Love Letter to Bow Trail Assessment Centre
Walking into the beige liminal space conjures an unexpected wistful affection. Sleeping vagabonds on dilapidated benches replaced with careful rows of medical professionals. The wheaten tile floors, though, still seemed disgusting. As if actually scrubbing the piss out of the heart of white trash travel was an impossibility.
“When there’s nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.” —Stars, “Your Ex-Lover is Dead”
“This is the last place I’d want to get a needle stuck in my arm.” My little brother Byron grinned at me, getting out of his car as we found ourselves walking into the newly renamed Bow Trail Assessment Centre to get our booster vaccination shots. The large, painfully boring and brunette building was just off of 14th Street and 9th Avenue. The building that all of Calgary would identify as obviously being the defunct Greyhound Bus Station Terminal.
Walking into the beige liminal space conjures an unexpected wistful affection. Sleeping vagabonds on dilapidated benches replaced with careful rows of medical professionals. The wheaten tile floors, though, still seemed disgusting. As if actually scrubbing the piss out of the heart of white trash travel was an impossibility.
We both go through the procedure by rote at this point. Proceeding with the bureaucracy of a life-saving strategem followed by a minor third stab. Byron was right — this was the last place I’d imagine getting a needle voluntarily lodged in my arm.
The image of office buildings and churches being hollowed-out and excavated for the sake of medical emergency has lost the romantically post-apocalyptic appeal. Though, the poetics of a place that was once a fulcrum for travel, albeit not a popular one, being transformed into worksite for this isolating pandemic are not lost on me.
I wave goodbye with a sore arm to Byron as he drives only a few blocks to his concrete studio apartment perched along 17th Avenue. I still have difficulty processing this — at only 19-years-old he has a steady job and moved out of our parent’s place to live on his own. Permanently etched into my mind as the chubby, prepubescent sibling with sticky hands and a love of now-extinct Flash games, in blinding contrast to the man who now embarrassingly stood taller than me and had his shit far more together to add. Where was I at his age, and now?
And I am here. Meandering, not exactly having a place to be, instead eyeing the former Greyhound cafe from the outside. Tinted windows attempting to hide the uncomfortable dining chairs and ram-shackled counters that have been touch-starved for years. Eyeing a past that no longer existed, loitering getting lost in it.
A few years ago, I was exactly here, boarding one of those Goliath buses. There were only a handful of trips which me and my ex-fiance Danielle took in our eight years together. I often found difficulty booking time off from the children’s hospice I worked at. The transit was cheaper than flying, however, and that was an essentiality to both of us. What you save in money you gain in the confines of neck pain and the cramped, sometimes painful half-sleeping for twelve hours straight before finally reaching the west coast’s engulfing oceanside and shared-room Airbnb’s.
No, there is no serendipity found at the forgotten gas stations pitstops, there isn’t enlightenment to be gained other than ever-present Samsara of uncomfortability that’s accented by each awakened pothole and depressed animal carcass of roadkill that’s driven past. Nobody would ever tell you that they miss the Greyhound. The journey is bullshit, the destination is the ecstasy.
And yet, in spite of everything, that wistful affection still lingered as I stood there in the middle of Sunalta. There was only nostalgia–a curious and misunderstood feeling. A dull sensation of longing that rides on the backs of memories; a profound ache when looking back on how things once were. I was younger, more open and less wise, not yet having a past to lose myself in.
The people were everything. How effortless it is to sketch the characters of the terminal, underneath the flickering halo lights: The bored wanderers reading The Metro, the runaway teen crying on their flip phone, the slow-moving elderly visiting adult children that didn’t think it was worth the ride, the massive backpack on skinny shoestringers, the invisibles. This is where I belong and it no longer exists.
There are multitudes of other vanishings and disappearances. Promised temporary hiatuses have inevitably turned into permanent deaths. The best I can do is retreat to paper. This is not the last time I am going to be booking a bittersweet appointment to get a jab at _Bow Trail Assessment Centre._Things look good now, sure, but they’re going to get worse again. For all of us.
I finally shake myself out of it, wondering how long I’ve just been standing here and overthinking to myself. I head back to my parent’s house alone. I continue to ruminate, opening and re-reading leatherbound _Moleskine_journals…
To be continued…
