Zoe Loukia is a writer based in Toronto, Ontario. She recommends writing and writing and writing about your problems so much that you set them aside out of pure annoyance. And the discography of Judee Sill past 12AM.
I’m waiting on a letter from you, from a far away place, where the ground is red and the skies are a cloudless blue, with only dust from the dry heat. I find it astonishing that the world has so many ways of being. How the rocks in one place could scratch a diamond, while others can crumble in your hand. The world is smaller than it once was and a letter is a shoddy precursor to the speed of a text. But isn’t it so sweet to have the chance to see my words in my print, and touch the same envelope that I licked closed, a couple weeks prior to it arriving at your door? A couple of weeks ago I was a different person. I thought of different words, and believed them too. I wrote of sorrowful goodbyes and starts as fresh as the coming spring, I wrote of the person you made me become How my eyes had been bathed in a new light And my world seemed brighter in your image. Today, I see that the sky was always blue and my ground here is now green after the stretch of bleak white And the rain here isn’t so bad and the clouds bring way to new growth– The fog that was lifted was not solely your doing, but lake Ontario’s as well as spring was a phenomenon that existed long before you or I ever did but I believed then that every new experience for me was new to all. I’ve seen my home before, and thought I’d seen enough but for now, I like my rocks tough as the Canadian shield, enveloping me the cold lake that I’ve tossed rocks off of, that lay still at the bottom. I can dive in and find them any time, and I know they’re always there. The world will wait for me, and it can go on crumbling and enveloped in heat but the air is fresh here and the leaves are bright, and it was spring coming all along.