Some Sort of Small Business

In the background, in the kitchen, of a coffeehouse in mind, I can still feel the fresh winter breeze find it's way through the tall windows and as it was settling on the old wooden floor
there was a ringed rug in the middle of the open expanse, and people always passed over it like it didn't exist.
I can't possibly understand what possessed them.
I just know that I was there.

Suspicions from Upper Canada

Be careful out there,
my mother said
the day I got on the bus.

The people who ended up out there
are there for a reason,
they left civilization and
went as far away as they could possibly go.
Most of them were probably on the run.
Misfits and creeps and criminals,
she warned, one hundred years later.

By the time I got off the bus in Vancouver
I still hadn't figured out which of the three I was.