Dear Jean;

The older I get,
The more clearly I remember
things that never happened. (Mark Twain)

I find it strange that despite everything that went on in my life before Claire’s death, this letter that I write you of the years since then seems to be the most difficult for me. They were difficult because they were empty years, defined more by what I did, not by who I was – for I was nothing. I wonder sometimes how I ever made it from there to here.

I remember going through the days, the seasons, then ultimately through the years by reaching from one goal to the next, from graduation to graduation: from Junior High, then from High School, from University and finally from Teacher’s College. I wonder sometimes if my graduate work, important as it is to me, wasn’t simply spurred on by a sense of having nowhere else to go and nothing else to achieve except another diploma.

I look back at the twelve-year old Starla living with her father, sandwiched in their first floor apartment in a house that also sheltered an aspiring Olympic runner and his massage therapist wife living above them, and a couple of bikers below. I recognize that that Starla is closer to the person I’ve become with your guidance, than all the other Starlas in between. She was open, sensitive and vulnerable. She was wounded and she wanted to be healed. She was looking for a model on which to build her new self but none was found. So over the years she enclosed herself: experience by experience, disappointment by disappointment, she built a wall that would sustain her in her life and protect her from further pain.

I could tell you of the years in Junior High when I was always being reprimanded for leaving the school grounds to escape the cattiness of the cliques; of girls who deliberately turned their backs to whisper to each other, looking over their shoulders as I walked by; of notes, hurtful and ridiculous, slipped through the louvered air vents into my locker, their presence invading my private space.

I could tell you about the rabbit who was kept in a large kennel type cage in the classroom, that I went to – as petitioners do in prayer – to lose myself. I would open the cage and he would come to me looking for the offered treat: carrot or celery sticks, apple cores rescued from lunch clean-up. The other kids called me a garbage picker – I knew I only did it because I wanted the rabbit to trust me. He would hop into my arms and allow himself to be folded into my small chest where we both found escape – he, as he nibbled the day’s treat outside the bars that held him in, I, in the troughs of his silken fur as the tips of my fingers drew their path over his back and along his long, cool ears. Then the bell would ring, or someone would come upon us startling him; his powerful legs and fierce claws would push on my arms to escape the embrace. The scratches on my hands where he had drawn blood as I struggled to return him to his cage, would sting for the rest of the day.

But I’d rather focus on the positive steppingstones that helped me get through those years, the things that helped me preserve some kernel of that softer Starla who so wanted to be part of a gentler life.

My first love – perfect and unattainable – was Boy George. This infatuation had nothing to do with music or pop culture but had everything to do with beauty and being defiantly different. Are you familiar with Boy George, Jean? Icon of the early 80’s whose geisha-like make up transformed the face of this young man into an androgynous, pouty object of the most delicate beauty. I would stare into each set of those gloriously defined eyes on each of the posters and pin-up pictures on the wall in my room, and listen to what they had to tell me about reinventing yourself to survive, and about wearing masks to protect yourself.

And I will tell you of Dale: my one true friend through High School and my own real-life Boy George. His creative, exotic and flamboyant personality was strong enough to envelop us both – the sad, shy young girl and the defiantly uncertain, gay young man – and protect us both from the worst of the teen scene. Among other things ours was a symbiotic relationship in that we rescued each other from the world of dating. We were a couple; granted we were a platonic couple in our deep friendship, but in High School any pairing of a guy and a girl was acceptable, and we were usually left alone.

Dale’s homosexuality was not a big issue between us. I remember the Saturday in November when he first told me of his confusion and frustration around what he was feeling, as we sat in our booth by the window at Mario’s Pizza, watching the rain fall. He knew that he wasn’t attracted to girls in the same way as he would hear other guys talking, but the world of High School in those days offered so little opportunity for anyone like Dale to explore who we was attracted to that he lived those years in a world of sexual ambiguity. For my part, I worked hard not to be attracted to anyone – I felt that I’d already spent my quota of emotional energy in my life; I had no interest in entanglements. So we “hung out” together, Dale and I, filling all those spaces in each other’s lives that were allotted to “friends”.

Dale sang in the halls and on the stage. He jumped from high places and wore garish clothes. I marvel at the gentleness inside him that allowed me to be his friend despite his wild exuberance: I was like a moth, attracted not to a killer bug light but to a tender beam that glowed and showed me how to have fun, and accepted me with my own restrictions and limitations. But perhaps it was my very wounds that allowed him to be close to me. His brave and smiling mask of self-assurance was so firmly in place to the rest of the world, but with me he would share the place of his sadness, where he knew that he was not the son that his parents had hoped for; their disappointment in him was a pain that he carried – not knowing how to soothe or heal it.

Dale poured most of his longing and creative energy into each theatrical production with which he was involved; he was a beautifully gifted actor on stage, where he could tame his natural clown. He was so good for me in so many ways. He got me involved in his theatre group where I would go with him to watch the auditions and then rehearsals. Later, I became a prompter, and went on to learn about lights and gels, and how to work the lighting board and sound systems. Over the years in High School, then in University, I spent many hours in tech booths at the back of so many auditoria, enjoying the isolation that my job afforded me, yet knowing that mine was a skill that was needed, that my contribution was essential to the production.

Besides my time with Dale, there were other oases during my teen years. In those days, I kept a journal. Well, not so much a journal as an assortment of doodles, poems, children’s stories, and rants about inconsequential things that Bill did to irritate me. I regret now that I threw them all away when I moved to Ontario. I remember a few of the poems though they hardly seemed worth the effort. But much more important to me than the writing was my reading – as if I had so little to give, and needed to be constantly replenished by an unlimited flow of words, phrases and ideas that I would seek out and take into me. I would steal time from studies and sleeping, use time on busses, and generally make time on weekends to read. Beyond the words and stories, there was a bond that I felt with the books themselves. Owning a book was not so important to me; holding any book however, even a library book, bringing it into my collection of “stuff” that I carried around in daily life, created a connection with all the other people who had cared for that particular story and enjoyed it’s richness. I cherish each book that I’ve read in my life: the good, the bad and the silly. They all hold that special key that allowed me to escape from a world that was too real, too harsh and too full of emptiness.

Another area of my life that sustained me through those years was swimming; the hours of training and practice that went into building up my endurance to achieve another level of proficiency were a positive influence in so many ways. At the time I only knew that they were necessary so that I could make it through to the next level, to finally achieve the papers that I needed to be a lifeguard and swimming teacher.

I’ve always felt so at home in the water – the deeper, the better. Heaven must be like this: swimming alone in a pool with nothing to interfere with the deliciously rhythmic sense of power and exhaustion that comes from moving endlessly – arm over arm, stroke after stroke, the whole body propelling itself, limitless, untouched by anything but water, until finger tips meet tile, signaling a shift – turn, push off the end of the pool and continue. It was the only place that I felt completely comfortable; swimming was a pure and unexpected gift opening doors to yet another world, and a sense of being relieved for a time of any sadness or frustration. I still carry this love of water and I try to get to the pool at least once a week.

During summer holidays I worked my way through the city’s day camp system, first as an LIT (Leader in Training), then CIT (Counselor in Training), to being a camp lifeguard and swimming instructor. Six summers, seven sessions per season, five or six classes per session: so many kids, all of them eager for their time in the pool. The summers flew by.

High School finally ended and I knew that I wanted to be a teacher. I’ve always been a teacher I think; from the first days when I realized that there were other kids in the world who were just as confused as I had been, I’ve had a longing to calm that confusion and build skills that would help them move on to the next set of questions.

In applying to universities, I knew that I wanted to be near Sophie, to return to the one place in the world that I missed for what I had left behind. I knew that Sophie had given us stability and predictability, and I always associated these cherished characteristics with our time in Ontario. So I applied to UBC in Vancouver so Bill would feel that there was part of me that wanted to stay in the West, but I knew that I’d be moving East as soon as I could.

That last summer in Vancouver, as I bought a trunk and began to arrange things in it, as I dreamed of dormitory life, as I pondered the necessity of winter boots, I thought a lot about Bill and our years together. I wondered how he’d get along without me: who would see that the laundry was done and that the plants were watered? Who would see that he ate something more than pizza and toast?

Would he miss me? Would his life change in my absence? I realized with resigned melancholy, that the answer to these last questions was a firm yes – and no. Of course we would miss each other and our lives would be changed dramatically by this move. We’d grown comfortable in each other’s presence: anticipating reactions, enjoying the easy familiarity of each other’s “stuff” in our lives – we’d miss that. But we had also become comfortable in each other’s absences. Bill was away a lot with work, sometimes for a week or more. I thought that it might take him a long time to realize that we’d moved into a new phase of our lives where we’d have to make an effort if we wanted to remember each other.

Bill was an okay Dad, especially for me. I didn’t need someone to oversee my activities and look out for my safety – I’m so cautious by nature. I was safe because I kept myself safe. On the other hand, it was good for me to have a home to care for, groceries to buy, and a sack of laundry to deal with once a week. At twelve years of age, I was an adult waiting for my body and my peers to catch up with all I’d lived and seen and felt in my life. And in Bill’s home, I had the freedom to live that responsible adult life.

Bill would come home after a day, or a week, with tales of politics and red tape left tangled at the feet of some poor secretary in some government office. Bill was a clerical wild man: he delighted in the hunt, in the paper chase of arguments – won or lost, it didn’t matter. So long as there was a case to be made or a report to be presented, he did it with panache and a never extinguished sense of impending victory. He’s an amazing guy in the environmental world where real victory is virtually unattainable, and success is measured proposal by proposal, and tree by tree. They’re lucky to have him.

On Fridays, after playing hooky from his professional life for a few hours, Bill would arrive with some new style of pizza: spicy chicken, or spinach and tomatoes, or pesto and shrimp with peppers. He might have a new B.B. King tape, the product of a long, lazy afternoon in the second hand record store. He’d play it, as excited as any kid, pointing out the amazing finger work that always inspired him. We’d eat our pizza, Bill and I, and usually Dale, enjoying these small moments of what passed for family life. I wonder if he ate alone on Friday nights after I’d gone?

These were the good things of those years that I wanted to share with you, Jean. They were the people, and memories, and activities that preserved some sense of my wholeness, so that I might rediscover it now that I have this reclaimed life to live with Danny, and with myself.

Before I finish there’s one more thing that I wanted to share with you about those years. It was the most difficult aspect of my adolescence, and that which left me feeling more vulnerable and frightened than all the uncertainties of my younger life. Asthma played a very large role in shaping who I was in those days, and the ultimate caution with which I reacted to life was a direct result of my need to avoid extremes and just keep breathing.

I’m able to trace my first asthma attack to a drizzly Tuesday in the late fall, after I returned to live with Bill. A group of girls from this new Junior High had been taunting me at the bus stop after school, laughing at what they chose to point out on that particular day: my less than fashionable clothes. I turned from them so they wouldn’t see the tears that were stinging my eyes. At first I walked with an almost march-like determination to leave them all behind, but as the anger and shame grew in me I began to run. I wanted my heart to race and my skin to burn with the sting of the cold drops of rain against my cheeks, so I ran as fast as I could, holding my bag to my chest, holding myself in. I ran.

It would have been about twenty blocks from the school to our apartment, and I ran past flower shops, delis, cafes, hairdressers, and blocks of small square homes, their patches of fall flowers still shining with colour in the dullness of the grey, wet afternoon. I ran past a fire station, a playground, and a car dealership, each melting behind me as I kept pushing myself forward towards the safety of my world in our apartment. Then without warning, from behind a chain link fence came a dog, large and black, his fleshy round head surrounding the snarling mouth and rows of hard yellow teeth. The sound of his bark startled me back into the world of what was real around me, and I screamed with the last easy breath to come from my body for days.

I screamed and kept screaming as I staggered back away from the fence that held him in with all the tenuous uncertainty of a sheet of glass around a tiger. I screamed until my brain focused, grasping at the knowledge that he was enclosed. I screamed in anger that my hurt adolescent pride was being suppressed by a real threat. And when I stopped screaming, my lungs stopped working, as if in those screams I’d pushed out all the air I’d ever breathed in, and my lungs had collapsed on its expulsion.

I staggered on for the few blocks to the apartment, gasping with every step and fell inside, grateful for the warmth yet horrified at the realization that it did little to help my heaving chest. I got a drink; I lay on my bed; I propped myself up against the wall trying to keep the panic at bay. I focused on each Rob Lowe and Boy George poster on the walls of my room, scrutinizing each one, willing their perfection to help me through this crisis. I concentrated on the ceramic whale that Carly had given me before she left us that summer, which sat on the top of my bookcase and had never known the feeling of water around him as all whales should. I resolved that if I survived, and if I did not die from lack of air or lack of courage, I’d find an aquarium for my whale where he could live in water – perhaps in the company of a goldfish or two. I focused on anything that would keep me from thinking about what was happening to me. I gasped and gulped tiny little breaths at first, telling myself, through each strange sounding wheeze of my chest, that I only needed little breaths for now: like a person dying of thirst only needs a drop at a time to keep alive.

In time, as the grey outside the window became darker and the streetlights shone in, my heart slowed from its running pace to a merely agitated level. The tiny gulps of air became deeper and little pockets in my lungs began to open up, one by one, letting more air in, letting more air out – in until it hurt, out until I could push no more. As the crisis receded I became aware of the bag of school books that I still clutched to my chest, of my dirty shoes and wet clothes marring the new lace comforter that I’d asked Bill to get for me to cover my bed.

I would have given anything to cry at that moment, for the gift of wails and rants that would have emptied the anger and this new fear from where they took up all the breathing space inside me. But I dared not cry – I was too afraid that the little breath that was left to me, which was slowly ebbing back into my chest, would be claimed again.

So I sat on my bed removing one dirty sneaker and then the other, wiping at the marks of mud they left on the lace, and coughing with dry sputtering gasps through the night. When Bill got home he came to see me in my room. He asked why I was in bed so early. I told him I wasn’t feeling well. He listened to the coughs – dry and persistent – and said that he’d get some cough syrup in the morning, that it sounded like I was coming down with a cold.

I coughed for a week before I got to see the doctor who heard the wheeze in my chest and prescribed a steroid inhaler and Ventolin for the discomfort of acute episodes. The coughing wasn’t so bad, except that it attracted unwanted attention from those around me. But the memory of that feeling of helpless contraction in my chest left me terrified at the thought of it happening again. Because I was running and was upset when it first happened, I was wary of anything that I sensed would bring on another attack. So I lived my life in a world with as little threat as possible of physical exertion or emotional distress. It wasn’t until later that I realized that swimming was such good exercise for asthmatics and that it probably did as much for my lungs as it did for my emotional and physical well being. The asthma followed me through my teens but seemed much improved when I came east to university. Perhaps it was the different weather; perhaps I’d left enough ghosts behind and there was more room for me to breathe here.

University was a new world for me, with no one to care for but myself. I worried about Bill at first but realized that he would be fine, with or without me. I met Danny in my second year at school and we went through Teacher’s College together. Strangely, though I still can’t put my finger on it, he has always reminded me of the best of Bill and the best of Dale blended together. But mostly I was attracted to Danny because of his patience: with me, with himself and with life. Danny’s always been willing to wait for something good. He tells the story of desserts in his family, how he would always wait until everyone else had their piece of pie or cake before holding out his plate. I guess that his mother noticed this kind trait in him, and would save a particularly large piece for him at the end. Thus he learned that patience was more than a virtue and was often rewarded. I’m grateful that I know how lucky I am to have found him.

So there you have it, Jean; that’s much of my life until the tears started to flow and I found myself in your office. I’m ashamed to think of how little faith I had in the process that you offered, and how reticent I was to dig up the old memories. But I’ll be forever grateful for the sense of safety that you provided in which I was able to take this journey, back to those times, and forward, into the next phase of my life.

Thank you, Jean, for everything.

Starla.


Copyright 2003