day 2 – zoe

You meet so many people in a lifetime. Crossing paths for anything from a split second to a few months to aeons. If you were to connect the dots, you’d make a thousand constellations– a lifetime of connections. And whether you know it or not, each of these beings of light impart something. A gift, a thought, an inspiration, a lesson (even if it’s a painful one).

Years ago, in Nova Scotia, I met this girl named Zoe. Zoe was full of spirit. Zoe came into my life at a time when my life was, admittedly, pretty shit. I’d moved to Halifax the day of a massive hurricane, which left my ex and I stranded for days in a small cove along the coast. When the army finally came around and cleared the trees from the driveway, we went on a date night and in the parking lot of the cinema, he told me that he’d cheated on me. I remember it was raining. I remember watching the rivulets on the window and hearing the drops on the top of the car. I remember knowing before he told me. I knew long before he told me.

I stayed. And it took me a thousand days to stop imagining what had happened that night with that other girl. I wanted to know every single detail because I thought knowing every detail wouldn’t be as bad as the film that was playing on repeat in my head. But it doesn’t matter if you have every detail because the version in your head will always be worse.

It was awful. But still, I stayed.

After a few months, we moved out of the room in the cove to a small cabin in the cove to an apartment in the cove. There was so much damp in that apartment that mushrooms grew in the corner of our bedroom.

It was not a good year.

But eventually, I managed to pack that year up in a neat little package and store it somewhere on the top shelf behind the winter clothes and the shoe boxes full of old letters. And in the midst of that catastrophic shit storm, I met Zoe.

Zoe had a lazy eye and a shadow of a moustache and in my self-conscious 20’s, I could never quite look her in the eye but I remember being completely in awe of her. Total girl crush. One day, she invited a bunch of girls over to her place for an art day. In the front room of her house in Halifax, we set up tables with art supplies– strips of leather and paint brushes and an old sewing machine and glue sticks and glue bottles and stacks of magazines and paper scraps. Everything one needed to create something, anything. I sat in the corner of the room, stringing beads together and I watched her create. I’m the type of person who needs everything polished and re-read a thousand times or cropped perfectly before showing it to anyone (including my husband). I do not share my process. My process is private and self-conscious and messy. But I sat there in that corner and watched her and how seamless her process was and how there was an air of play about it and how she didn’t seem to be thinking at all. She was just doing without worrying about the end result. She was loving the process itself.

At the end of the day, she gave me her painting. She had no attachment to it– it was never meant to be hers.

I still have that painting. I love that painting. It’s everything that I am not. It’s care free and boundless and brightly coloured. It doesn’t have an ounce of self-consciousness. It’s both roaring and peaceful. It’s everything Zoe was.

I didn’t see Zoe much after that day. I moved to the valley and we lost touch. And then I moved back to Montreal and never saw her again.

She died last Wednesday. She was out for an evening jog and got hit by a drunk driver and now she’s gone. A dazzling light extinguished far too soon.

But she was a bright star in my life for a split second. And I’m so grateful that she was one of those million connections. I’m reminded today of the lessons she taught me and I plan to fully enjoy this creative process (even if only for her) because otherwise… what’s the point?

“One day, when I was agonizing over how utterly bad my writing felt, I realized: “That’s actually not my problem.” The point I realized was this – I never promised the universe that I would write brilliantly; I only promised the universe that I would write. So I put my head down and sweated through it, as per my vows. ” – Elizabeth Gilbert