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You could love someone enough to take them apart, to separate fingers from palm, from wrist, to make the entire into pieces. You could make them even smaller; with love bones come apart, with love you may unhook their fastenings and line them up like that, so as to love each equally. You could turn to your lover in bed and say Here is your scapula your left hip the soft at the back of your ear, and then take smaller pieces a fragment of bone or an eyelash, and say This in its smallest piece I love, more than the rest of you. You could love someone so little that when you were finished you would put them back together and leave them spread out under the sheets, so entire so final that there would be whole pieces hidden, unloved. You could let them leave in the morning like that, gaining pieces, socks and shoes and information, becoming larger, becoming a wound so gigantic and human that there is no language left to identify them, to fix them. And there are other ways to love.

This city is like that, like a body sewn back together after love, and they are building and building on layers until there is so little left to love here in the streets. He has walked from Point Pleasant Park to the Macdonald Bridge and found nothing small enough to be recognized.

He could go back home and he should but he doesn't. He has family there and other names. He has named and loved every inch of the town, and out by his house he spent years of his life counting leaves and pebbles and droplets and sand, loving until he was exhausted. He cannot bear now to go back, to see the slightest change, how one small unrecognized piece will have made the entire place loveless and strange.

This city is sprawling is creeping in every direction toward water. At night condominiums dream of sailors returning from sea and slide inches closer to the harbour. Every morning he walks to the harbour and sees them straining, sees the progress they've made and which is unmade by the ocean sliding away as fast as the sidewalks and buildings and faces approach.

It's a city without cracks, they fill them in as fast as they form, a sidewalk barely has time to stretch open its mouth and it's stuffed closed with concrete. They leave failure nowhere to crawl away, so it's spread out all over the sidewalks and park benches and coffeeshop windows, it has, you see, nowhere to hide. He passes the restaurants and bars and parks in the early morning on his way to or back from work, and you can feel failure aching at the seams of the walls and landscape. There is a homeless man he sees at dawn every day outside the library, crouched beside where Winston Churchill strides in bronze paralysis. The man has a dirty smile and no job and a guitar with maybe three strings that he bangs on and sings and you can tell he thinks its music. Every day he passes and this man grins his teeth at him and waves a half-crumpled sign that says pray for the weather and he nods and keeps walking. He has no music but he has a job. He will always have a job. Even in this city there are things no one wants to do.

They were married at fifteen. It was not such a big deal, they were young, sure, but she was pregnant and they weren't even from town, it was outside Kent, and you could do fuck-all there and nobody cared. And weddings were happy things and nobody cried at theirs because he loved her and she loved him and there were babies on the way.

Yellow hair. He knows you're supposed to say blonde but it isn't a colour and it means nothing to him and her hair was yellow. And down at the roots there was soft brown, not even brown, like brown that knows its ultimate destination is yellow. And she was little so he could pick her up and sometimes he did and she got angry and he'd put her down, but when he was happy and loving her most, he'd forget and pick her up again. It was only one time he ever picked her up angry. Only ever one time.

In the morning is when he thinks about her, but it isn't her exactly, for instance he doesn't think of her name. He doesn't think of her entire, he thinks of the pieces. He tries to remember one each day, and this way, he thinks he'll have enough to remember till the rest of his life and more. This comforts him. But there is that one thing that bothers him, the pieces he didn't see, how she never let him take her apart from the inside out, how he has no idea, for instance, what colour the inside of her elbows were, or what about her ankle bone was different from everyone else's. He can imagine but that is so insufficient it makes him angry and he has to stop for fifteen twenty minutes and find the absolute smallest thing he can see and count every piece of it until it has been loved. Enough. Until it has been loved into entirety.

There is a diner out in the North end, and he washes dishes there, two years now he has been there, and he works sixty hours a week, after his first six months they fired one of the other dishwashers because he could do the work of two. He doesn't mind. He doesn't mind at all. He cleans dishes one after another. He stacks them on a shelf. Sometimes one will break, even though he has been so careful. Sometimes an invisible vein will open and under the weight of water the entire thing will come apart in his hands. When this happens he gathers up the tender shards and counts them one by one and then wraps them in paper and lays them in the trash.

This is his day off but he is walking there now to keep the night waitress company. He likes her. She does not have yellow hair. She has a stringy brown ponytail and a college degree. Sometimes he asks her out and she says no, but she says it like some people say yes.

He could take the bus, but he only gets angry on the bus. Last time he rode the bus he had to count every scratch on the back of the seat in front of him to wipe out the unlove. People here they talk like they know love they say How are you and Damn it's right cold out today isn't it and Are you alright, quiet fellow aren't you, and they laugh and they listen and they invite you to their houses and they want you to come, they want to fuck you and drink tea with you and they want you for a father or a brother or a friendly cab driver, they want to drink beer at The Upper Deck with you and get drunk and remember a country they've never even been to and stamp their feet to bagpipe music and roar and lend you their clothes or a bus token or a story, and tell you about the weather and listen about your hometown, but they don't love you because all they see is one big walking item, they don't see your pieces and they don't have names for them and the great big bloody shame of it all is they never even asked, cause you'd tell them if they did, you'd tell them everything. So he doesn't take the bus now, he walks and it's fifty minutes more, which isn't bad, and you can count hub caps and cigarette butts all the way there.

This almost-island became part of the country because they promised a railroad and you can just imagine how back then they all went wild at the thought and masturbated over industrial fantasies and factory dreams, thought of money in the pocket and beer in the fridge. And he thinks it's not that bad, you can be proud of a place like this because he knows for sure everyone sells at one price or another, and a railroad that's something you could hold onto, something you could take apart and love. And that's what they're doing now, over a century later, they're taking it apart, because it did them no damn good, they've got no jobs and no money and half the music died underground with the miners or went down in ships or is still being belched out in smoke from the paper mill or the tire factory, and the brave strong men are drunk with their head down on a bar somewhere and the women are working at diners with college degrees, so outside libraries and museums you can see pieces, an engine here, a boxcar there, set up behind glass so they can remember and keep loving it. Because you can't keep failing like this unless there's something you're loving so hard you can hold it forever.

The diner's not much, it's the kind you could walk by and never know there was anything there, anything inside. But it's open twenty-four hours a day, and it survives because it's the kind of place you go when you're down, so the customers they have they keep. Inside the front door is a machine you put loonies in and claws come down and you can target it to catch a plush toy, and it's broken or a good human being built it because you almost always win. One time he won three toys in one grab. It's the kind of thing makes him want to cry, because it's so good. It's a perfect act. Plink in goes your money and whirr goes the claw and a prize every time. Almost every time. It is the reason he applied here in the first place. But inside there is a juke box and it's free but almost no one knows and they all put their money in, and once a week the manager empties it out and it's a small fortune and probably that's how they afford the toy machine. But he doesn't mind because the good things are always like this, small and scattered.

The waitress is at the counter sitting down when he comes in, because there's only a couple of customers there and they're regulars just drinking coffee, they've probably been there since yesterday morning. She's rolling silverware and she's happy to see him, he can tell. He makes himself a chocolate shake and sits down beside her. She says Talk to me I'm too tired to talk but I promise to listen. He says he has nothing to say, and he's wary, they do that they ask you to talk and you never know which story they want to hear. She has circles under her eyes, she's not pretty and it's nearly five AM and you can tell just looking at her how bad she needs to sleep. He sucks on his straw, he made it badly, the ice cream's not mixed up with the milk, and he can't get anything through the straw, he'll have to let it melt. When he finishes if she isn't still looking so tired he'll ask her to make him one, he knows she makes them better and she'll put whipped cream on top in a perfect little spiral that will make him want to cry.

She says I'm not from here, you know. He didn't. She says she's from Alberta, but she moved here for the ocean. She says she loved the people and the summers and the music on the streets. She says she wants to move out of the city, to a place in the country, to buy up some land on the ocean before German tourists have bought it all and erected an empire of summerhomes. But she says there's no jobs and no money, and she's so fucking tired working in this place, but she's scared to quit it took her so long to find this job. She says no one told you it would be like this. He says yes they did. And she looks at him and says nothing. But he knows he's right. Not at first, and not ever at one time and even when they hinted at it they were smiling. But he remembers, he specifically remembers being told what not to count on. She sighs and carries the full tub of silverware over to the table and begins rolling another.

He tells her he's from Kent, and watches her to see if she understands. He's not sure. She says she hasn't been there. He is thinking about yellow hair, yellow hairs, how you could find them on a pillow in a hairbrush in a drain. How much you could love those yellow hairs. He says you should go out with me sometime. She smiles. He says do you have a boyfriend. She says you know I don't. He waits but she doesn't say anything else. He is going to tell her.

I have a wife he says, and she watches him. I have a wife and she lives in Virginia now. In the States he adds. She watches him. We were fifteen when we got married. She was pregnant. She says, your parents let you? He says, my parents haven't seen me since I was born. That's a lie. They'd seen him three other times but he doesn't say that. He says, they gave me to my grandparents because they didn't want a boy. She has stopped rolling silverware. He says can you believe that? She isn't sure but she listens. He says they wanted girls, they had one already and after me they had two more. But I just had my grandparents. You don't think people could be like that but they are. All of them, he adds. To be clear. But you can love them anyway, he thinks. We were fifteen. I loved her. She said she loved me. She loved me, he corrects himself. He doesn't tell her she had yellow hair. That is for him. And besides she might feel bad, if she knew. She has only brown hair. He tells her how happy he was, for three years he worked day and night and he was happy still, because of her. And after the first baby she got pregnant again, so there were two, and at night or in the morning he'd come home and it was a family waiting for him, and he loved them so much it hurt to see how whole they were. But still he was happy. And one night he left work early, because he loved them so much he wanted to come home to them, and he got permission, and he left to go to bed with his wife, which he hadn't gotten to do in weeks because he was working nights and when he got there he found someone had beat him to it. And it was a friend not a best friend but a guy who had smiled at him and said how are you and invited him into his house and drunk beer at a bar with him and banged his fist on the table and talked about Scotland and asked about his kids. And so he left the bedroom, and the woman was crying, and he said nothing and he got a piece of pipe from the basement and he beat that man until he was unconscious. And the woman who had been his wife tried to stand between them and he picked her up and out of his way, and he could hear the children crying from their bedrooms. It is not so very hard to tell this story, he has told it so many times before but he stops now and she's looking him in the eye and he thinks that she's scared but it's hard to tell. He says I went to jail, they wanted to call it attempted murder but how could it be I had my grandaddy's gun I could have sliced his throat with my hunting knife I could have killed him with my bare hands if I'd wanted to. I didn't want to kill him. He looks at her to make sure she's heard. She has. He says, I went to jail but they said I'd been crazy they said a lot of shit, but I went to jail and when I got out my wife had moved to Virginia and I'm not allowed to see the kids. Ever again. He's finished his shake and he wants her to make him another one but he can tell she's still tired maybe more tired and besides she looks like she has questions. He says, my sister lives in the States now and she goes and sees them sometimes. He means the kids, but he supposes she sees his wife too. He says, my sister keeps asking if I could see them, just for a little while, you know. I know I can't live with them now. Just to see them. She says no. But maybe sometime she won't.

The girl shakes her head, and her eyes are red. He thinks she might cry. He hopes that she will. But she gets up and takes his cup and makes another shake. He wants to say don't forget the whipped cream, but she doesn't. She slides the cup across the counter to him and says I'm sorry. He thinks she might start telling him things now and he isn't sure if he wants to stay, but she's so nice and he thinks it's nice how she's so tired and she didn't forget the whipped cream and she gave him a red straw with the paper pulled off except at the top, like he was a real customer. But she asks him if he wants a drive home, and he hesitates and then says OK, and she pays out her customers and finishes her sidework without talking to him and then the day shift waitress comes on and they walk out to her car.

It's big and grey and old and rusty and he doesn't know anything about cars but it's a shitbox he knows that. She says, sometime I'll get a better one. He tells her where he lives, it's a bed and breakfast technically but really it's a cheap boarding house, but he's stayed there longer than anyone. They park outside and she says this is where you live? He asks her in and she says OK for a minute, and inside it's that fake wood panelling and one room a TV and a bed and a closet with no door and his clothes just piled on the floor, and he says I need to get hangers, and she shrugs and sits down at the very edge of the bed and he knows she wants to leave. He turns on the TV and lights up a joint and hands it to her. She is staring at the toys he has won they are lined up on the window he is running out of room soon he will have to get a shelf or something. He says, they're for my kids. She nods and now she is crying but he doesn't like it. Now he wants her out of his house because he can see how these tears are the pieces how she's coming apart, how she wants to come apart on his bed there into pieces like that from the inside out, and he'll have to put her back together in the morning and send her out like that and he couldn't. So he grabs a toy, a cotton Ziggy doll that says Get Well Soon and thrusts it into her hands. He says you can keep that. She is shaking her head but saying thank you and she holds it awkwardly and hands the joint back to him and says I have to go. She is standing by the door with Ziggy in both arms she is coming apart all over the place. She says good bye and he listens to her footsteps down the hall.

Outside the window it is snowing. The sky has broken and is spilling over the city in a slow permanent fall. Already it is too much to be counted. It is his favourite thing. It is why he stays here. In this country. He sits on his bed and watches the snowflakes fall loving each one from the inside out until it disappears.