PREVIOUS TENANTS
Standard
Pixelated Minecraft-like houses illustrating their time; unapologetically ugly and foreshadowing a new retail style—the big boxy store (Walmart/Target/Canadian Tire)— much later. Mass-produced dwellings, seemingly blank pages in a library teeming with books of dreams And dreamers inscribing their hopes upon the walls with scrawling aspirations of old nobility; "let's look like we belong," they plead in these hallowed halls of wall-to-wall polyester. My Brothers sold out our massive, charming Victorian house for two floors of newer wallpaper-smothered East Van mediocrity. Thus awoken from stasis, I fled the new family pretensions, to steam-fogged windows and a scratched plastic chair, where beef noodle soup offers its dark, salty grace, an honest broth in the air to counter the hollow drywall. I find my home in the spice and the steam, searching ever since for a self-made dream.