just a little story

The wind was chilled and to my back as i walked down the street. you could smell the freshness of a new fallen rain in the air. my thoughts wieghed heavy on my shoulders, tonight would be a good night to sort them out. i feel into a queer silence as i walked the dark streets and narrow allys of my new found "home". the nightcrawlers coming out of the wood work asking me if i could spare change or wanted to get high. this was the place i moved to? this is the place that was supposed to be better then home? these thoughts running rampant in my head.

I lived most of my childhood in a small town. Perth, Ontario. birthplace and if i get my way, final resting place. my mother decided at the tender age of ten that we needed to move. so we sold most of our most prized possesions and picked up. we came to land on Vancouver Island. a nice place but not what i would call home, at least not yet. i spent the majority of my teen years being silent and un noticed in jr. high and high school. don't get me wrong i had my friends, but we were a tight nit group of people. After a few years some of us drifted away. moved onto new places and new people. it was a hard time for me.

i was one of those to move. after doing a few things i shouldn't have done in my town, i left. didn't think of who i was leaving behind, just like before when we moved across cananda, i picked up my things and left. i went to edmonton. not much of a place, dirty streets and restless cowboys surrounded me everywhere i went. so i moved once more to calgary, here i had at least one friend, my best friend. Jason let me stay with him for awhile and we eventually moved into our own place. there we got into the drinking heavily. the nights passed by us as we wallowed them away in drunken stupor after drunken stupor. numerous people just drifting in and out of our lives and home. we would rock out to heavy metal and thrash the place, wake up the next day and clean. just to do it again. life was simple.... it seemed.

jason and i got into an arguement about this thing or that, i'm not really sure anymore. i decided it was time for one of us to leave and nominated myself. so once again i picked my things up and left. i said my good byes this time, learning for past expierences that you should always do this, and walked out of calgary lifestyle. fate as it would seem call my brother, Johnathan, to my side this time. offering a place to stay and a job as soon as i get there, i pointed my compas north and retreated to family i was not sure i was familliar with anymore. turns out i was right.

things went well in grande prairie for a while. i got my job working at mac dicks for 9 bucks an hour. johnny was getting me heavy into pot smoking, so i would spend most of my time, not in a drunken stupor but stoned out of my gore. the time passed slowly then. things were more adept. i learned to live with my poisons. even if one of them is me. i met a few people through work that seemed alright. more outside of work that seemed even better. but life would take me somewhere soon that i wasn't prepared to go.

i was having troubles dealing with a few things in my life at this point. break ups, missing old friends and my general depressions thats been kicking around since i was sixteen. i lived in a haze of smoke. never thinking past the moment. never careing where i was going to end up. then one night i would come home to see two of my friends sitting at my table with my brother. things started to get heated and i tried to leave before anythings stupid that might break and already unsteady relationship. but to no avail. i was thrown around, smashed against things, told what to do and how to do them. johnny was asuming his "father" role. he had heard some rumors that i was doing a drug that shouldn't be done. this was not true. so i left again.

i came home...

then left again...

to be continued.....

Andrew C.