“Wanderlust” by Maddy Ringo
There is a place where we exist, between Winnipeg and Ann Arbor and Toronto, a fourth home where we coincide for a moment, enough time for you to look at me all the way through my eyes into my memories and pull a confession before the wind changes and we are gone from each other again.
I come from a long line of weary travelers. We are women who wander, and never stop, and who sometimes run, like my great-grandmother who, at 16, freed herself from her father’s chokehold with a cast-iron pan to the head and escaped from Fort Wayne to Detroit, never looking back. My mother walked the world, hitchhiking through borderlands and spending days on crowded trains. She moved 300 miles from home for my father, settling in Canada. For generations we’ve marched across the west for peace and for justice, finding ourselves somewhere among the picket lines, the peaceniks, new industries, old towns, chosen family. This was how I came to know America; a country that never settles, always challenges, knit together by railroads.
In September, my first semester, I was running from something; the gray of the metropolis or the anger of my mother. I was building a new home south of the border, where the trees grew thicker and my lungs felt light in the air of a college town. The nights of my adolescence had been spent in city parks polluted by artificial light, company kept always by traffic noise, sailing home dazed in the fluorescence of an empty subway car, where the laws of private and public collapse often with close conversation, open prayer, secret sex, and suicide. I thought of this world often as I spent my first evenings with my back against the window frame of my new dorm room, staring at the wide campus full of little people like I were perched in a dollhouse looking out at grass made of felt and buildings of plasticine bricks.
We met on a cool October night, in the dim light of a downtown Toronto pub where you sat at the end of the table and you smiled at me so easily. As we walked down well-traveled streets you asked about my world, the one tucked into the palm of Michigan with its hills and diners and bungalows. I wanted to know about your world, before Toronto, a childhood spent in Winnipeg with its wintertime and its wilderness and your grandmother’s house in the country. Later that night we stood on the sidewalk outside a frat house while you smoked a cigarette and I talked to you about something precocious and probably crazy. You held my gaze so intently that I had to look away, afraid of the kiss that eventually followed our silence, so I looked up at the night sky. I told you I wished I could see stars from the city, how I missed camping trips full of constellations, laying out on the boardwalk bundled up in sweatpants and smoke-soaked long sleeves to keep the bugs away, with our eyes fixed above us. You said you’d also like to see the stars, that the big city was sad in that way, and for a second we stood there saying nothing, but I knew I wanted to say everything and that one day I would.
In November I saw you again, while I was busking on my favourite street corner down by the market. I had just let you slip into the comfort of a feeling long past, as five weeks nowadays is a lifetime, but now that I was back in the city, in the bustling of downtown Toronto, and your easy smile trailed on me as I strummed my guitar for the pedestrians, trying not to sing to you, I slipped into the comfort of time never having passed at all. The heart has a funny way of making time collapse like playing cards. With a beat of the wind I stumbled towards you, flimsy in the autumn breeze.
A few days later I waited in the train station draped in old clothes, my hair tied up in a messy ponytail showing off the hickey you had given me in my bedroom the night before, when the street lamps poured in yellow light through the shades. The campfire still clung to me, the lingering smell of my head pressed against your shoulder in the cold late autumn evening, which was colder than it could have been because the best I could build us out of tree branches and a torn up Toronto Star was smoke and embers. My memories of you draped my body like I were wearing your t-shirt home the morning after. In this way, I let myself hang between our world and the one that is lonesomely my own. Over the rolling of the tracks I leaned against the window in a silent smile of remembering, the half-slumbering melancholy of waking from an ecstatic dream. Ontario passed through smudged glass, breezing by forests, wildflowers, rows of lavender and sweet country towns, beautiful even just in passing once every blue moon when I bide my time on this very train.
As the winter set in I found myself curling into the cupped hand of December. I felt the season drawing me inward, toward the sobering quiet of my own company. At night when I laid awake I could place myself back in my tangled sheets, in that fourth place we made, the world where my darkness is held from behind and smoothed like snow melting under a warm hand.
Instead I woke alone and climbed outside into the familiar hum of dawn. In the chill of a midwest morning, my senses were awake in the cold, rushing my nerves with a pulse from my heart out to the fingertips that grasped a hot cup of coffee. Poorly dressed for the nip of a late sunrise in my jeans and a thin blue paisley scarf, the tip of my nose icy red, I sighed to no one but my own ears. My quiet breath hung around me in a cloud of deep stillness. Looking out at the evergreens among the dead and scattered branches, northward down the eye of an endless road, I wondered for a second if you would hear me if I yelled across the sky.
You appeared inside my world one December day, when you turned around toward me in the VIA Rail station in Windsor. I brought you over the Ambassador Bridge, the path with which I became so familiar as a child, passing back and forth between two homes. We drove through Detroit, treading the spirit of my mother’s footprints, to my new place with the hills and diners and bungalows. It shocked me to see you where I had come to know so much distance. You stood against the hazy picture of my everyday in sharp color. At first I found it hard to see you clearly,
to let my eyes focus and know you all the way out here. I introduced you to the dark of my winter, the soft loft of my dorm room bed, the creak of the ladder, the deafening drone of the heater at night, the warmth of my wobbly second-hand lamp. We took the long night drive through the country to my aunt’s house with the raucous family dinner and the broken kitchen sink. I watched your eyes attentively for signs of your comfort, letting you sleep through the mornings, speaking gently to you and slowly through frozen lips in the rural cold of Michigan midnight while we walked through the dead forest.
Our world became transient in this space. The nests of our endless conversation and comfortable silence now live on both sides of a border. I will continue to wander, finding you often in the bends of branches, the tops of evergreens, the glowing dusk, the whispering roads, quiet nights, stillness, candles, rolling papers. In my journey over state lines, through canyons and train tracks, rain and fog and snow and desert, you will not live under a pin in my map nor a stamp in my passport but as a memory of mine, the living and changing story on my tongue, a feeling under my skin that wakes under the moon.
I love you in the waves of the Huron that roll from your shore to mine. I love you in the sky that we share, under which I can warn you of a coming storm. I love you over 300 miles, foolish as it may be to keep part of myself tucked in a secret place so far away. I love you like the wildflowers that stop my breath even if only once in a while, for a few tender moments on this great American railroad.
Maddy Ringo is an artist from Toronto, Canada. She is a voice major in the SMTD and a singer-songwriter. Her writing is inspired by Southern gothic and beat literature, focusing on exploring the internal world within an alienating, industrialized society.
Artist’s Statement: “This piece is an open love letter to a guy I was involved with long- distance in the fall. I read this to him the last night before it all fell apart, when we stayed up almost the whole night before I drove him to the airport to go back home to Winnipeg. It’s about impermanence, and the way people and geography are intertwined.”
