I gave birth to a universe at nineteen years old. I got on a Greyhound bus with my lover, who I will call Back to Black (B2B), a name I gave them to describe a love so instant — full of addiction, mistrust, lies, and abuse that we reasoned away as passion — that it could only be compared to Amy Winehouse's album of the same name. We headed toward the closest big city: Edmonton (Deadmonton or Oil-town). That's how the common-folk got around the prairies — by hurtling down its endless highways in a beat-up old Greyhound. The lack of air conditioning and locked anti-suicide windows made the ride so hot that passengers' thighs stuck to the gaudily upholstered seats, which hadn't been updated since the 1980s, and were stiff and scratchy like a towel with dried semen on it. There was always that middle-aged biker, sans bike, with his leather vest and Harley Davidson tattoos, offering his seatmate swigs off a forty half-assedly concealed in a paper bag. I remember the horizon seeming just a little out of reach, no matter how many hours we passed driving those dusty prairies roads, and the journey endless like maybe I'd continually be on the move. If the world's at large, why should I remain?

From nîtisânak by Lindsay Nixon ©2018. Published by Metonymy Press