July 24th. Mid-afternoon, mostly cloudy. I move from the harbour up to Barrington. I hang a right on Spring Garden and keep walking until I reach Dal. Back down University Avenue instead this time before returning to the water again. I didn’t decide to do any of that. I was halfway through before I clocked that I’d walked my normal cycle, the exact circuit from two years ago, the one I was on the first time I started thinking about fugitive cartography. Same season, even. It felt like I was trying to catch up on what I’d missed. Near Kuowaqe’jk, colonially called Citadel Hill, Parks Canada has put up new panels. The polished, informational signs tell some story about the place at the corner of Brunswick and Sackville. The road beside them is still built like pedestrians are an afterthought. Nobody’s touched that.
I ran into my friend Sara at Levantic Café the next morning, a Syrian-owned café near where I’m staying, in a neighbourhood that’s clearly expanding around it. We started the PhD at the same time. She had a kid, moved a few streets away from here, and I barely knew either thing until she told me over coffee. Fifteen minutes and she’s building an entire life. She used to live a few blocks from where I used to walk laps. Life goes on.
July 25th was mostly sunny and warm. I’m in Kjipuktuk for the week: I was hired to give a workshop to a handful of young people starting to build a ballroom scene in this city. We talked about history, the structure of categories, how to create something out of nothing and have it mean everything to those who need it. Small group, sharp group, and they loved it. Watching them start to take the shape of it into their own hands, I felt honoured in a way I don’t have a better word for. To contribute to the making of a space like ballroom, in a city with a Black culture this deep, is not a small thing to be handed.
Early for a community barbecue, my friend Riley and I tried to make our way down to Africville. As usual, the roads didn’t cooperate: a U-turn in an industrial parking lot, streets that felt like you shouldn’t be driving on them at all. How hard it is to get there is its own statement. By the time we got close it turned out to be the weekend of the annual Africville reunion: the community’s time with itself. Beautiful, and also none of my business. We returned the way we came.
The barbecue happens every year, the hosts’ own tradition: Black queer and trans people and the folks who love them, gathered to eat, drop out of the rest of the world for an afternoon, build something across generations. I ended up there more or less by accident this time, and it turned out my entire doctoral committee was in the same backyard. I’d first come to this barbecue in 2022, two months before I’d started the PhD, with an ex. That’s also where I met the person who’d later become my supervisor, before he was anyone in particular to me, and the rest of my committee was there that same day too, before any of them were part of my life in that way. Everyone I’d eventually need had been surrounding me from the start. What I didn’t have yet was the structure to receive it, so I had to leave Kjipuktuk and come back changed enough to sit in that same backyard and actually take it in. Four years on, I’m relating to these folks more as peers now than as people I was hoping to be good enough for, which made what they told me land differently: the work is innovative, they needed me to know that, and it read less like approval from mentors than recognition between co-conspirators. I joked about defending on the spot. Nobody laughed like it was only a joke. I felt recognized and validated and seen, and I’m not going to be cute about how good that was.
My supervisor and I talked in person there too, which sometimes feels like the only way to get past the hedging that comes over email. The defence will take place in late August, probably, possibly even later. Which means cancelling my graduation request for the second time and waiting again on a date that isn’t mine to set. The thing itself is handed in. From here it belongs to schedules and readers and rooms I won’t be in. There’s real relief in that anyway, one I didn’t expect. I can hold my lease in Tiohtià:ke through December, keep the pace of life I’ve built there a while longer instead of dismantling it on someone else’s calendar. A job that I was hoping to apply for is now off the table, since it wanted the dissertation defended by mid-August. Everything else is still moving, just with a bit more certainty now.
I left the barbecue and walked the length of the peninsula, a joint going, the sun doing that last low thing it does before it actually sets. No real reason to walk that far except that my legs wanted it and I let them have it. Down Connaught, the evening still warm enough that I didn’t need to pull the Land Back hoodie out of my backpack. A left down Edgewood, past École Saint Catherine’s Elementary, the rainbow someone painted across its whole face still bright even in the fading light, Bienvenue and Pjila’si over the door, half-swallowed by grass and shrubs nobody’s cut back. Then a right down Oxford, and a detour I didn’t plan down Allan, to pass the last building I lived in in Kjipuktuk, with a relationship that was as bad as they get while I was in it. My body knew the block before I did. Everything went tight, thirty seconds ahead of my understanding why, and I let myself feel it the whole way past the door instead of speeding up, let it sit in my chest for the length of the building and past the end of the fence before it let go on its own. Down Welsford, following the desire lines across the Commons, dusk properly settling in now, and I was back on the circuit I’d started the trip on, closed without my ever deciding to close it.
I sent a friend a voice note that night saying I felt great, and I did. I also have decisions to make about where I go and what I build and who I build it with, and none of the walking answered a single one of them.
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