Originally published in VIVID by The Luna Collective: “VIVID is a 44 page zine featuring photos, words and graphics by our team alongside our incredible creative audience.”
Postcards are out of fashion and I have nobody to send them to so I tape them to my wall instead. They’re no longer a destination souvenir—you can find any type of postcard online. I have a whole bunch in a tin box that I don’t like enough to tape up but don’t dislike enough to get rid of. It’s like having a photo collection of someone else’s memories.
I have one print with a face on it. The contorted nose seems layered with green and orange oil pastels. The forehead is peach with purple shading around the temples. The mouth is a cherry frown and the card cuts off before the jawline. It’s thick like Van Gogh yet thin with imitation. The postcard belonged to my father and was found on his body by the river.
Last week, I met Dirk.
“How long have you been in this place?”
He had his arms crossed which covered his Ozzy t-shirt. He bought it earlier in the day on a deal—buy one, get one fifty off. He didn’t have to gift me the second one, but he did.
“About two weeks,” I replied.
“There’s more shit on the walls than furniture on the ground.”
“Takes time to build.”
He stared at the wall that separated my bedroom from the kitchen of my decrepit downtown apartment. My new job sitting at a desk pays well enough for me to afford it. There’s a crack in the wall behind the TV and each step causes a creak. I’ve Windex-ed the windows over and over but the blur doesn’t clear up. You’d think the place and surrounding apartment buildings would be palaces based on the rent, but that’s a problem the city doesn’t care to solve.
“Takes time to tape these up, I’ll bet.”
Dirk walked from one side of the wall to the other, bending and leaning to look at each postcard. I wondered if they affected his opinion of me.
“There’s one of an acorn. There’s another of the sea and here’s one of Terry Fox. There are a couple of bands, Elvis, prints from the Art Gallery. How do you pick ‘em?”
“Whatever I’m okay with looking at everyday.”
“Huh.” Dirk turned to me and uncrossed his arms. He put his hands on his hips and there was the Prince of Darkness staring me down as Dirk asked, “When’d you start collecting them?”
I’m twenty-eight years old. I felt that it would be silly to admit I’ve felt fourteen since my father died, and that I started gathering postcards then.
“When I was a teenager.”
“Huh.” Dirk turned again and squinted at a postcard I found on some fan-art website of Lord Byron with his hand under his chin. “Wanna grab a beer?”
Two hours later I would tell Dirk about my father and the contorted nose postcard and Dirk would put his drenched-with-bar-sweat arm around my denim-nestled shoulders and slur, “I wouldn’t want to die without trying the address.”
So today, a week later on a winter day that passes as a spring day, I’m at the train station with Dirk and we’re heading to the address that was on the postcard my father meant to send out before he dropped dead next to the river. He went there often but never took me.
“It doesn’t matter how much you work out or how healthy you eat,” my grandfather said after the funeral. “Stress will kill a man faster than anything.”
At fourteen, that doesn’t make much sense because stress means math exams and where to sit at lunch. At twenty-eight, it means wishing you understood more at fourteen.
The train whips past abandoned houses behind yellow tape to stop trespassers from sinking into mold and rotted wood flooring. It stops at a station with businesses on either side: a candy store, a gym, a cinema. Another station looks like nowhere at all with thin brick walkways and a metal fence.
At each stop, I watch as new riders push to board and rush to claim seats. Competing with them are the people trying to get off the train within the twenty seconds before the automatic doors slide shut. The scrambling is animalistic but I think about how tired people are from their long days of work at jobs that don’t contribute to transportation fees. I think about the privilege of living near your workplace. I think about the privilege of affording the train. I think about invisible illnesses that require healthy-looking young people to sit down and breathe for a moment on a busy train, and I think about the people that wouldn’t believe it. I guess it’s animalistic because it’s a rat race. It’s nobody’s and everybody’s fault.
Dirk elbows me as the train pulls up to the final station. We rode the whole route and still have a half-hour taxi to get to the address noted in my father’s handwriting. We step off the train and spot a lady crouched on the floor tiles by a vending machine. There’s a plastic bucket filled with roses to her left and a sign to her right that reads, “$5 for a rose.” Her hair is matted and her smile is beautiful.
I pull ten dollars out of the back pocket of my jeans. The lady looks in my eyes, smiles, hands me two roses, and says, “May they spread joy to you and yours.”
I give one to Dirk and he chuckles. “Just when I was starting to wonder what I’d get from tagging along.”
The taxi drops us off in front of a house that doesn’t look much different from the abandoned ones we passed by. It’s a classic two-storey, wooden home with bedroom windows on the second floor that look like glass eyes. There’s a rug on the porch and a spider web above the front door.
I knock three times and hear a grunt followed by rustling. About two minutes of rustling later, an old man opens the door.
“Who are you?”
His voice is strained and sounds painful, as if each breath of life requires effort.
“Hello, sir. Did you ever know a man named Tomas?”
He stares at me and I catch myself making a rude assumption—does he understand me?
The man grunts then says, “You have big eyebrows like him.”
He pushes the door wide and we follow him inside, his striped pyjamas dragging on the hardwood behind him. The dark walls are covered with what looks like original art. Parallel to the front door is a framed landscape of amplified storm clouds and a cowboy riding across a farm field. To the left, where there’s a kitchen bar, three smaller, solid indigo paintings hang above pots and pans pinned to the wall. There’s another cowboy next to a brick fireplace and this one sits next to an oak tree with his hat in his lap.
“Those are my wife’s,” the man says, noticing me looking around.
Dirk kicks his Converse off by the door and I do the same when I notice the old man walks around barefoot.
“Sit,” he tells us.
There’s a quilt-covered loveseat facing the fireplace that we squeeze onto. The man brings three glasses of water from the kitchen then takes him time to settle into an armchair.
“Can I ask your name, sir?”
“Well, I’m quite enjoying being called ‘sir.’ You seem like nice boys.” He sips his water then adds, “It’s Mike.”
“Mike, sir, did you know my father?”
Tan spots on Mike’s bare feet twist as he curls his toes into the red rug under us.
“I met Tomas when I lived on the street and was trying doctor after doctor about my back. Sudden onset of pain, no bruising, couldn’t walk much. My Marceline stuck it out with me until we met a doctor who said I needed surgery. That fixed it.”
He takes another sip of water, breathes in, looks out the window to his left, our right, and smacks his lips before continuing.
“The whole time, Tomas was a friend. We met him in a Subway, of all places. We got along and he started meeting us every couple of weeks. We’d just bump into each other. He laughed with us on good days and listened to us on the bad ones. I told him the good news that Marceline and I would be able to stay in this home. It was owned by our friend, Arthur, who offered us a room for a rate we could afford at the time.”
Mike looks around his home as if viewing it for the first time. Gratitude is in the gentleness of his fingers gripping the glass and in the personal decor around him. It’s in his slow speech and in his hunched posture that rises and falls with each relaxed breath. It’s an unshakeable type of gratitude that only comes from having known absence.
“Our good friend, your father,” he continues, “was due to visit. Now I own the home and that visit is still due.”
He chuckles and I notice a picture of a young woman on the mantle that I suppose is Marceline. I look around and notice the silence. It’s glum and I hesitate to ask about Marceline. Instead, I reach into the inner pocket of my jacket and pull out the contorted nose postcard.
“This is for you and Marceline.” I hand Mike the postcard. “There’s a message from my father written years ago, before he passed. I wasn’t sure what it meant until now.”
He looks deep in my eyes before turning to the postcard. The few eyebrows he has left scrunch up. There are tears in his eyes as he reads out loud. “‘Mike, I wanted to be one of your first letters at the new place and thought Marceline would like the picture. Catch you soon.’”
Mike’s legs tremble as he stands from his armchair and hobbles over to me. I stand too and let him melt into me.
“I hope my Marceline and your daddy found each other up there.”
On the way back to the train, I wish I could have met Marceline. My father wasn’t much of a creative man, but it almost relieves me to know he kept creative company. I always thought he was industrious in a construction worker type of way and didn’t understand any other ways of being. Now I think that maybe he made his choices on perspective and stuck with them. Just because they were different from mine doesn’t mean they were any less potent in their importance or ability to allow him self-expression.
Dirk and I walk past a glass statue of some significant man that costs the city thousands of dollars a year to maintain. I don’t know his name and don’t care to read the bird-shit covered plaque on the side. We avoid gum and frothy spit on the concrete. A woman keeps her head down as she passes our unwashed jeans and faded band shirts. The click-clack of her heels quieten with distance and we’ll forget each other in a few minutes.
Dirk and I amble by a café called Chez Ty and I ask him if we can go in because my name is Tyler and I want to see how they’ve chosen to cover their walls.
There’s a man sitting on the sidewalk outside of the café and we say hello.
A dimple forms in his chin as he smiles and asks, “How are you?”
“Been better, been worse,” Dirk replies. “How are you?”
“Been better,” the man says.
“I’m Tyler. What’s your name?”
“Miller.” His eyes are as blue as a whale in water and his teeth are decaying.
We offer to grab Miller a bite from Chez Ty. He accepts, and I say, “We’ll be right back.”
Dirk gives Miller the rose he has been carrying since we got off the train. I left mine with Mike.
Chez Ty turns out to be one of those minimalist places with white furniture and white walls. There’s a chandelier above the order counter and a single framed photo on the opposite end of the cramped space. It’s a photo of a dog, a sheepadoodle to be specific, and I assume it must belong to the owner.
There are only two sandwiches and a muffin left in the display and there’s a sign that reads, “Food in display 50% off after 5 p.m.” The city is preparing to sleep while Dirk and I each order an americano. They cost us four dollars and fifty cents each and I feel guilty for contributing to the expensive coffee plague. Outside, Miller has a tattered paper coffee cup placed by his crossed legs that holds a couple of dollars from passersby.
Dirk and I ask for both sandwiches and the muffin for Miller and wait for our americanos. They’re playing covers of popular songs over the speakers—Silverchair’s “Tomorrow” and a boyband track that I don’t know the title of. I look over to the glass door through which I can see Miller. His head hangs low as people walk past him like he’s a stain on the sidewalk to politely slip away from.