it's killing me, wearing me out. All this brown on the ground, like liver spots, like cancerous moles, and these trees, so gaunt and austere and sullen in this May-cold. I am so tired of all this deadness, this dehydration. I drink three litres of water a day and I still never really want to do anything. To be a real person. How can I be expected to live in a city that is so clearly not alive? I'm tired of all this need, my own: the shopping list on the fridge door - MARGARINE, WASHING UP POWDER, TOOTHBRUSH - I don't want these things and yet somehow they are necessary to my survival because even if I wash the dishes by hand I'll eventually run out of liquid soap and I don't care. I don't want to care. I want to crawl into your bed and stay there forever, the issue of this being physically and socially impossible notwithstanding, and need nothing. I imagine your bed to be sparse, with old sheets, the sheets of your adolescence, and mismatched. Your bed would be low to the ground - a futon maybe - with a thick comforter that we would push to the floor in the night, wanting only the warmth of each other's bodies. I would be absolved of everything unnecessary. We would meditate, become young yogis, supercede the limits of the third dimension, forget about the ugliness of this world from a corner of your charming South Calgary home where our lives could be perfect and muted and lovely in all their rawness. Because that's what's doing it. I look at the rivers and they are not rivers. They are massive infrastructure leaks that have etched their way into the crust of the earth and - damn you, Dave Bronconier! - it is somehow my responsibility to fix this, to make it better somehow, cleaner, more beautiful. And I can't do it because the sun is hot and the roads are swimming, the concrete undulating beneath my tires. I can't help but wonder if this is all my fault: if I didn't have to drive my seventeen year old sister to work in the middle of the most fucking awful rush hour traffic I've ever had to deal with in my life, if the air would be fresher and gas prices wouldn't soar to a dollar and ten cents per litre and the neighbor's yappy dog would just shut up so I wouldn't be so tempted to rush over there at eight o'clock in the morning wearing nothing but my decaying moccasins and Ezra's boxer shorts to kick it like a football into the middle of the street where, seconds later, it would be run over by the blue Astro Van that resides a few houses down the road. I wonder all this while I sit completely still through three changes of a light on Elbow drive and think how ridiculous that is. How all I am is one car in all this traffic that is trying to snake its way through the tracts of this city like tape worms, like parasites, and I am so, so tired.