Auld Lang Syne

 ” Should old acquaintance be forgot 

And never brought to mind?”

– Robert Burns, 1788

When he was born, the youngest of seven, they had to change all his blood—right through the top of his head. “I was Rh-negative,” his mother, my godmother, explains to those who hear the story. Now, I think, he must be invulnerable: riding the crest of 30, a burly construction-worker type, renovating his own home, third child on the way, staunchly supportive partner at his side. It is his partner who writes to me at Christmas each year, she who will thank me for the money I send when their baby is born. It’s a cheap ploy on my part—I’ll pay anything to stay, however tangentially, on the periphery of his life. He was not the first of my loves of the same name, nor (by a long shot) the last; but he is the one who has haunted my dreams of late, so I will remember him here, and try to show him to you. 

 When I knew him best, he was a gawky fourteen-year-old; I still have a picture of him at this age, but I do not need to open the album to describe it. A sheepish grin that is also the beginnings of a scowl—for he wants to woo you and despise you at the same time—is belied by brown eyes whose merriment is contagious. “Let’s play!” such eyes invite you, and you find yourself agreeing long before you know the nature of the game. His chestnut mane is dishevelled—probably unwashed—and a few blemishes bear witness to the hormones that will corrupt and change him. His baby blue t-shirt slopes onto shoulders whose power is unrealized—no one will lean on those shoulders for a few long years yet. I knew this boy; I know him still, though he no longer exists in that incarnation. I have not seen him in years, yet he lives in my dreams, a solid presence as real as the warmth of his arms and lips. 

I know now—and indeed I knew then—the startling and strangely humbling truth: he worshipped me. 

Of course, it was a different incarnation of myself that he knew and loved. He would not see—I do not think I can see—that sweet-sixteen girl in the lusty and mournful behemoth who sits typing at this screen. Oh God, to think he wrote a seven-page treatise of his desire for me, and I burnt it in the fireplace an hour after receiving it! And what of innumerable other love notes, scorned by me, now lost forever in the oblivion of waste that shrouds our gentle planet? Somewhere in some garbage dump in rural Ontario, those discarded pages have mouldered into the dirt, along with half-eaten hotdogs and used maxi-pads. “I love you,” said those secret notes, all the more so (secret and lovely) because they were not in English but in some Tolkein-script of Dwarvish or Elvish; “I’m glad you came to live with us.” I would sell my soul for those words now, have sold my soul in a vain attempt to recapture what they offered me once. If you have experienced such a thing yourself, you will know whereof I speak. 

But then, oh then, I had no sense of it—or maybe it was just there at the periphery of my benighted vision. Mornings we walked to school together, the sun shining, blossoms opening on the trees that sheltered the solid, square brick house where we lived in the bosom of what was then our family. “Shut up, birds,” he would inevitably say in response to the cheerful sounds that heralded our daily departure from home. Yet in his mockery of them his voice was sweeter and lighter than any birdsong. 

“Oh, you,” I would rejoin, if I bothered to say anything at all. 

Once at school—a few grades apart a lifetime—we went our separate ways: he to be compared unfavourably to his brilliant (intellectual, artistic, athletic, musical) older siblings, I to

be alternately pitied and admired as the smart little “orphan” that the guidance counsellor’s family had taken in. If we saw each other in the halls, he would give me some secret signal to be acknowledged or ignored at my whim. I read and studied works of heart-wrenching passion, jealousy, ambition and betrayal—Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet—and never once thought to connect them to my own past, present, or future (I cannot help but do so now). 

Summers we’d swim at the quarry, tumbling into the car with Muti (the German word for Mommy, which we both used to call her) for a dusty ten-minute ride to paradise. In the flurry of preparation before setting off on these adventures from home, breaking the languid apathy of the day, he and I would sometimes meet each other on the stairs. It happened countless times, but I have it in my mind as one sepia-toned memory, permeated by the rich colour of his eyes and summer-skin and hair. The dark stained wood of the staircase is brown, the rough-worn carpet (trod untold times by the denizens and guests of this rambunctious family home) is brown, the wallpaper is a muted, maybe even dingy, shade of brown, and even I am brown, despite my blond hair, encased in Muti’s brown bathing suit and cover-up wrap-around dress bedecked with tiny brown flowers—I can see them still, as I can see myself, a glimpse in the hallway mirror: young, unscared, unscarred. Well. Redeemed by the love of this family who took me in, elevated by the crush of my secret admirer. 

“I know, I know,” he would whisper on the stairs as he leered at me, “don’t get my hopes up.” 

“Not to mention,” I replied. 

It was our little joke. 

Now I see how little it all had to do with what we thought it did: sex. That was so far in the future for both of us then, and something we were never to experience together. What we had instead was much more sacred, and my denial of it was only part of its cachet. Watching TV in his parents’ room, on a bed made holy by parental love, he once kissed each of my toes in turn—I don’t think he even took off my sock. How can I describe the intimacy of such a moment? I can only attest to the perfect, unprecedented certainty of being loved. Another time, as I sat on that bed with Muti, she said, “I don’t know what you said to him today, but he’s very, very happy.” What had I said? I knew no more then than I do now—some passing remark, to which he attributed happy significance. What bliss was this? None that I acknowledged at the time, none that I perceived except as one perceives knocking on a distant door, ringing of a distant church-bell, splash of a languid brown catfish who comes up from the mud to break the water’s surface only once every seven years. 

Sitting here by the window in rainy Vancouver, I hear that splash, I am awoken by that bell, I get up to answer that door as I begin to pick out my memories one by one, to exercise—not to exorcise—some part of my heart that is dormant even during a seven-mile run through the grey city streets. What route will take me back to the small-town streets of yore, for auld lang syne? How can I make you see it? 

If you’ve never spent a summer in Ontario, you can’t imagine the oppressiveness of a hot day in town, the bricks and asphalt baking in the tyrant sun. On your way out of town, on a gravel road, it’s worse: you feel the dust rise up through the floor of a rust-worn vehicle, as your lungs protest and your eyes narrow to squinting slits. Then the car, expertly manoeuvred by Muti, turns a sudden corner and you’re there: beyond the stark rock cut, there’s a crystal-clear

hole in the landscape, filled with some magic elixir it seems wrong to call water. There’s a world under there, at once stranger and more mundane than the ones Tolkein envisioned—moss and stones and old tires and shoes, maybe some hidden treasure or a water-creature in the depths—and a vast expanse of surface, a mirror of the azure summer sky. If you break this mirror—and I did—by diving into it, it’s seven years’ good luck: seven years of childhood, no hurry, lots of time before you have to go. 

Ah, I remember this feeling: “not today, not tomorrow.” I relived it every weekend, during my first few years of university: coming home to Muti’s house on a Friday night, and that precious, unassailable last thought before dropping off to sleep. I’m here, right now. I don’t have to go back tomorrow. Every weekend, I watched the same old movie, taped from late night TV, The Court Jester, starring Danny Kaye and Angela Lansbury. An elaborate, musical parody of Robin Hood and other such legends, it never failed to amuse and comfort me. No matter how daunting my courses at Queen’s, no matter how strange the antics of my so-called parents (estranged from each other and from me), I survived each school week away from my spiritual home, knowing it was always there to return to. It still serves as a secret code in my emails to Muti. Subject lines: “The vessel with the pestle has the potion that is poison,” “The chalice from the palace has the brew that is true.” 

Back then, back there, I took it for granted of course, as I took him for granted: and the wages of this sin are death. I lost that world, my Hobbit-hole of comfort and delight, and I lost my admirer while I was still in it. He gave me a ring once, a plastic near-circlet whose fellows held together a bound document belonging to his father. “I dee endoh,” he announced, an 

allusion to Best Friends, a movie in which Burt Reynolds and Goldie Hawn star as a couple who

almost ruin their friendship by getting married. In the wedding scene, as you may know, the strange accent of the man performing the ceremony makes it impossible for Burt and Goldie to understand him, so they simply repeat what they think he is saying, instead of the right words, “I thee endow.” I kept that ring for years in a little brown box; I still have the box, but the ring is gone, lost or discarded on the long journey from there to here. 

So you see I have only myself, and time, to blame for my loss. Such carelessness is tolerated neither by objects nor people. As for the latter, they may turn against you after too much neglect, as I should well know from my own abandonment of my parents. I cannot tell you when or how love turned to hate, or even what those words mean, but I can furnish evidence of such a change in him. 

First, the trust exercise. I had learned it in Drama class: fall backwards and your partner will catch you. “Let’s do it,” he said, and let me fall. This was my first clue that something had shifted in him, that I had taken him for granted once too often. I was angry, then, as one becomes when something one has relied upon (unearned as it may be) is taken away. Later that summer, after a sun-drenched day at the beach, he fainted in the living room, and I didn’t catch him, thinking it was all a game. 

“Fool me once,” I thought, as I saw him crashing to the floor. 

Taking him to the hospital for stitches, I sat beside Muti, saw him through her eyes as the most-beloved, the last child she could have. Something shifted in me, and I knew I would do anything for him. But of course it was too late. He went out of his way to alternately ignore and insult me thereafter, and I assumed (which seems so foolish to me now) that he no longer cared for me. Thus was ignited a flame, an angry passion re-ignited each time he spurned me. 

“Are you pregnant?” he would ask me, in the same kitchen where his arms had once enfolded me in a shining circle. From his sarcastic tone I understood that I looked fat (!) and became certain that I was no longer pretty enough for him. 

“If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, make an ugly woman your wife,” he chanted. But I knew he did not believe this, and would never choose someone like me, ugly as I now began to see myself, even for the promised prize of happiness. He did not want to LIVE beyond the age of sixteen (translation: I was waaaay over the hill); he wanted to climb mountains. I now courted his good will and affection as I had never done before, buying him climbing books and equipment with my babysitting money; he steadfastly withheld his approbation as if he knew (now I think, of course he knew) this would be the best way to sustain my devotion. 

To this he added the seal of a kiss, given to me as I sat in his lap, late at night when everyone else was safe in bed; we were watching King Kong, the late movie. A world opened up to me in that kiss—there is perhaps one such kiss in a lifetime. The next day, under the bridge we had crossed so many times en route to the quarry, I pledged my love to him eternally and unconditionally. 

“That is not what I meant at all,” he said. “I was just testing you.” 

Whatever test that was, I knew then as I know now that I had failed it, that I would keep failing it in a series of botched departures from the perfect love one finds only in childhood. What kind of man was this, whose childhood self could tug me back to a life that was and is the stuff of dreams? As a grey January seeps through my childless dowager’s veins, I dream of our first Christmas Day together, when we were sent out to buy milk at the Seven-Eleven: he handcuffed me to a signpost in the middle of the town square, and reluctantly left me there for an hour, a girl in a brown coat amidst the brown brick buildings of our small-town downtown, having gone home to find the keys. 

I feel those cuffs still, a talisman from the cage of love, to which the door is always open. I know him now in dreams as a lord of bygone rings, a keeper of sacred truths and words. Parental, paternal, prenatal: these anagrams of desire.