Shoes.

"Who's here?"
"No one. It's just me."
"Whose shoes are those then?"
"Oh, I got new ones."

  It's interesting how people become associated with their possessions. There's a comfort in being able to identify who is at your friend's house just by taking inventory of the shoes on their landing. I like having a rough idea of what to expect before entering a social situation.

   You can tell if you're early or late.
   You can see who is there, or who has yet to arrive.
   You can judge whether it was worth coming out.  

  The shoes someone wears, or any possession, become as familiar as personality traits and quirks, such as a laugh or twitch. A material item may be, by itself, trivial and empty; but within the context of being chosen by someone, an item becomes a representation or an extension of that person's personality. Those shoes exist because whoever is wearing them has a preference, or a perhaps a financial situation, that led them to purchase them.

  Material things are unnecessary on their own; they don't need to exist. But they do, and have become integrated into who we are. I find comfort in the associations shoes provide me about their owner, as sort of a Hansel and Gretel crumb trail telling me what is to come ahead.

Noise.

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     Even in the quietest room in the world, you can't achieve true silence--you can hear yourself.

     

Something Different.

    A man who works for a fencing and deck business is the second of two offspring in his immediate family. He has a brother; his brother is erudite and financially successful. His brother, with moderate monetary strain, moved to England, where he teaches; he belongs to a social group including others of his nature. The man is invited by his brother to visit him in England. The man accepts; he's in England. 

   His brother has a social gathering one night, so the man can meet his brother's friends.
One friend asks the man, "So, what is it you do?" 

The man answers, "I build decks; I also fence. The rest isn't that interesting."

"Fence, you say? I belong to a fencing club. Maybe you could come out with us while you're still visiting?"

The man, at that moment, feels very small.

Clear View.

   Today I drove past a dead goose strewn across the left lane, feet from the curbed median.

   This was the second time in relevant memory I saw a dead goose. There is something more striking and unnerving about seeing a dead goose. Maybe it's because the body is so well preserved; it looks only as though it's laid across the street, asleep, tranquilized, immobile: only the context suggests death.

   Maybe it's the goose's ability to fly that makes its vehicular death more unsettling. Most roadkill are animals constrained to land, and cars are a frequent, expected risk. Maybe it's simply the gooses's size, so large that it's an obstacle on the road, rather than a decoration.


 Goose is on the road
 Neck outstretched, wings unfurled
 It shouldn't be there

Fragrant Remnants.

   I work as a research assistant for University of Waterloo's psychology department. The job involves bringing participants into a small, windowless room to complete tasks relevant to whatever study I'm running. Participants, once in the room, take anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes to complete the study. Suffice it to say, my time with each participant is brief.

   My memory of each participant normally ends as soon as I see them out the door, but frequently, due to a lack of airflow within the building, I'm confronted by an odoriferous reminder of their presence: in the time it takes for the participant to complete their assigned tasks, their smell has filled the small room--a Polaroid snapshot of their aura. Cologne. Sweat. Food. Deodorant. Hair product. Laundry detergent. Outdoors. Organic. Inorganic. Unintentional. I am left with these pieces of people's lives.

   For the small time that the smells linger, before being replaced by another's smells, I wonder what to do with them; I wonder what these smells mean to someone who knows them; I wonder about the story behind them; I wonder about the unintentional intimacy of knowing a stranger's smell.

   Then I remember the intimacy of the smells I do know. Little post-it notes of fragrance and memories.

Waiting.

    Any period of time—a week, a weekend, a few hours—is, in memory, reduced to its most pronounced features. When you tell someone of an event or are asked to recall what you did last week, you comb your memories for these points of interest. If memory is a landscape, these points of interest are peaks, mountains punctuated by valleys. But what of these dips in your memory, the valleys connecting the mountains?

    Think about the times you you were doing nothing but waiting. Think of the times you have waited and constructed a little game for yourself or developed a connection with an object just to pass the time, only to forget about it as soon as you move on; think about the times you've waited for a friend outside a bathroom; think about the times you slept over at someone's house, but woke up before them and lay waiting; think about the times where you've waited for the bus, or waited on the bus; think about sitting in that waiting room for whatever appointment you scheduled.