My imagination was a lifeline. It was where I felt the most unrestrained, unselfconscious, real. Not a visualization, far more natural. Not a wishing, but an understanding. When I was present with myself, I knew, without exception. I saw with startling clarity then. I miss that.
Private play was similar to acting, the sensation a sort of paradox. My reliance on my imagination has carried me through life. Perhaps I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since. “Acting, finding a character, it is like being possessed,” Samantha Morton once said. Later, when I was sixteen, her performance in Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar would become one of my greatest inspirations. The quietness, the subtlety, the power of silence.
Before my taste in cinema led me to films like Ratcatcher and Movern Callar, I was stuck on disaster films. I rented Anaconda on my eleventh birthday, not a disaster film, but close. Anna, a girl in my class, had come over for a sleepover. We took a cold, short walk from home, cutting across the boulevard to Isleville Street, the grass hard and frozen, crunching under our feet. The video store was in a small brick building. We moved through the aisles, assessing the covers. After the demise of VHS tapes and DVDs, it became a salon. After the salon, I am not sure. The building isn’t there anymore.
We trudged back home, clutching our prize, eagerly waiting for J.Lo, Ice Cube, and Owen Wilson to face off with the world’s largest and deadliest snake.
“They strike, wrap around you. Hold you tighter than your true love. And you get the privilege of hearing your bones break before the power of embrace causes your veins to explode.”
All the boys liked Anna, including me. Friends since primary, we went to school together and played on the same soccer team, the Halifax City Celtics. She was defense, right wing typically. We’d play Aladdin for hours on Sega Genesis. We’d jump on her bed, singing to Aqua in unison.
I’m a Barbie girl, in the Barbie world
Life in plastic, it’s fantastic
You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere
Imagination, life is your creation
I often dreamed of being Aladdin. But it wasn’t for the rug, or the wishes, or the teeny monkey, but to know what it feels like to delicately touch a girl. A sparkle of romance. I remember sitting on a wall with Anna after school, waiting for my mother to pick me up. We sat with our legs dangling, looking down the quiet, leafy street. I slid my body closer to hers, barely touching, feeling the concrete scrape against me. I went to place my hand on her thigh.
“What are you doing?”
Her body recoiled as if grazed with a soldering iron. She didn’t move after that, or speak, neither did I. Then her mom came and picked her up. Anna and I grew apart. She became very popular and I, as you can imagine, did not.
Still, it wasn’t long before I started exploring sexually, but invariably with boys. My first kiss happened with a boy named Justin. He looked like a character from The Lord of the Rings, Cate Blanchett’s elf son or something. He’d built a fort around his bed, and like little spelunkers we would crawl inside and make out to Kenny G. His family dog was small and white and the absolute worst, so mean. I would secretly feed the dog under the table, pinning my hopes on a soggy french fry, beseeching it to love, or at least tolerate, me.
We’d exchange notes at school. A new feeling, a flutter in my lower back, how did a little piece of paper with a few sentences alter me this way? Risky and exhilarating, it added a poetry to the days, transcending the mundane. Maybe not exactly right, but a path I couldn’t stop walking down. A teacher intercepted one note,
Meet me in the corner of the backfield and I’ll give you another massage.
My cheeks burned with embarrassment, frozen, but Justin, being a goddamn genius, said that he meant to write “message,” but spelled it incorrectly. The teacher bought it.
I was with Justin the first time I was called a faggot. We were huddled in the trees of Fort Needham Memorial Park. The location burned in my memory. Fort Needham was established during the American Revolutionary War. It looked out over what is now Halifax’s North End, where I grew up. Now, a bell tower stands atop the hill, built in remembrance of the Halifax Explosion. A major disaster forgotten by most of the world, but that quite literally shaped the entire landscape of my childhood, with evidence everywhere I turned.
The Halifax Explosion on December 6, 1917, involved a Norwegian relief ship, the Imo, and a French munitions ship, the Mont-Blanc, which contained 250 tonnes of TNT, 62 tonnes of guncotton, 246 tonnes of benzol, and 2,366 tonnes of picric acid. The cargo weighed six million pounds. Nineteen times the weight of the Statue of Liberty.
As detailed in John U. Bacon’s book The Great Halifax Explosion, ships in Halifax Harbour transporting ammunition to Europe typically flew a red flag to signify the contents, but due to the threat of German U-boats outside the harbor, on its arrival the Mont-Blanc did not. Only five people in the city knew what was on that ship. As the Mont-Blanc discreetly made its way into Halifax Harbour at dawn, the Imo was gearing up for its voyage. The Imo had been delayed a day, waiting for a late coal shipment, and its captain now ventured out, irate from the lost time. He sped along the incorrect side as he approached the narrowest part of the harbor. A game of chicken commenced. One captain made the last-minute decision to turn. So did the other, and they collided.
People rushed toward the harbor and their windows as giant smoke clouds rose, unaware of the Mont-Blanc’s contents. The ship burned for nearly twenty minutes and then detonated, leveling the entirety of the North End, more than 2.5 square kilometers destroyed. Over fifteen hundred people died instantly, left limbless, clothes ripped from their bodies. Vaporized. The force of the explosion caused a thirty-five-foot tsunami, sucking out bodies that would never be found. The blast was so extreme it was studied during the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb, a fact kept secret for decades.
Survivors screamed for help under the enormity of the destruction. Injured and dying. It was the morning, and woodstoves had been burning and the rubble ignited. The fire engulfed the ruins, people screamed for help, flames fast approaching. Survivors have said that their worst, tormenting memory is the sound of agony, the guttural screams coming from those trapped underneath. People were forced to flee, fire spreading. Parents leaving children, a lover leaving their soulmate. At least two thousand people died and over nine thousand were injured in what was the largest man-made explosion prior to the atomic bomb.
And that is where I sat kissing, decades later.
Together at the base of the conifers, an empty liquor bottle by our side, perhaps left by two other lovers. Touching. Kissing. Holding each other. We were two boys, and we looked like two boys.
“What are you, fucking faggots?” A group of teenagers were coming at us. Faggots. Faggots. Faggots.
They were bigger, menacing, cruel.
“Faggots. We are going to beat you up.”
“I’m a girl,” I told them.
“Oh then what are you, an alien?” They spat at Justin.
Something clicked, and we started to run. This wasn’t going to be just words. Our legs flailing as we sprinted down the hill. Electricity in the gut. Every step a Hail Mary pass.
I fled toward my babysitter’s house, thinking it a wiser choice than my own. There was no time to look over my shoulder, the voices kept coming. Miraculously, we made it to her porch. I could hear her Lhasa apso, Bubba, barking. The boys came to a stop. She came to the door, our panic clear. She looked to the group of boys, understanding coming to her eyes.
“Fuck off, you little shits!”
I can still see it, her yelling at them, it was rare to feel protected.
Growing up I was taught the Mont-Blanc explosion was an “accident,” a “mistake.” Two ships collided and one had explosives and that was that. It wasn’t an accident, though—it was a consequence of war.
The explosion created thousands of orphans overnight. People were unhoused and hungry. St. Paul’s Church served over ten thousand meals that month. My mother’s father, who died when she was sixteen, was the minister there for years. St. Paul’s evidently survived the blast, but the windows were shattered, along with all of the windows in all of Halifax, as many stood with their faces close, looking out at the rising smoke.
I imagine the carnage, the snow bloodred, an apocalyptic slaughter. Where did all that trauma go? Children, suddenly with no parents, walking in the midst of unspeakable devastation. What did queer people do after the tragedy? Those who lost secret lovers. The closeted grief.
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