openlessness

i kind of see living in edmonton as a commuter sleeping on the bus. i thought about this while crossing the river on my daily commute to the university. the girl sitting next to me was lulling in and out of sleep and i was convinced i would have to wake her up by the time we got to campus. however, she had raised her head before we approached with enough time to put on her gloves, hood, and mentally prepare for the cold.

we edmontonians constantly hope to find something uniquely characteristic about the city--something to be proud of other than our festivals and secret hot summers. we travel through the city attempting to slip into a blissfully complete experience of being within the city like within a dream. we want to have a complete story, a certain narrative without any confusion. we are so afraid, so very afraid, of recognizing the city as it is, accepting it as imperfect, and accepting our own confusion about it. perhaps it is that confusion we should embrace. maybe our inability to define it characterizes edmonton. we don't fully engage with the city because we can keep it at a distance in hopes of fixing it or leaving it. embracing it would mean we would be giving into it as it is. (maybe it's more of a broken and imperfect marriage rather than a bus drive.)

just the way the sleepy commuter never truly falls asleep, snoozing with some part of them resisting the dream, we never embrace edmonton because we are not strong enough to be vulnerable to the sentimentality of imperfection. our search to define it is fruitless, it just is.

*

a bit of a different vibe than usual. i also wanted to discuss how all those stories about edmonton seem like they have something about the dead, ghosts, haunts, etc. i am one of those superstitious atheistic weirdos who thinks you can feel ghosts of the dead in cities the same way you breathe polluted air. i noticed this in dieppe, france and vukovar, croatia. i visited these cities with very little background knowledge about them and before my parents told me about their histories i noticed some kind of hesitation, timelessness, paranoia in the cities. physical memories. invisible landmarks. a jelly-like silence--a silence so thick you can feel it. i attribute this to the restless dead which will eventually dissolve with people's forgotten memories. sure there are memorials or shelled out buildings but it radiates out so that you feel it before you see it. maybe off-topic though?