All things hidden and rustling
Hedgerows, grasses, back of my mind
She tiptoes white-pawed through the morning.

I watch the dog, full of aesthetic admiration. Her snowy mask continues down her chest now, silver hairs in the minky fur of her back. Aged, grey little eyebrows. All animals have this, their streamlined simplicity. Exactly what and as they are. She’s perfect and strong and I imagine her insides brimming with health. Red blood cells furiously rushing. She is both old and immune because I insist on her eternal companionship.

Kayla and I bathed last year under some misting rain and the sounds of the harbour. We can be nude but never scrutinizing—you can look without seeing when you’re polite, or when the body is reduced to vessel. Talked about her pregnancy hips, my affectionately named haunches. Were animals laid out under the November sky but our limbs not as exquisite, not so purpose built. I wish I had the grace of the dog, to be blinking in a pool of light and look heaven sent. The brimming tubs had strands of my hair indenting the water, proof of weakened little follicles and faulty hormones. Sweaty impressions of ass and thigh on the sauna floor. And now as I become ever-more preoccupied with the increasing visibility of time, I find this is all I want to talk to women about. I imagine some easing of physical anxiety if I could only explain the weight and reach and sway of it all. Anticipating the hum of likewise, likewise.

Are animals this physically conscious? To be able to associate the grumbling tummy or popping knee with cause and consequence. I’ve waited for a certain thickness to permeate her rib cage—wasted concern. Instead she catapults her little body around the world, lean as ever. Restless, restless feelings. All this human claustrophobia (relentlessly inside of myself) and her abundant animal mess.

Send me, Nina.

Having come into adolescence alongside peak blogging culture, the temptation to lurk amongst banal internet debris still thrives. I used to make friends this way, the chance encounters magical. In the spring of 2012 I spent a morning waxing poetic about a particular photographer, posting a collection of photos capturing dusty blue and cream stretches of American cattle ranches. Later in the day I borrowed my mum’s border collie for a walk. In the grey of a west-coast drizzle, we crossed paths with a man and his own collie, both of them red haired and gorgeous in the mud. I was flattered at the exchange and shocked when I returned home to find a comment on my Tumblr. “I took these photos. I think we just met.”

A year of walking around Vancouver together failed to cure my nervousness or my pining. Once he gave me a sheepskin coat to wear on a particularly cold stroll home. I could feel the shape of him in its oversized drape and was beside myself at the proximity. My size tucked into his. The most delicious agonies have always come from an inability to ask for what I want. When I eventually made plans to leave the city, he asked if he could take my picture and I said no, absolutely not. The precarity of something I loved being spoiled by my own image.

I remember being self-consciously fay, channeling the kind of precocious innocence that defined femininity in the aughts. Our naivety was genuine though, given how little we knew about where technology would (or would not) take us. Turns out the chance encounters were limited. On the blogs of the early 2000’s, a glimpse of someone’s face buried amongst an archive of words and curiosities was all we had to prepare ourselves for who we’d meet on the outside. But at least the conversation flowed. My breaches of internet to life were both twinkling and potentially minacious—some endeavours more foolish than others—but all considerably more exciting in their physical mystery than when the apps monopolised sexual interest. When the novelty of swipe-centred dating began in earnest, I would reuse the questions that were exchanged so much more poetically across message boards. Within the context of specifically sexualised encounters, no one was really up for the conversational challenge. Had I had access to years worth of my Tinder match’s internal monologues, I would have saved myself a lot of effort.

It’s absurd that sexual content took Tumblr down. That any service which encourages users to voice their thoughts would play the prude shows a shockingly limited understanding of human preoccupation. More-so, the codified flirtations saved on Tumblrs and Live Journals remain a novelty in our experience of digital communication thus far. The censor’s response to a platform of curated fantasies now feels laughably puritan. We’ve since learned that the internet insists on an increasing lack of subtlety, something that would have made the watchdogs blush just ten years ago. In comparison to contemporary media, the act of blogging felt like a method for maintaining some kind of sparkle. The arm’s length distance from the real thing more intriguing than any number of nudes. Though I admit that in search of a thrill, I sent my fair share of those too.

So much of the digital experience is about yearning. Lust and greed, yes, but also attempts at capturing a glow you know you can’t emanate forever. The internet capitalises on this instant nostalgia for ourselves, the art of remember when becoming increasingly accessible. I remember when I felt beguiling, powerful without the need to obviously eroticise my content. Now faced with endless streams of gym selfies and puckered lips, I don’t know how to do that anymore. Born from a culture that tantalised with the unexpected, my thirty-something year-old self remembers what it was like to be charmed, a kind of courtship that relied on more than self advertisement and memed platitudes. I believe that we all want to be known, but the tools we have at our disposal feel inadequate. Incapable of conveying the initial mystery. Overly literal. They lack the crucial element of surprise. Sometimes I sense this halo of longing around a group of friends, the way we’ve traced our respective romances with the language of lure, a gentle melancholy at the app’s most recently disappointing entrapment. No one denies that the hunt still titillates but what I recall most poignantly is the feeling of the heavy jacket around my shoulders. A sense memory for the warmth of another body I was too afraid to reach for. And the chance encounter of two dogs, in a park, in the rain.

Knee deep in swamp water, sucking at your toes. The gentle pricklings of mud-coloured mesozoa brushing at your skin.

Time passes. A slow burning of hours under rain clouds and moonlight when silent things unfurl and rush for the sky. Today you found moss tangled in the roots of your hair. Tomorrow, a web cast in the crook between jaw and shoulder. You can't see it, of course. Just a gossamer tickle when you turn your head to the east.

A song designed to illicit an emotional melt down at the grocery store, smiling wetly at the man in the produce aisle clasping a cluster of tomatoes to his chest. Worthy of a cry in front of magnificent towers of canned soup. 

The inexplicable boredom of your life—oh! Row upon row of condiments and some sudden aimless love, ripe in you mouth. Gooey. Here it comes. Chest thump goosebumps hair standing on end did you grab butter a dozen or half you've left thumbprints in the baguette clutching in line wanting to squeeze the forgiving skin of something warm and panting and gorgeous. The world can be so gorgeous.

Out now slight rain and the unbearable energy of being alive. At the foot of traffic and the feet of mountains. Trill Trill Trill Trill. Nose pointed home. Beaming. Seething. Greedy. Like there was juice trailing down your chin. The way birds feel like handfuls of warm air, a precious and impossible affection set loose and singing. 

It ended like all hurricanes, in a stillness that was frightening to approach.

This scared her more than anything—tasting the air and finding it as sweet as any spring.

Time had passed. It always does.

Skin frozen, damp fingers and wrists grasping at wet-slick branches with mud and leaf decomposing on the soles of our shoes. See ahead dropping below the grass ridge, blue horizon bellying out before an abandoned ship yard with the skeleton dock crumpled inwards on stilted legs, kneeling in the sand before the sea. The blue sand and the blue sea and the black sky blue around the moon with clouds rolling in.

Bats wing erratic shadows in the silhouette of impending storm and ash boughs shudder silver whispers in the wind. We’re attuned to crickets and the whine of mosquitoes by our ears. Up the bank from where we’ve slid down to the coastline, a country road winding between midnight grazing sheep and the wide-eyed look of farm animals after dark. A tent and two sleeping bags smelling like the dirt of our hair and our nails and the unwashed clothes pressed down in the depths of our backpacks. Out there, the two of us standing dark in the mist of evening damp rising from salt water, spray gusting delicate veils over the bluff. You and me shivering in decrepit jeans and woodsmoke sweatshirts. A little further apart than when we left and a little softer still. The crust of determined resolve sprouting from sympathetic intentions. The exhausted ability to fight, an agony of good behaviour. Three years ahead and one year behind. Anxiety that longevity will fail to cure. Some slight anger or a wet-eyed hurt. Laughing hysteric on the highway from here to there. Silent separate sides of the bed but always always my paw in your paw facing oceans at night.

I've always wanted heat on my palm, held upright and cupping the sun with the window cranked down. Half asleep in the backseat, I love all of you. It's painful, thinking of your faces glowy with sweat in the light of purple dusk. Asking what that sound is. A long ways out and driving towards the dark. 

Sometimes I still catch it, little shivers of being that kind of young. When we pass around a song that feels yanked from memory (this isn’t trite, it’s just true) I call you to mind however many miles away, dancing in your too-new apartment. A murmur on a sunset highway. A bleating of shouts colliding at the kitchen table. Walking home after work, I could hear the happy yell of your voices from halfway down the street.  

Name something more exciting than your face caught in the glimmer of two martinis and an empty stomach. Small room crowded late on a week night and a catastrophe of unsaid questions. Everything echoes like clear water at the bottom of a well, dizzy lapping.

Come on bright spark. Take a dip.

The car crests a rolling peak of highway, blush and terra cotta as far as the eye can see. Seafoam and lavender skies. Grip the steering wheel, dust on your palms. Everything undulates in the afternoon heat.

How long have you dreamed of the desert?

You whipped through a wall of rain in Wyoming, cruising alongside a crescent of horses racing against the dark edge of cloud. Your heart was screaming. 

Rock sealed in crazed shapes, a perpetual teetering. The sun hits the underbelly of everything. At a rest stop, you walk across an ancient plateau and fight the urge to crouch and press your tongue into the dirt. 

You are on the bus shifting gears downhill to your pointless job. You know all the faces on this bus. You get picked up at the start of the line, when the morning light is still watery and pale. You get picked up alongside construction workers who smell like coffee and the calcium in concrete. 

Your apartment this far south secures you a window seat. You sit in the row just ahead of the folding back doors, where the breeze carries the sounds of the world waking up.  

You have a choice. You can lull yourself into falling asleep with your head resting against the window pane. You can miss your stop by a few blocks and not care, admit your exhaustion. Or you can grit your teeth and encourage the nausea of undirected energy. You can feel alive, an artificial thrill playing through headphones. You can step onto the sidewalk like a boxer, bouncing on your toes. Shifting your shoulders. Light as air and buzzing. You are flashing your eyes (zing! pow!) at anything that moves. You are suspended for six delicious minutes in a world of satisfaction.

You smooth your shirt in front of the bathroom mirror. Examine your skin under fluorescents. Sit in a chair that squeaks, and stare at a screen. 

I wake up in the dark, the attentiveness of the dog a thick vibration in the room. There are racoons in the courtyard plotting to upend a trash can. This is a house cut into quarters, divided by paper-thin walls and the laughing of neighbours. I am always anxiously conscientious, my life exposed in overheard coughs and whispers.

Sounds heard from other bedrooms: The tin-can warbling of pedlars selling hot yams from bicycle carts in Mexico City, accompanied by a melody of stray barks floating across rooftops. The alien electricity of cicadas in Melbourne and other gentle pricklings as insects wake up with the moon. Wolves in Yellowstone and wolves outside of Halifax, their wet beds cocooned in the grass the next morning. Once, a squalling shriek coming from wooded darkness, circling my small coastal cabin as if searching for a way in. Stones thrown against the window of an old apartment. Hunching down, hoping he can’t see my shadow in the moonlight.

I doze, spooning the warmth of the dog against my stomach. When I get up to pee, she curls up on my pillow and warms that too. Sun leaks across the bed while I am holding this image in my mind. The delicious not-quite-loneliness of your own set of rooms. Volume up, uninhibited. A wishing for no one to care. I kiss the dog between her half-closed eyelids.