trish tender_square was short for patricia, an abbreviated name for such a tall woman. she was my neighbour; the aunt to my best childhood friend who visited from newmarket. trish worked at scotiabank, where i kept a savings account, an accumulation of rolled loonies from the belly of my ceramic teddy bear. she drove a k car like candi's. lived with her mom and one of her brother's one house away from ours. when trish was working, she’d let us hang out in her room and brea and lia and i would sit on the sheet of her dusty pink bed, run our fingers along her trinkets, close our eyes and listen to her meditation tapes. we'd call the free bell phone service from her phone and listen to our daily horoscopes, trying to picture what our futures would look like. trish had hair cropped to her chin, looked like an eastern european model with her translucent skin and cobalt eyes. she was shy and introspective. the youngest in her family, a family that had endured so many tragedies: a lost brother before she was born, who accidentally asphyxiated on his own sickness as a child; a father who slowly faded in a living room chair with parkinson’s; a schizophrenic brother she cared for, who worked as a bag boy at the grocery next to the bank. we didn’t know how depressed she was. at 28, she jumped from the eighth-floor balcony of another brother’s apartment while visiting him in toronto for christmas. brea and i never attended the funeral, the family was quiet about the circumstances. but lia allowed brea and i to each take something from trish’s room to remember her by. i wish i still had that porcelain circular box painted with flowers to keep lucky coins in. because the older i get, the more i realize how much of life comes down to chance, how randomly it’s determined that some of us will make it out of the darkness alive where so many others falter. 211122 what's it to you? who go blather from