Morning Walk, Basement Calls

The strange thing about waking early in summer is that it feels less like an accidental glimpse behind the scenery. Halifax at seven in the morning, before the offices unlock and before the harbor begins performing itself for tourists, has the look of a place briefly relieved of its obligations. The heat is already there, waiting. Not the dramatic heat of noon, but a low, ambient pressure, as if the day has been preheating for hours without anyone noticing.

Walking to work in that kind of weather creates the illusion that one has chosen a simpler life than one actually has. You move through blocks of old houses and convenience stores and buses idling at intersections, carrying only a coffee and whatever private inventory of concerns you've packed into your head. The city seems arranged entirely for your passage. Every other pedestrian becomes a character whose plotline has not yet intersected with yours.

This morning I found myself thinking about stories, which is perhaps unsurprising when a story is about to leave your possession and become somebody else's. Basement Caller will be published on July 1st in Flash Phantoms, which feels simultaneously imminent and impossible. The piece has already completed most of its actual life – the writing, the revising, the second-guessing, the period where you become convinced it is either secretly brilliant or catastrophically embarrassing depending on the hour. Publication is merely the moment the private object becomes public weather.

Grace and I doing well. Thanks to my association with her, I was featured recently in a small fashion event, of all things, which remains one of those experiences that feels slightly more plausible in retrospect than while it is happening. 

Maybe that's what these early walks offer: a temporary sense that life's various threads are not competing with one another but travelling side by side. The literary ambitions, the ordinary employment, the relationship, the strange little public moments, the private anxieties. They all accompany you down the same sidewalk.

By eight-thirty the spell is gone. The city resumes full volume. Emails. Deadlines. The heat becomes official. But for a brief stretch of morning, moving through Halifax under a brightening sky, it is possible to imagine that every part of one's life belongs to the same story, and that the story, against expectation, knows where it is going.