If I’m being honest, I’ve always wanted to be a writer.
When I was in elementary school, I had to decide whether I wanted to go to Aurora High School’s French immersion program, or the Unionville Arts High School. Ultimately I chose Aurora; but I often wonder how my life’s trajectory would have unfolded had I chosen differently.
When I think back to little ol’ me, making that major life decision, I don’t remember writing pro and con lists or whether anyone around me influenced my decision one way or another, I just remember feeling like choosing the arts was frivolous, risky, a pipe dream, and not, ultimately, the “smart” or “responsible” choice.
I remember adults and older kids telling me I was going to be so pretty when I grew up; but all I wanted was to be seen for who I was beneath the façade. I wanted to be respected and valued based on how I thought, not how I looked. I wanted to receive praise for doing good in the world, not for being a decoration in it. But I was desperate for attention, so I took what I could get, sowing the seeds that would forever entwine my value with being perceived as “pretty”.
There was something about pursuing arts school that worried me. If I was to pursue music, what would I write about? I didn’t feel like I had anything to say because I was still figuring out what to make of this whole planet Earth thing. I remember thinking that I didn’t want to be just a pretty face, singing someone else’s lyrics, about something I didn’t understand, or hadn’t personally experienced.
What I wasn’t giving myself credit for at the time was that I had so much to say. Because I had in fact lived so much life already; and I’d seen much more than your average 8th grader.
I was born in the Peterborough hospital at 7:07pm on July 25th, 1991. My parents brought me home to their cabin in the woods just outside Havelock, Ontario, and for three years we lived there with my older half-sister, building the addition onto the house, playing in the sandpit, going on four wheeler rides through the woods on trails my father had made through his 40 acres of swamp and forest. We had 10 ft bon fires in the front yard; picked chives and rhubarb and weeds that looked like flowers. It was slow, simple living, but my parents eventually divorced when I was 3; and so began the semi-nomadic lifestyle with my mother as our primary caregiver.
I went back to visit my dad every other weekend. Sometimes my mom would meet him at a truck stop somewhere along his route and I’d climb up into the cab of the transport truck. We’d listen to classic rock on the way home, start a fire in the wood stove and watch Star Trek after dinner. I don’t particularly remember my dad cooking, unless it was crispy bacon with chopped up onions in the scrambled eggs, served of course with Heinz ketchup. He had emergency packets on hand in case we ever ran out.
I have very few memories of time spent with my dad one on one; I always remember the house being full. My step mom eventually moved in with her two kids in tow, and soon after she and my dad had a kid of their own.
By this time, my mom was also dating again. She eventually settled on her first husband’s brother, my sister’s uncle, and although that made him our stepdad, we still called him Uncle Chucky. He and my dad were similar in a lot of ways; they both smoked dope, enjoyed the outdoors and going on adventures. He took us snowmobiling and bred Rottweiler puppies. He was a roofer by trade and he was the best at pulling out loose baby teeth. He’d offer you money to eat weird stuff like cottage cheese or chewed up broccoli. He once gave me $5 to take a shot of red wine. He had an infectious laugh and drove without a license for most of his life. He used to drive me from our house in Aurora at the time, to my dad’s place in Havelock for those every-other-weekend visits. We listened exclusively to classic rock radio for those two hour drives each way. I give him credit for introducing me to ACDC, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and other bands with songs I know all the lyrics to but couldn’t tell you the band’s name. He always encouraged me to sing, actually he’s probably the reason I started taking lessons at all. He was supportive, but imperfect. The tone of his angry voice terrified me into submission. I loved and respected him so much that the thought of disappointing him crushed me.
While I never feared my dad the way I feared Uncle Chucky, I also didn’t feel as loved by him. He was a truck driver and he often worked nights so if we were too loud in the morning, he’d lock us kids outside. Yes, even in the Canadian winter, and no, I didn’t always have time to grab both winter boots. On days when we quietly got ourselves bowls of cereal in the morning, often with water because we’d run out of milk, I’d resort to schemes like making myself throw up just to get him out of bed. There are some positive family memories for sure; playing Spyro and Risk, carving pumpkins, trick or treating, Christmas at Granny and Granda’s, making seaweed tea at the cottage and learning how to ski; but there were also times when we kids were left unattended and we’d get into all kinds of shenanigans like huffing gas, climbing trees, falling through the ice of our swamp turned skating rink, picking up and smoking discarded cigarette butts off the driveway, or making crunchy peanut butter out of mud and rocks. I was never physically disciplined as far as I can remember but I’d seen my siblings get their mouths washed out with soap.
I have a scar on my foot from the day I jumped off the pool table and landed on a plastic bag full of broken beer bottles, and one on my forehead from when my step-brother pulled the chair out from under me and I face-planted the linoleum floor. I’ll never forget the day my jeans got stuck in the gears on my bike and I was left in the driveway for what felt like hours to problem solve on my own. When I finally made it in for dinner, all the corn on the cob had been eaten. One night, I fell out of the top bunk, my dad wanted to keep me awake in case I had a concussion so we sat and watched TV and ate peanuts out of the shell until he let me go back to sleep. In the morning, I had no recollection of the fall but I told my dad that if he wanted to hang out with me he didn’t need to wake me up in the middle of the night to watch TV & eat peanuts!
My dad once let me completely disassemble an old VCR, and then asked me (jokingly) to put it back together. He also jokingly asked if the floor was okay after I fell off the ladder that goes up to the attic at the cottage. His “joke” about how delicious Santa’s cookies were at Christmas confirmed my suspicions about Santa. One night, lying in front of the wood stove, using our cat Amy as a pillow, I noticed that she stopped breathing. My dad yelled upstairs asking my mom to bring down a garbage bag. “Cat’s dead.” he said. We took her to the dump and that was that.
The last memory I have with my dad was NYE 2003. I remember fragments from the evening; being at a party with all adults, and then the car being in the ditch in the snow, in the middle of nowhere. I presume he drove drunk; it wasn’t all that uncommon in my small town. There were no taxis or ubers, and very few other cars on the back roads. Then again maybe he just pulled over to take a piss on the side of the road, and maybe he wasn’t drunk at all. I really don’t remember clearly enough. But that was the last memory I have with him.
Later that month, my mother got a phone call. Slowly, people started showing up at the house, and then once everyone was assembled, I was called into the living room. I seem to remember that I was putting away laundry at the time. I walked into a somber room full of sad faces looking at me with sorry eyes and tilted heads. I don’t remember exactly what my mom said but I remember asking how he died. I had this gut feeling that it had something to do with smoking.
As far as I know, they never pinpointed what started the fire. Something about frozen pipes was one theory, but I immediately pictured him falling asleep on the couch with a lit cigarette, loosely gripped between his hairy fingers, falling to the floor as he drifted into a deep sleep. I’m pretty sure his remains were found where the basement couch was, which helped corroborate the story I was telling myself. I make up that the fumes took his life before the flames took his body. I decide that I too want to be cremated. And despite the fact that he was nothing but ashes in the end, we still had a coffin at the funeral. It was so weird to me, the façade of it all. I’ll never forget my little cousin, ignorantly stumbling around the funeral home, telling me matter of factly that my dad was dead. Thanks little asshole.
There are so many mysteries and conspiracies around my father’s death. And I got zero closure. I still haven’t seen the tape from the news report. I never got to see the house in ashes. So much was withheld from us in the aftermath of his death. Over the years I’ve put some of the puzzle pieces together, but most of the pieces I have seem not to have a snug place on the board. I’ve often contemplated going back and researching it more thoroughly but then a little voice would say, to what end?
The truest version of events is that the night my father died, his best friend was supposed to go over to visit but his truck was having problems so he went straight home. They talked on the phone for a bit and then the next morning, he didn’t show up to work. The neighbours across the street had noticed some smoke coming from behind the trees where my father’s house was but his bon fires on the front lawn used to create as much smoke so they weren’t concerned. Eventually the fire department was called, but they couldn’t even go close to the house because there was so much unused ammo snap crackle and popping.
My dad had guns, but he wasn’t a hunter. There were “no hunting” signs all over the property. He kept them in a safe as far as I know, and I only ever remember him firing a gun once into the sky to scare away a bear on the property. But I also heard something about guns being missing from the house, I mean I don’t know the logistics of what would happen to a safe and guns in a fire but there’s definitely some suspicion around what happened to his guns. He also grew a TON of weed. He had plants all over the property, it was illegal then. There were also footprints in the snow leading away from the house and someone theorized that he’d perhaps gotten away.
I have the craziest dreams about my dad. The earlier dreams would involve us walking around the rubble that was once our home, built with his hands, the hands of friends and family; the people I fed with the cookies I made in my easy bake oven, feeling so appreciated for my offering to the hard working men building my home. In other dreams, I’d be travelling in Europe and would do a double take noticing that the homeless bearded beggar man was my father. Sometimes in a dream, I’d wake up and walk out to the terrace overlooking some beautiful mediterranean view and he’d be sitting at a table abounding with freshly squeezed orange and grapefruit juices, fresh fruit and berries, pancakes, french toast, croissants, scrambled eggs, the works. I’d sit and sip on an americano as he told me how sorry he was for not visiting sooner. How much he regretted not being more present, how proud he was of me, how much he loved me; but lately, the dreams have morphed into a scenario in which he has abandoned me and my siblings to pursue a life with another family.
Now when I dream of him, it’s a dimly lit hole in the wall of a bar; he sits at one end, I at the other. I recognize him and recruit the bartender to help me pry but no amount of persuasion softens his stoic façade. He has a whole other family, they live in our old house, but I’m a stranger there. And he won’t talk to me. He won’t tell me why he left, why he abandoned us, why he won’t speak to me now. He doesn’t explain himself, he won’t look me in the eye, he pretends I don’t exist; and it’s unbearable.
I was 11 years old when he died. I’m sure I had a cacophony of emotions whirling around like a tornado inside of me, but I was getting praised for “handling it so well.” My mom and I often did this choreographed dance of a conversation that almost always ended with me comforting or consoling her. I felt like the protector, I think. And because I was being praised for not showing emotion, I persisted, burying it all away, pushing it down, so that I could be good. A contrast to my sister who was always getting into trouble.
Sometimes I wonder, if I had discovered my songwriting superpower earlier on, would it have helped me process everything that was going on? At the time I used my journal to work through my feelings, to better understand them, almost as a way of getting to know myself. I wish I had turned to writing more often and in the most stressful times, partly because I don’t trust my own recollection and would appreciate a more detailed accounting to refer back to, but also because I feel like it would have helped me better understand how I was feeling. Instead, every time I was traumatized or triggered, I would try to shake it off. Pretend like it didn’t happen. Forget. Move on. Move forward. Focus on something else.
Shutting down was a survival mechanism I developed to keep myself feeling safe, to be able to keep moving forward, to be able to focus on my school work, singing lessons, and Irish dance classes. I buried and ignored my grief. If I didn’t acknowledge it, it didn’t exist to me, and it couldn’t get in my way.
Perhaps subconsciously I knew that choosing the arts school would require opening myself up in ways I wasn’t ready for. In choosing the creative route, I would have had room to explore myself, I would have had room to think and process and create and write, but not only did that seem irresponsible, it seemed harder. Choosing French Immersion was the easy way out for sure. It was the safe choice because I knew I’d succeed; I already spoke French and I knew I’d have friends there. By choosing the path more likely to lead to financial success in a stable job in a responsible field, I would finally be respected; taken seriously. Being bilingual felt like a superpower, I could be a teacher, work for the government, translate, travel; it made the world feel open and infinite to me; but I was naive and wholly unprepared for the challenges that high school would bring.
This book is proof that there has always been a writer in me. She helps me figure out what I want to say. And while this certainly isn’t the first piece of writing I’ve shared publicly, it is my first book. A book that’s taken me 20 years to write, curate and publish. And probably one of the only things I’ve done entirely on my own. I’m so used to collaborating on music, film, and photography that it feels weird not tagging other people in the social media posts. It’s just me, just lil ol’ me. I hope you like it.
<3 Keegs