more_than_nothing raze you were born the day before halloween. you were fifteen when i met you. you sat crosslegged on my basement floor and listened to me sing and play piano while gord tore up his fingers on the strings of my shitty acoustic guitar. you told me i sounded like eddie vedder. your hair was yellow. it looked like you hadn't washed it in a week. you laughed when i screamed. i still have your laugh on tape. it's the best bit of music we made that night. when you were sixteen, your hair was brown, and your brother was trying to hide from the camera your parents bought you for your birthday. you told him he'd have to get used to you filming around the house. your father rolled a joint as thick as a finger and lit it up. he looked like me twenty years before i knew i was going to look like anyone. gord wrestled the camera away from you. you hid your face. you filmed the outside of your house while he sat on the front porch carving pumpkins. you zoomed in on the pumpkin you carved yourself. "he looks kind of cute and stupid," you said. "that's how i like my pumpkins to look. and my boyfriends." your mom came home from the liquor store. you filmed her pulling into the driveway. "how was work?" you asked her. "it was work," she said. there were fake spiderwebs all over your house and real spiderwebs inside your barbecue. you sang to the fish in your aquarium. you filmed your cat. you told the camera, "her activities include eating, sleeping, and begging for anything." she didn't have to beg. she had food in her bowl. she ate and you made her glow with red light. you filmed the clouds. you filmed your front lawn. you filmed your brother talking on the phone. "hopefully he won't notice," you said. "i wonder if he can feel us staring at him." he could. he flipped you off. two days after your birthday it got dark early. you were alone in the kitchen. you told the camera everything. you talked to it like it was a person. you said you hadn't done much with the day and you didn't know what to do with what was left of it now. your bedroom walls were covered with pictures of your favourite singers. you listened to the first blind melon album and filmed a map of the world. you wanted to see australia. the closer you got to where you wanted to be, the more impossible it seemed. you cut off the song you were listening to before the drums kicked in, with shannon hoon whispering, "get me out of here, get me out of here man, get me out of here." you wanted to keep a video diary. you only stuck with it for a few days. you didn't film your father threatening to burn down the house with everyone still in it. you didn't film your mother leaving him. you didn't film gord calling you a crazy scorpio bitch. you didn't tell the camera how it made you feel. you wore long sleeves in the summer, and you pierced your lower lip, and you kept dreaming of the sixth largest country in the world more than nine thousand miles away from where you were. i always felt this distance between us. i was your boyfriend's best friend, at least for a while, but i was never your friend. i got the feeling you didn't like having me around. when we were all eighteen, you called gord's house from another city. you wanted to talk to everyone. you started screaming at tyson when he told you i was too messed up to come to the phone. it was one of those old phones that didn't give much away to anyone who didn't have their ear pressed right up against it, but you were loud enough for me to hear, "what did you do to him?" and, "what did you make him take?" that surprised me. i was rocking back and forth with my head in my hands after tyson bullied me into taking a second hit of e so he could steal my money and see how fucked up i got. breathing felt like something i had to learn how to do all over again. he was asking me questions like, "what kind of animal are you?" i couldn't answer. i couldn't speak. but i could still register surprise. when i snorted too much ketamine on gord's nineteenth birthday, i walked out of the coach house that doubled as his bedroom saying, "get me out of here, get me out of here, get me out of here." i was the singer in a song you loved, but i didn't know it, and you couldn't hear me. i knew what kind of animal i was that night. i was the kind of animal that couldn't stand up anymore. everyone thought i was dying. my pupils were shaking. my body was shaking. i couldn't focus my eyes. i couldn't talk. i couldn't cry. but i tried. gord brought me into a room that had a fireplace. you weren't seeing him anymore, but you followed him. tyson grabbed your camera and turned it on. he filmed me. my eyes smeared with black eyeshadow and rolled back in my head. words that weren't words spilling out of my mouth. i convulsed and puked up air. it made him laugh. he took the rest of the white powder i paid for out of my pocket and snorted it with jay in the coach house. he drank the rest of my beer. he left me there to die. he called me the next day and said, "you owe me big time, man. i really took care of you last night." you stayed. when i could see again, i saw you sitting on a couch next to gord, your legs bunched up beneath you just like they were that first night in my basement. it was just the three of us. gord gave me a frozen carrot that wasn't frozen anymore. it was cold and soft and small and awful, and it was the best thing i'd ever tasted in my life. ​ the last time we talked it was the first time i'd been in the same room with you since we were teenagers. you were giving me back a piece of my past you didn't know you'd been caring for. we talked for two hours. you'd never talked to me for more than five minutes. "it's been a while since i had a conversation that lasted this long," i said. "i've never had a conversation that lasted this long in my life," you said. i got to be the camera that day, almost twenty years after yours stopped working. you told me everything. you said you hadn't gone a day without smoking weed since you were thirteen. you spent more years than you wanted to admit living with a man who made you feel like nothing. your body was letting you down. but you got out of that relationship. you were starting over. you were learning to be kind to yourself. you still loved halloween. you were putting up decorations for the kids who lived on your block. i told you it was strange to talk like this. not in a bad way. just strange. i always got the feeling you didn't like me. "no," you said. "it was me. i didn't like myself." i hope you do now. because you are so much more than nothing. 211021 what's it to you? who go blather from