Semi-Related
by Darren Stewart

I have never seen the northern lights.

But I can imagine them while I stand on the shore of Lake Huron in a field on the cusp of summer. The grass is still bent after the recently melted snow and to the west the night sky still glows like a TV recently extinguished.

I have never been to Newfoundland but I have seen much of every province but. And beside me in the same field stands a friend who was born and raised in the province and has just finished a five-year stint working as a reporter for the daily in Cornerbrook. He's older and listens to bands like April Wine and Trooper when he thinks nobody is watching. He plays electric guitar not very well and talks a purple streak better than anyone I know, which is endearing.

I remember him well barrelling down a slide at the West Edmonton Mall waterpark, lauching off the final hump and thrusting his arm up through the chlorinated spray, giving a defiant rocker sign to us waiting in the pool below.

I didn't play ice hockey as a child because the equipment was too expensive and the ponds don't freeze for very long in Victoria. But I have skated down the Rideau Canal, the main artery of the belly of the country, many times, and once sipping a hot chocolate and carrying a hockey stick. My roomate's high tech firm threw an employee appreciation party with ice hockey and free beaver tails once (beaver tails, for the uninitiated, are deep fried dough covered in maple syrup, chocolate and brown sugar and are best bought from temporary stands on the ice of the canal). I skated circles with my friends and shot plastic pucks at imaginary goalies while the cold scorched my hands and face.

I have never gone on a road trip through the states to Mexico but plan to someday with my crazy friend Rolf. I did visit Tiajauna once with my grandparents when I was ten or so and was on a family trip to Disneyland. My late grandfather, an extremely charismatic man whose funeral a few years ago packed a large church leaving only standing room for some, was a brilliant haggler. He would laugh and the merchants would laugh and clap him on the shoulder. I remember him best when he took me on a fishing trip with my father and some of his "fishing buddies" when I was twelve. It was the coolest thing I'd done to that point in my life and I got to take sips from his beers and listen to stories of his days in the navy while Bald Eagles flew low overhead and swooped down for fish.

I have never seen the Northern Lights but will someday soon. I will call Rolf, who's reliable only for this sort of thing, and we will take his shitty car, or my shitty car, and drive fast up the province in shifts. We will sing Nick Drake songs at the top of our lungs and fill the backseat floor of the car with styrofoam cups and food wrappers. We will drive for hours without speaking much until we see them. Then we will pull over and lie back on the hood. Neither of us smoke but we will have a pack of cigarettes which I will slowly unwrap and light, awkwardly.

Darren Stewart is not ugly, but he has no music.