If Your Sadness Were A Lake

by A.S.

As I paced around the bedroom of my very first apartment away from home, I was conscious of an urge to cry creeping up my throat and pressing into the backs of my eyes. There were no tears there, just a sense that I wanted to cry.

This would be my last night in this apartment. My parents were arriving the next day with my brother to help us move into our new, shared apartment. 

The place was a mess because I had put off packing. Not by a conscious decision or an unconscious failure to remember to, but through pushing away any thoughts of moving so that I could pretend nothing was changing. It was a terrible strategy to cope with the emotions welling up inside me. But if there was one thing I learnt to master in this place, it was to bottle things up until it's too late. 

I looked at the spacious apartment, its beige carpet and popcorn ceiling, its plain white walls that I had kept mostly unadorned. I looked out of the huge windows and onto the building across, a beautiful stone structure with ornate wooden doors and an air of importance. A relief sculpture of a head with wild hair peered from the top of the building. It looked mythological somehow. All of it was bathed in the orange hue of the streetlights, mixing in with the pallid yellow of the building lights. My lovely green couch was there, all modular and mid-century modern. My grey Ikea couch, perfectly inoffensive and functional. All my books on the bookshelf. My standing desk that I never used, but that I had rather overconfidently set up looking out from the large windows, assuming I would do work on it. Most of my work was done either reclining on the green couch or laying on the floor in a sleepless daze. On those days, I would work through the night on some hellish essay, blurting out three, five and even ten thousand words in a single night, references and all, as my pushing away of everything periodically caught up to me. 

I went into my bedroom, which used to be our bedroom, and looked at the clothes lying on the floor. My sweaters, my jeans, my insufferably niche soccer jerseys. There was a large floor bed spread out beside the twin bed in the corner. The spaciousness of this bedroom was far too good for me. I made no use of the space beyond what was absolutely necessary. Both the double floor bed and my twin bed fit comfortably there. The roominess was exactly the problem; it allowed me to sidestep my clothes rather than have to confront them head on. 

“I have to do something about these tears, get them out of me somehow,” would be a rough translation of what I thought as I looked out the large bedroom window. I’m translating because I don't always think in whole sentences, this just took the form of abstract notions. And so, I pressed myself to think hard about the saddest things that had happened to me here. Anything to get the necessary tears out while I was alone. There is nothing more embarrassing to me than feeling things, much less feeling them about a place, much less feeling them in front of my parents. 

It didn’t work. I couldn’t cry. Leaving wasn’t final enough yet, in my mind. And so, I sat down and waited for my parents to arrive, to let them into the building. 

A short greeting took place, not many words exchanged. They mind this, I think. But they’re too nice to say anything. My mother said something that cut through me recently. We were at a family gathering with many distant relatives and family friends.

“Your father asked me, ‘Did we go wrong somewhere? Why is he so distant and quiet?’. I told him he is distant and quiet with everyone and it’s not just us.” 

This wasn’t true. It was only with my family that I was distant and quiet. It takes me a while to open up, but I could never do it with them. I feel deeply embarrassed about even my achievements and the happy things in my life, unable to speak about them. It devastated me to know that this was more noticeable than I thought. I thought I was just a quiet person to them, but the fact that they thought about it as a problem or worse, as a failure on their part ashamed me endlessly. 

**********

I moved into the apartment in 2022, starry-eyed and naive, with my high school girlfriend. Both of us had lived most of our lives in cities that didn’t really have any tall buildings, so I remember going up an Edmonton street with her for the first time. My parents were in the front seat. We had come to look for apartments. 

“This is a real Big City.”

I can’t remember if it was my mother who said it or my ex-girlfriend. What I do remember is that I was very excited and when I turned to look at my ex’s face, she was too. I remember thinking that one of the roads leading up from the Walterdale Bridge looked like San Francisco, because of all the buildings on an incline. It seems funny to me now. This giddiness wasn’t due to any lack of travelling on my or her part. It is just that all our previous travels had been with parents, with no real independence to roam. This would be different though. So even though Edmonton was no Madrid or Mumbai, unlike the latter two, I could walk out the door and go anywhere I liked in the city. No itinerary and no list of places to see. 

That view from my window is my sharpest memory of the first night in the new apartment with her. Making our Ikea furniture while playing music. Texas Sun by Khruangbin came on. She said it felt very appropriate, like a song at the start of a movie. I was glad. 

Then she got mad at my terrible furniture-making skills and we argued. She was worried I wouldn’t be ready for life on my own and everything I did wrong from this point on would be a confirmation of that for her. A few days ago, I was supposed to have some mail delivered to me, and since I would be moving into the new apartment soon, I decided to have it delivered there. However, I forgot the unit number and called her to ask if it was 303 or 309. 

“You can’t do this anymore. You have to know these things. What if you fuck up something really important and it ruins something for us, gets us into huge trouble, have us stuck in debt or something because you put the wrong address for an important cheque?”

She was stressed out and catastrophizing, but back then her anxieties, no matter how extreme and unlikely, were gospel truth that I was not allowed to question. Of course she was, but I do wish she was kinder. A strange pang coursed through my chest, a wish for things to be different and less stressful. It would grow into an unbearable ache by the time I could speak about it out loud. 

After we finished arguing about the furniture and finally got it done, we went to sleep incredibly tired. We woke up just before dawn and realized we had no bowls yet. So we had cereal in plastic tupperware, looking out onto the official-looking building as the reddish hues of a September dawn appeared in the sky. Our sparsely furnished apartment laid behind us, not yet feeling like home. 

Even though I remembered this moment, no tears came into my eyes. I lay down on my bed and decided to play music to help me go to sleep. If Texas Sun by Khruangbin was the soundtrack to me moving in, Jessica Pratt’s music was the soundtrack to me moving out. I had listened to her music during my last days working at my family’s furniture store over the summer. There was something that felt so appropriate about her bittersweet music for that moment. While the work was incredibly hard, I had started opening up emotionally with my coworkers for the first time. As usual for me, I had been too withdrawn for the first two months. Now it was a bit too late for any of us to actually get to know each other, but it was just enough for me to see a hint of their depth and emotional state. It was also going to be a transitional moment for me. 

When I left the warehouse, I would go to the last year of my undergraduate degree, where pivotal decisions about my life were waiting for me. As Jessica Pratt’s haunting voice played in my ears, I assembled together the last few pieces of furniture. Then, when it came time to say goodbye, I paused the music and shook hands with the warehouse manager, who was immensely depressed throughout the time I worked there. He would ask me questions like “Do you know when you finally become happy in life? I’ve never been happy.” Mostly I would laugh and say “I have no idea”, but as I opened up, last time I told him he needed to take a vacation to Vancouver Island, since he worked two jobs and was always tired. 

“So, guess it’s time for you to leave now, eh? Take care, man. Don’t forget working in the warehouse.”

“I will. Might come back next year.”

“Don’t, it’s miserable here. Go to Spain like you said you wanted to.”

He left after saying that. There was something melancholic about this whole situation. In three months, this was all the emotion we had managed. It was also touching in its own way, I suppose. 

Jessica Pratt was also the soundtrack to my five hour bus ride back to Edmonton. 

It is hard to describe the emotions I felt as I listened to her voice and looked out my window at that familiar view, contemplating the changes I had undergone in the three years that I had lived here. She writes sad music, but in a deeper sense than the sadness one feels from say, a memory or an experience. If the sadness inside you were a lake, Pratt’s music is a gust of wind making ripples on the surface. Her lyrics are usually abstract, swirling shapes rather than sentences that describe a scene. Like any good abstract painting, they invite you to see an emotion or a scene, or just let the shapes flow around you and create an ineffable moment of emotional specificity that emanates from the work of the artist, but is entirely yours to keep.

**********

We were at the train station once, coming back from somewhere, possibly me going to pick my ex-girlfriend up from her late class and walking back with her so she wouldn’t have to take the train alone at night. I got a call from my father. His voice was hoarse. 

“Are you at home?”
“I’m about to be. Why?”

“Call me when you’re home.”

I somehow knew exactly what it was going to be. My grandfather had been visiting us in Canada over the last summer, but he had severe pain in his back for reasons unknown to us. My aunt, who is a physiotherapist, tried to identify the problem, but came up blank. In the end, he had to go back to India since he couldn’t get medical treatment here as a non-citizen. It was probably for the best anyways. Even if he were a citizen, there was no chance a doctor would even look at him for at least a year. As my grandpa’s pain got worse, my dad made the decision to go back to India to take care of him. Before he left, he told me to be prepared for potential financial troubles.

“I’m going back to India for a long time,” he explained. “Even though I’ll be working remotely, I don’t know how good of a job I can do, and if I can’t do a good job, I don’t want to be a burden on your great-uncles, so I don’t know if I’ll keep my job.”

I remember I had been a little bit exasperated by this. He had a tendency to always talk about the worst-case scenario as though it were the more likely one in any given situation in order to prepare us. It usually only made me anxious, especially when I didn’t know it was an absolute worse-case scenario. This seemed a little much even by his standards. My great-uncles would never fire him. Especially not right now, while his dad was ill and his family still not fully settled, and he probably wouldn’t be gone for that long anyways. 

Listening to his voice this time, I knew things had changed. Something big had happened and I was tensed up on the way back. I wish I could have opened up to my ex and told her exactly what I felt, let her soothe me in some way, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. All I told her was that I needed to talk to my dad, that it was serious. When we got home that day, I sat down on the gray couch and video called him while she started doing something in the kitchen. 

For the first time in my life, I saw my father cry. He was sitting on a hospital bench, eyes reddened by tears. My grandfather had multiple myeloma, an aggressive and incurable form of blood cancer. We had assumed his back pain was a hairline fracture, because he had sustained a fall from a ladder. Of course, he had not told anyone about it until much later. It turned out that his bones were weak because of the cancer. My dad explained all this to me through tears, at times needing to pause in between sobs. Gradually, he calmed down and I said “It will be okay,” or something utterly unhelpful like that. He eventually started explaining to me what multiple myeloma is and that any treatments were incredibly expensive, but that he would try his hardest to get them. All of this gave him solace, I think. As I write this, I realized that this is also how I seek comfort when I find something to be sad. If someone else is sad about the same thing as me, it helps me to describe the problem and how to fix it, to take charge. After a while, he said he would go talk to a doctor and we said goodbye. 

I looked across the living room, to the fluorescent-lit kitchen, at my ex-girlfriend. She came and sat down beside me, and I started to tell her that my grandfather had cancer, but I got one sentence out before I burst into tears. She held me for what felt like ten seconds and told me it’ll be okay. 

There was so much I wanted to say at that moment. I wanted to tell her that I felt sad at the idea of losing my grandfather, but that I also felt like a horrible grandson and son for being so emotionally distant. Tell her that I felt as though I didn’t even deserve to be sad because I could count on my hands the amount of times I had called back home since I moved out, that I was enraged no one seemed to notice that this fact made me a bad person, enraged that the world seemingly had no reaction to my badness. I was too emotionally stunted to have the words to express that then. 

It was partially her fault. She often told me my problems were small compared to hers, that they didn’t really matter as much, that I had nothing to be anxious or sad about. The first statement was true. I believed at the time that the second and third just followed logically from that. It was partially my fault. I rarely bothered to explain anything about my emotional state or needs to her and wasn’t good at it if I tried. It was partially because of my childhood. I don’t even know how to begin talking about that. It wasn’t abusive or anything, just emotionally stunting in the way any boy’s childhood can be, although perhaps I was naturally predisposed to being emotionally shut off. 

**********

There were only a few things left to pack now. My girlfriend had come with me, ostensibly to help, but mostly because I just wanted her company. We slowly shuttled things to my new apartment. Once we were done, the apartment was mostly empty and clean, devoid of all my things, basically in the exact state it was when I opened the door three years ago. To my horror, the sense of familiarity remained stuck to its walls, to the floor, to the light coming in through the windows. I had hoped that my things disappearing would mean that this place would become just another apartment building again, but it wasn’t the case. 

I kept hoping against hope. It’s the two bar stools, I thought. That’s why it still feels familiar. It’s the shoes at the threshold, no wonder it still feels like I could just put my bag down and go nap in the bedroom. I kept taking pauses in between the work of moving and cleaning, feeling emotion well up inside me again. From my girlfriend’s perspective, it must have been like having a dog that keeps looking out the window, really concerned about something. At this point, the tiniest thing made me want to cry. For example, I took my shoes off before going onto the carpet, but my girlfriend forgot. 

“Oh you took your shoes off? Sorry, I forgot.”

“It’s okay, I took them off more out of habit than anything.” 

Why did this make me want to cry? I have no idea. Maybe it’s the fact that I cared for the place still, that it mattered to me not to get the carpet dirty. Even acknowledging I felt any emotion about it made me sad. 

Finally, the time came. We had cleaned everything, taken everything. All that was left was to return the keys. I knew I had to cry, but I had my contacts in, and I needed to confirm it was okay to cry in them. It seemed to be perfectly fine to do. At that point I put my head down on the kitchen counter and murmured to my girlfriend, “I feel really sad, I need a moment”. 

“Of course, my love. Here, let’s sit down.”

We lay down together on the bare carpet and I finally cried. I tried to explain to her why it was so sad for me. 

“I’ve just… had a lot of important things happen to me here-”

“I know and it’s okay. You can take your time.” 

“I can’t find the words right now, but I will write about this, and you will be the first one to read it. She smiled and told me she would love to. 

After taking a good, long look at every room, we stepped out. As I was locking the door, she walked down the hallway to the elevator, and she looked so cinematically framed from where I stood, at the end of a liminal space in a cool-lit hallway.