Free Melly

Don’t ever call me Melly. Like EVER if you want me to still be your friend. The title is simply a pop-culture reference representative of how I feel...like a big, barnacle-crusted whale, flying through the air, splattering cold water on a blissed-out child actor as I belly-flop to freedom.

My sister got on a plane. My parents got on a plane. My condo is rented. And I am free. I’m an unbound, unfettered artist, sitting in Canmore, staring at the mountains and breathing the delicious fragrance of vanilla-jasmine body scrub. The vanilla-jasmine body scrub that Boyfriend hates but it doesn’t matter because he isn’t here to smell it.

No one is.

It’s just me.

Me and my creative work.

All alone.

With my gargantuan, nowhere-near-finished book.

*Blinks*

SWEET, MERCIFUL JESUS ON A ROCKING HORSE, SOMEONE SAVE ME!

Kidding. Two days ago, when I rented my condo and felt that head-rush of freedom, joy and possibility, I almost passed out. I haven’t felt this good since I was in Paris. For serious. It’s been four months since I’ve felt this goddamn good. Which is actually kind of lame, but I’m not going to quibble with the details.

If you flip it on its head, it only took me four months to recreate the experience of living my dream of being a full-time artist. Well...four months, a casual mental breakdown, a brush with bankruptcy, a relationship that sustained daily napalming and the overriding delusion that being 45 minutes west of the soul-sucking suburbs is somehow equivalent to Paris-Freaking-France.

Meh. Who’s counting?

Yesterday afternoon, I set up the Official Writer’s Garret. It’s my mother’s sewing area and since she’s not here to sew for the next six months, I cleared it out. I packed up bits and pieces from her mid-70s quilting phase, her early-2000s needlepoint period, the brief knitting moment from 2007 when she decided needlepoint was too stressful a hobby and the Ugly Reusable Shopping Bag incident of 2008.

Hideous cloth grocery bags in unnatural colours were the most recent innovation in a long-standing tradition of making anything and everything possible out of bedsheets. Curtains are the gold standard in that department, but there have also been strange bed skirt wrap things, table runners, place mats and a junior high prom dress or two. It’s no wonder I didn’t lose my virginity until I was 27.

That’s a lie, but the bedsheet obsession isn’t. And for those who are wondering about the thirty-year gap between the 70s quilting and everything else, those were her Children-Who-Can-Walk years. Not a lot of sewing happening then. A shitload of microwaving and multitasking, but not much sewing.

Anyhow, here I am. Writing in the mountains. Does it get any better than this? Well, yeah, because I forgot to bring chocolate or any form of dessert-like material. I may be forced to eat sugar straight from the 5 kg bag with a spoon. Whatever. It’s my process.