Oh, Canada - Daniel Benson

While walking down a street I’d never walked before, don’t get me wrong, I get around, but I’m usually bound by the jurisdiction of the QuickChek corporation, which is to say the New York metropolitan area, because where else have you seen a fucking QuickChek. So there, in the land of poutine, rivers of maple syrup flowing as far as the eye can see, taking the shape of Justin Biebers mugshot. The promised land. Canada. French Canada. Montreal.  But it just looked like Queens with more signs I couldn’t read. A street, who the fuck knows what it was called. The sun is finished with that awful place, and soon I’ll be too. I see a poster advertising the Rocky Horror Picture Show, the lips are always tempting, but the show was in October, and it is now April, and three years later. The streets are dripping wet.  Not with piss, although the smell suggests otherwise. I hear almost nothing, enormous headphones I paid way too much for make sure of that. Rather fittingly, the song is Hometown Waltz by Rufus Wainwright. I waltz along, although I never did learn how to waltz, and I hear a voice, not my beloved Rufus. I haven’t spent much time with the man, but thus far I’ve yet to hear him utter the word I thought I heard, so I take off my overpriced head gear and apologize of all things to the wretched fuck who dared interrupt my stroll, and, a gentleman, he repeats himself: “Faggot!” apparently directed at me, and he  punctuates his statement with a gift of saliva on my favorite jeans. It seems he considered  the eyeliner and nail polish a dead giveaway to something I am only suspicious of, and, like  an act of some god I don’t believe in, but that clearly hates me, hail, perfect frozen crystals  fall from the sky, and while I stand on some street in the “Paris of North America” absolutely shocked, all I can do is watch the ice melt, along with a few tears, blackened by  my borrowed eyeliner, and wish I’d kept my headphones on.

Daniel Benson is a first year History major, minoring in Anthropology. These are his first writings published in ARCH magazine. Identifying as queer, his writing is often explorative of what it means to identify with a community, and how it can bond young adults together, while simultaneously separate them. Apart from writing, his interests include art, folk and indie music, and cool rocks.