Fragments of a Dissociative Universe

Before the drugs, before the streets swallowed me whole, I was already learning the architecture of survival. My first economy was marbles. What began as a child’s game quickly mutated into a primer on power. My friend and I engineered a betting table, a board with holes of varying sizes. The smaller the aperture your marble conquered, the greater your winnings. We had turned play into a system of gain, a microcosm of extraction. But beneath the commerce pulsed a raw, desperate need to belong. Each transaction was a futile knock on a door I knew was locked, a child’s hope that the right price might finally purchase entry. The older I grew, the more the truth solidified: I was an outsider trading with natives, learning their language but never earning a passport. The realization was complete: I was different. An outcast. It didn’t come as a surprise, more as a cold, final confirmation. I didn't accept it, not really... but I began to learn how to live with it, to build a life ar...

Most kids my age named astronauts or firefighters when you asked them what they wanted to be. I always said I wanted to be an inventor, a maker of things, someone who could fix or build and change the world with his hands. From what I remember, when I was young I already had a logical way of reasoning that rejected what I couldn't see or verify. I was an overthinker, turning simple things over in my mind until they became complex. The origins of eggs and honey, for instance, weren’t just facts but puzzles that felt vaguely unsettling. Where did eggs really come from? The process seemed messy and invasive. And honey? It was bee vomit, a fact I found both fascinating and deeply unappetizing. That same literal hunger for truth led me to demand my mother remove me from Catholic classes right after kindergarten, finding the stories unconvincing and the rules arbitrary. Years later, that thread of questioning would push me toward vegetarianism, another refusal to accept things at face v...

  By the time I was nine, loneliness had become my shadow, my closest companion. My mother, a woman navigating her own scarred past, had let a silence grow between us until our words were few and far between. I had an older brother, though he was never a brother to me, the guardian who offered no protection, the companion who offered no comfort. We shared no closeness. The dislike between us was a quiet, mutual pact, and so the evenings I spent alone became the rule, not the exception. Our mobile home was a small island, its thin walls no match for the endless percussion of the nearby gun range. The shots came like clockwork, day bleeding into night, their reports rattling through the hollow rooms. In that space, I was the sole ruler of an empty kingdom, a child with no one to answer to. The silence inside was a heavy blanket, punctured only by the steady, violent rhythm from outside… a twisted lullaby that wrapped itself around my bones until I grew to hate the very sound of it. I...

  I was eight or nine years old, and for once, life gave me a stage where I wasn’t the outcast. It was the day of our class ice-skating trip. For most kids, it was just another field trip. For me, it was a chance to shine. On the ice, I wasn’t the quiet boy in the corner, the loner with sadness stitched into him. I was good at skating. My body knew the rhythm of the blades, the way to lean into the cold and turn it into grace. For once, I had something my classmates could admire. The rink was alive with sound, the scrape of steel on ice, the laughter of kids pushing off too fast, the distant echo of teachers calling half-hearted instructions. My breath clouded in the air as I sped forward, weightless, the cold wind carving against my face. For a rare moment, I felt free, almost untouchable. Then it happened. A flash, a slip, a brutal snap from joy to horror. I went down hard. The world didn’t just tilt, it detonated. Pain exploded through my skull, white-hot and electric, as if...

  It was Halloween night. I was six or seven years old, just another kid with a cheap costume and a bag that grew heavier with each door we hit. The streets smelled like wet leaves and wax from half burned candles, the cold air sharp against my face as I ran from house to house with the others. My friend’s older sister trailed behind us, a reluctant teenage chaperone half distracted by her own thoughts, but close enough to pass for safety. That year, adults had only just begun whispering about “stranger danger.” To us, though, the world still felt mostly harmless, sugar coated by the thrill of free candy and the rush of running through the dark. And then the car appeared. It slid into our orbit slow and deliberate, too slow for a night where everything else was chaotic and fast. The headlights cut across the pavement, washing over our little group. The car rolled up beside us and stopped. I was the closest. The driver’s door opened with a dull metallic click. He didn’t get out. Ins...

Dated October 27, 1988, this clipping reports the arrest that shattered our community, speaking of at least 30 victims. By 1982, I was four years old, and the small world I knew was dismantled. My mother had met a man, mostly unemployed, a drug user, an alcoholic. He was another mouth to feed, another weight strapped onto her shoulders, though he carried none of it himself. Not long after, we packed up what little we had and left Napierville for  a small community called Ruisseau Des Noyers . Her boyfriend moved with us. To outsiders, it looked like a mobile home park, but it was a strange mixture of the well-kept and the trashy, a paradox stitched together between an acorn field and a forest on one side, and a gun range on the other. That range became the pulse of the place. From morning until dusk, the air shuddered with bursts of gunfire, every crack echoing across the park, ricocheting off the trees and seeping into my bones. That noise became the rhythm of my childhood, a soun...

  The newspaper clipping I would later find didn't just report a death; it documented a cover-up. The article coldly noted that when a photographer tried to reach the crash site, 'the authorities of the company... prevented him from taking any pictures.' That single line, buried in the text, was more telling than any headline.                      I have no memory of my father. He exists for me the way a rumor does...an outline traced in someone else’s voice, a silhouette behind glass. His name was Mario Yelle, and by the time I could hold a single coherent thought, he was gone. I was two years old when he died, leaving only the strange, absolute silence where a man used to be. My mother carries the images for both of us. She tells me I was once a different boy: open, trusting, loud in the way small children are loud about everything. “He always slept a lot and cried to go outside,” she says, as if reading from a tender confess...

I didn’t arrive in this world with a cry. I arrived with a flaw, and by C section. The first thing my body knew wasn’t the warmth of a mother’s chest or the rhythm of her heartbeat. It was the cold, sharp slice of the surgeon’s blade, the tug and pull of being lifted from a darkness that had turned against me. Then, the antiseptic sting of a hospital air. The smell of disinfectant, blood, and cold metal clung to everything, heavy and merciless. July 1978, the day I was born, was also my mother’s birthday. A cruel irony, as if fate wanted to etch a scar into the calendar before I even opened my eyes. I was too big for the narrow tunnel of the womb, and inside that cramped darkness, my foot had twisted itself crooked. My very position was a problem. So when they cut me out, their solution to my body’s first failure was as immediate as it was brutal. They broke my tiny bone so they could set it straight. Imagine that. Your first experience of the world is not a gentle welcome, but the cli...

The world seemed to stop when darkness fell. Winter of ’16. Okanagan was frozen solid, not the kind of cold you shake off with a hoodie and a coffee, but a bone cracking stillness that made every breath feel like broken glass. Just me, thirty five, locked in a rented room that smelled of mildew and stale smoke, already feeling like my expiration date had passed years ago. Days weren’t much brighter than the nights. I pruned frozen vineyards for contract, pay good money if you kept the blades moving. Piecework. Every cut counted. They gave me blocks and left me alone. Just me, the shears, and miles of sleeping vines whispering in the wind. No chatter, no voices, only steel on wood and frost under my boots. I was fast, precise. The kind of worker they didn’t need to check on. All it bought me was another night to burn. Ritual time. Same every night. The only clock I obeyed. On the milk crate I called a table: a dented metal bowl, a Bic lighter, a bag of weed that reeked like skunk roadki...