It’s June and I’m in the basement of a YMCA in downtown Toronto learning how to play group card games on rainy days. It’s for my new job as Office Manager at a camp in Parry Sound. After months of applying before graduation this is the big job I have with a not for profit, in my field. Some friends warn that Parry Sound might be too isolated for me at such a fragile time but I shrug them off. I wanted to escape the constant reminder of being the sister of the funny dead kid they met in the summer he stayed with me in that 7 bedroom house on Robie Street, where we worked together at a vegan restaurant and sipped on Oland’s on the balcony of Kate’s rom while she stayed at her boyfriend’s place.

The camp was supposed to be for underprivileged inner city kids, that’s why I wanted the job. When we get up to Parry Sound, I mean myself and all the new and old camp counselors and staff- although I make it clear to anyone listening that I am NOT a camp counsellor but a degree holding manager, it turns out just the first two weeks are the free weeks for the Jane & Finch crowd, a term of which I now realize implies the poorest city kids in Canada who have a lot of fun eating grilled cheese sandwiches in a big cafeteria and canoeing daily in the beautiful sunny water. I love that for them cause this is my first time at a camp too. Then it's time to make room for the real paying guests- professional campers and the pecking order that comes with returning with the same group of kids and no parents every year.

I stay in a little cabin by myself with an office space attached where I do all the bookkeeping and procurement for the tuck shop. In between reading Jeffery Sachs and other important development economic tomes -remember that at this time I had not read a novel or any fiction for the past 5 years in an attempt to convey my utter devotion to becoming part of the academy - I canoe with my new friend Laura, write letters to Kathryn and Kate and listen to too much Coldplay while crying myself to sleep in the dusty and yet still humid tiny wooden room. I wait for my weekly phone call ration where I call my stepdad or his mom. I look forward to the trips to town to buy supplies for the camp at Canadian Tire and the Cash and Carry and update the bank book at the branch, allowing for some time to browse through the book stores filled with beautiful handmade cards and other Group of Seven art I am only now encountering for the first time in my life. Georgian Bay is really like nothing I’ve ever seen before, it’s beautiful like Banff but hot and sticky like a beach with the calmest tourists I had ever encountered, even at the Don Cherry restaurant where the staff went out drinking a couple of times. It should of been fun and I should have loved it. I started teaching yoga classes and mountain biking because those were things I knew how to do and the kids were always bored with what they had on offer at the camp. I started canoeing every morning with Laura. But every night in that little wooden coffin, I would close my eyes and see a zombie version of Justin who would try to talk to me. I couldn’t sleep, so I got seizures. The longer this went on, the harder the seizures would be to hide and I would call in sick – for a camp I lived at. I asked for more phone time but it was denied cause then all the staff would get extra phone time and who would work?! Weeks in this beautiful idyllic place went by and I really tried to love it but I was so tired and haunted that eventually I was fired or quit or something. I think I asked for a break and the adults in charge who’s faces and names have long ago escaped me, passively-aggressively suggested I wasn’t cut out for the job. In the middle of the night they silently dropped me off at the bus stop in town to get back down to Barrie to make sure no other staff or campers would make a fuss about my departure. I managed to get a quick call to GG who promised to meet me at the Barrie end, which she did with her friend Sharon. I was a mess, crying and convulsing but you know the way GG is, she pretended not to notice so I could try and regain some composure.

At that time GG and her bestie Sharon were big gamblers. When GG visited me in Halifax at one point, she would put $20 in my hand to occupy myself at the slot machines in the waterfront casino before a buffet dinner where I ate more food than I ever had on my $20 a week meal budget all through undergrad. She would always come to dinner with a few extra hundreds she had won while I was just so pleased with myself that I could stretch that $10 for hours (I saved the other half for bills) and  would find a well lit corner to do the readings for my classes for the remaining hours. We stopped in a big casino resort, Casinorama, on the way from Barrie to Kingston and while the two of them were winning downstairs I had one of the most memorable showers and naps I’ve had in my life because they made the zombie Justin disappear from behind my eyelids for a full 48hours.

After a few weeks of tagging around in the background of GG’s crowd of other retired friends and siblings- I was really enjoying the retired life of matinee plays, early flavourless dinners, naps, church and casinos but I was still only 24 and needed to start a career before I could enjoy all this good shit. I applied for all my dream jobs at the UN, the Red Cross, Amnesty International and WUSC where I had been volunteering at Dal but nothing. 

I did end up getting a job as a breakfast waitress at the Howard Johnson on the waterfront and the only thing I can remember were the tips being terrible. A new stone fired pizza place opened up right downtown and I got hired there as the head server in the fall when all the Queen’s students were returning. The weeks are a blur but consisted of me heading to work at about 11am, taking a break and reading a book along the waterfront park that had a view of the Fort, back to work for the dinner shift, after work drinks at a bar nearby with my boss and coworkers, then on the weekends my boss would host a cocaine fueled party at the stripclub down the street (away from the Queen’s kids) and I would wake up at one of my coworkers apartments (or with my boss in the restaurant) and repeat. It’s difficult to explain the headspace I was in at that time. I felt numb. I also kept seeing that zombie Justin walking down Princess street or in one of the bar crowds, never at the strippers though. He wasn’t that same metal slab zombie from before, now he looked regular with unrotten skin, barely even acknowledging that I could see him, looking past me as I tried to catch his gaze. Despite giving into the inevitability that I could die at any moment based on any dumb decision I made, this just didn’t happen. It just kept going on. I’m not sure if I was very sneaky (I doubt it), or if GG just didn’t want to bring it up because I was showing up to work everyday and doing chores around her house (when I was there) but she didn’t. I could really fuck up my life and no one would notice because I was no longer responsible for anyone and nobody was responsible for me. Freedom baby.

Part of the reason I didn’t want to go home (GG’s) was the phone. My mom (GG’s now ex daughter in law) would call me multiple times a day loudly and tearfully re-explaining that she had lost everything in life and that she was suing my stepdad and myself to be compensated for all the choice stuff of Justin’s I had burned in a fire – spoiler alert, there was no fire in the sorting of Justin’s stuff. She was not doing well, drinking and taking anti-depressants all day long. I don’t know how she got to work everyday.

One day after waking up to a massive headache beside a stranger in a part of Kingston I didn’t recognize, I could see this could very well turn into the rest of my life and started to plan an escape before I could end up like my mom. With the only Canadian job interview being at a call centre in Kingston – thanks but no, (I had already done that at Telus, when I had to take a semester off to pay for tuition and moved back to Calgary) I looked further a field in less competitive sectors, teaching English as a Second Language. The best offer I got was airfare AND a salary in Khartoum. I happened to have some friends from southern Sudan and they encouraged me to take it and report back on the conditions. Since I was ready to die in a blaze of glory, I decided why not? There were a lot of perks for me at that time, the main one being that a Sharia Law country would help get me off the coke and booze and random sex party train. The other one being that perhaps my proximity to a few wars (southern Sudan and Darfur) I might land the NGO job of my dreams, the third being that it was close to Uganda (on the map anyway) and the semester I spent in Uganda was one of the best times of my entire life (that’s another story and unrelated to this particular story). Oh, and no phone calls from my mom, I’d be unreachable. I signed the contract and booked the flight.