Today, I am sitting in my office with the lights only dimly lit and the radiators on strike from producing heat. I am wearing a dress that places me in the dust bowl era. I feel like I should be mending a sock or churning butter, but no. Instead, I am wearing a Korean face mask and smiling lovingly at my framed picture of Barrack Obama. This is 2020. The year of everything and nothing.

Do you ever have a flash of some forgotten, pre-covid part of yourself? Something that you have long buried out of self-preservation? This happened to me a week ago; I was walking down the street listening to a Haitian band with the sun setting over Dundas. It reminded me of traveling alone in a country that my mother would deem ‘unsafe’. 

There is something about the edge that I love. A driver going a little too fast, a slightly unsteady ladder, the sun setting in a somewhat unsafe neighborhood, and the long walk home. The motorbikes driving a little too close to you, the lack of streetlight, and those who pass you by knowing you are a tourist because you are blond and you look terrified and ecstatic and moronic. 

That little spike of adrenaline.

There is a song by the Talking Heads that keeps haunting me: Heaven. 

Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.

It achieves a specific emotional paradoxical dissonance: having everything and still longing. It is the grieving of that thing that you thought would make you feel complete, satiated, unburdened. 

In a way this year has been like that, in another sense, it has been the farthest thing from that. It has been one arduous undertaking after another. Death by a million blunt objects. Still, the sentiment is not lost. The remedy to both is the same. It’s the edge. It’s the feeling of how precarious this all is, it’s putting that feeling on a tightrope and making it cross some canyon of fear. It fills your lungs with delight and possibility. It will clear out all of the dust.

And speaking of the edge, I think it would be a great tragedy if I didn’t include lyrics from the Bruce Springsteen song Darkness on the Edge of Town. If you refuse to listen to the song and just read the lyrics, know that these are sung emphatically. There is also an emotional dissonance, but this time, it is searing hope and it is searing pain. It is the disappointment of life and it is fear. It is the dissonance of life: the darkness begets the light.

He GROWLS:

Tonight I’ll be on that hill ’cause I can’t stop

I’ll be on that hill with everything I’ve got

Well lives on the line where dreams are found and lost

I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost

For wanting things that can only be found

In the darkness on the edge of town

In the darkness on the edge of town