In a few weeks I would be leaving Canada. 

This was the last red maple leaf hurrah for me and Natalie before I packed up and headed to Tokyo to see about my visa for Taiwan and hopefully get back in. 

The night before we left for Whistler I was smoking on the front porch. Something I had done late at night all year. I had been doing less of it lately as we had moved to a new room downstairs in the basement for our final few weeks living in the share house. 

The backyard had become my smoke spot, but tonight I felt like smoking on the front porch. 

I was looking quizzically at the ghost mansion across the street. 

Suddenly the hair on the back of my neck stood to attention, goosebumps popped up all over my arms, my blood turned to ice. 

The ghost mansion had taunted me for the better part of a year. It had sat there seemingly abandoned. Tonight an attic light was on. 

My eyes darted from side to side. 

I checked the garden, then the neighbours. No disturbances. No racoons tonight. 

I focused on Rumble Street from the porch. 

Black. Cold. Silent. 

My eyes shot back to the attic. Light still on. Had I seen something move in the window? 

I had reasons to be unnerved. This wasn’t just in my mind. I had had three separate ghostly encounters on Rumble Street… 

_

A large army on horseback charging up the street. It wasn’t visual. It wasn’t auditory. But it was a strong feeling. 

A hallucination without the hallucinating. 

That doesn’t really make sense but fuck it. 

It was a hallucination without the hallucinating. 

_

The big bulb of the external garage light would turn into a tall Chinese man in the dark. 

Whenever I would walk out back at night I would see him standing there, in the same pose, as if checking his phone. It was uncanny. 

The first time I even called out to him, confused why such a tall Chinese man was in the backyard. 

The creepy, probable illusion of light and angle only disappeared when I stepped within feet of it. 

_

We were walking to the 7-Eleven, talking, maybe arguing, when we both stopped, stunned as if some unknown force had fused our shoes to the pavement. 

An old couple doing their gardening had appeared and disappeared in a split second. 

“Did you see that!?” I asked Natalie. 

“Yes!” 

“What did you see!? 

“An old couple.” she said. 

My blood ran cold. Unless we were having some shared delusion – two separate brains dreaming up the same thing – we had just experienced something extraordinary. 

The figures were white light, with shadows distinguishing their features, very detailed features. 

My opinions on ghosts changed instantly.

This wasn’t something that could be explained away and dismissed. 

I had seen it and my girlfriend had seen it. 

Whatever the fuck happened in that moment, it was far beyond our current human understanding of reality. 

_

I went back inside and made my way down the stairs to our basement room. 

“If only I had my new phone, I could have taken a picture of that attic light.” I thought. 

I climbed into bed and fell asleep, forgetting about the ghosts. 

The reason I was waiting on a new phone? 

A month before I had been through a technological disaster I was still recovering from. The worst thing had happened. 

Both my phone and my laptop were dead. 

Well my phone was dead, my laptop I had imprisoned myself and it might as well have been dead and gone. 

Remember in New York, when I had that great idea to seal off my plans for world domination from the rest of the world?

Turns out I sealed everything up just a bit too tight. 

I had now lost the complicated passcode written on the inside lid of a Marlboro Light box. 

But don’t worry – after doing the calculations online – it would only take millions of years to crack the passcode and get back in. 

I had also lost the vast majority of my photos and videos. None of it was backed up. Not in a place I could remember anyway. 

It was a tough, brutal lesson to learn. 

I still had hope that the phone could somehow be fixed. That I could get back some of what I had lost. The laptop was going to be another war entirely. 

I collected together all of the photos I had left and put them in safe places. And kept the hope that I would be able to get the phone working again. 

I ordered a cheap new phone and tried to put it out of my mind. 

I was still waiting on it. I didn’t have it to record that creepy attic light or any of our Christmas trip to Whistler. 

_ 

On paper it seemed the perfect Christmas, a warm room in a romantic bed and breakfast just outside one of the greatest ski resorts in the world. 

On paper, but reality is not made of paper. 

The drive to Whistler surprised me. We really were only a quick drive up the road to one of the greatest ski mountains on the planet. I had just gotten comfortable when the bus pulled into Whistler after barely two hours. 

We were stranded for a few hours in Whistler while we waited for another bus to take us the short distance to the inn where we would be staying, located in another town nearby. 

Once we were in our room, we rested and prepared for what we both knew would be – but wouldn’t admit to each other – an awful experience. Skiing. 

I had never skied on snow. She had never skied on snow. We were both walking into a disaster. 

It didn’t disappoint. 

_ 

The snow from the clouds that hung around the distant summit began making its way down and landing on my nose. A mass of skis and sticks lay against rows of metal racks and unrecognizable figures carefully danced between and around each other. 

As usual everyone had only one thing in mind – self-interest. But it was a heightened, particularly childish form of self-interest. 

I’d always avoided skiing. It seemed like a boring sub-elitist pastime. Paying money for the expensive equipment to only use every now and then, staying in cozy chalets and basking in the smugness of a latte and hot tub. I fucking hated these people. 

I was more than a little pleased when this Christmas ski vacation proved all of my hatred justified. 

I looked around at the chaos on top of the fairground of a mountain and saw nothing but misery. 

The price of a day’s rental of skis was over $150, the price included a childish idiot Japanese ski helper at the rental store grabbing violently at my ski boot, “Are you going to pay extra?” he shouted, tears in his eyes. 

I clenched my fists ready to break his scrunched up red face, “Calm down, kid.” I said to him as another worker took over the job. 

The sweating, unhinged Japanese helper retreated to cry at the stress of fitting my ski boot. 

I began envisioning the humiliation I would give him when I returned the bulk of shit later in the afternoon. 

On the slopes Natalie and I both got one ski on each. We struggled while we tried every possible way to lock our boots into our other skis. The equipment was just as crappy as the help. 

We fought, we went down, ate a slice of pizza, made up and one painful ski boot step at a time made it back to the rental store. 

I opened the door and the nervous smiling face of the Japanese store helper greeted me, I cut him off before he attempted some enthusiastic feigned welcome. 

“Listen! You should NOT have shouted at me earlier.” I said in a forceful, fuck you tone. 

“Bu bu bu but I was helping people aaand…” he weakly sputtered. 

“It doesn’t matter,” cutting him off before he could continue the excuses, “you overreacted, you should NOT have acted like that.” 

He bowed his head, “I am sorry, I apologise.” 

We returned the useless gear and as we were leaving I wished him a merry Christmas and felt better that I corrected the tit. 

There was another encounter with a woman who accused me of stealing her latte, the same latte I had ordered for my girlfriend 20 minutes before she showed up at the counter. I corrected that tit too. 

The smugness of the latte and hot tub crowd was something to happily hate and something to look at with a bemused acceptance and indifference. 

Humans are gonna be humans and you’ll usually find the most pointless of the pointless species at ski resorts and on golf courses and at fucking spas. 

These people must be drowned in lava. 

The magnificence of the mountains and a drunken night of Christmas Day storytelling with other guests from the inn were the only bright lights of a dim time. 

Fuck skiing.