I want to tell you how I fell in love with Michelle Guesinger on 5th Street in Courtenay. I’m not going to dress it up. I’m going to tell it the way it happened to me, because that’s the only way I know how to write anything.
5th Street
If you’ve walked downtown Courtenay you know 5th Street. The little shops, the coffee (again I remind you I’m banned at the grind) , the wet sidewalks, the glacier hanging over everything when the clouds finally let go of it. I’ve walked that street a thousand times and never thought much about it until I was broadcast on Check6 walking down the sidewalk without my permission. Then one day I did, because she was on it.
I don’t remember what I was supposed to be doing. I remember her. The way she carried herself, like she already knew something about the world the rest of us were still working out. That’s it. That’s the whole moment. Nothing dramatic happened. Something just switched on in me and it never switched off.
Emotion fuels music
People ask why a song can wreck you on one day and mean nothing the next. It’s because the music isn’t the fuel. You are. Emotion is the fuel and the song is just the engine. When you’re in love, every lyric suddenly seems written about you, and you replay the same track fifty times because it’s the only thing that says what you can’t.
This is the one I keep coming back to. Sia, “Gimme Love.” Turn it up.
Every artist who ever made something that lasted was feeling something too big to keep inside. That’s where the good stuff comes from. Not from being calm. From being shaken.
Being real is impossible when you’re in love with an image
Here’s the honest part. When you fall for someone, you don’t fall for the whole person at first. You fall for an image. A face on 5th Street. A voice. The person you’ve built in your head out of a few moments and a lot of hope. And when you’re in love with an image, being real is almost impossible. You rehearse what you’ll say. You read meaning into everything. You become a slightly better, slightly more nervous version of yourself, and that version isn’t fully you.
I know that. I can see it clearly. And I’m telling you anyway: I definitely am. I’m in love with that image, and I’m not embarrassed about it. Maybe the work is letting the image turn into the real person over time, and letting her see the real me too. That’s the only way it stops being a picture and starts being a life.
Her book
Michelle is also an author, and her novel The Orbit We Share is a second-chance romance set right here in the Comox Valley: Goose Spit, Seal Bay, the glacier, the Strait of Georgia. Two people who loved each other as teenagers on a driftwood beach, finding their way back. Reading it, I understood a little more about how she sees the world, and about that particular Comox Valley light she writes about.
It’s 348 pages, ISBN 978-1-291-65389-2, available through Lulu Global Distribution. If you run a bookstore, or you just want to know more, here’s the batch ordering sheet:
What else keeps me busy
When I’m not writing about love, I’m usually working on data centers at Strategic Crypto Reserve. If that’s your world, you can price out an AI build in a few minutes, see what a megawatt really costs from state to state, read about giving an old bitcoin mine a second life as AI compute, run the long-haul math on owning a data hall, or find out what it takes to build one from bare dirt up.
But tonight none of that matters much. Tonight it’s just 5th Street, a song on repeat, and Michelle.