Fall is so fucking beautiful especially in Vancouver.
I want to drink the sky’s velvet blue coat until I choke.
I want to eat the leaves, crunch the colours like candy corn until I bleed.
I was on the bus last week and I told the man sitting beside me
how unusually beautiful, vibrant and stunning fall was this year. Much more so.
He then began to explain to me that, in fact I did not feel what I do as a result
of the colours this year and the way fall is expressing itself. That there
really isn’t anything different about this year, it’s just my eyes have
adjusted coming from Ontario where the colours are always very exuberant in the fall.
I thought to myself, “No, actually, what I feel is valid. What I see is relevant,
and what I know is true.”
Why is there always a fucking man trying to correct how you feel and to
explain your emotions back at you like what you see and how you feel
about what you see isn’t in fact, real, that, “you feel that way because of this, not that.”
Really?
We kept chatting, he talked about his wife and him moving to
North Van from Ontario after COVID. I kept looking out the bus
window eye daggers penetrating every yellow, orange and red tree
as we moved through Stanley Park. A view that always has been more
satisfying and fulfilling to me than a man.
As we approached our stop at Park Royal, he grabs my hand,
looks at me deep in my eyes, pauses, and tells me
my smile is nothing he’s ever seen before (shocker) and asks
can he meet me again to talk more about the beauty of B.C.
It’s always my smile that gets them, sucks them in. It’s always the married ones.
I thanked him for the compliment, and politely declined his offer.
I’d rather sit through nine root canals and an appendectomy
than sit next to a man who wants to correct the way I see the world.
Fuck that.
I’ll stick with nature.
