September 16th. Overcast. I woke up at around three thirty in the morning, into the kind of night that still has an old apartment folded inside it, a door that used to slam a particular way. I sighed, got up, and made the bed. For once I didn’t run the usual math, didn’t lie there ashamed of being awake or trying to force my way back under. First, coffee. Then my face in the sink, water first, then quiet. It felt less like insomnia and more like being told something I finally had the good sense to listen to.
I left the house around six and walked slowly through the streets of Vieux-Montréal, almost no one else out, down toward the Vieux-Port. Right where the canal drops into the lock, the ground turns to wet grass on a short slope, still slick from last night’s rain, and I went down it carefully to sit at the edge. The water’s loud where it falls. Across it, the old grain silos stand hollowed out and covered in graffiti, most of their windows long gone. A couple of people pass with their dogs, moving at the same half-asleep pace I am. Past the silos, the Tower of the Port of Montreal, and further east, the Jacques-Cartier Bridge.
Even at this hour you can see what the city’s been doing to itself all month. Vinyl banners and informational placards for the cycling championships, zip-tied to every fence between here and downtown, that plasticky smell already lifting off them in the morning air. Avenue du Parc has been closed since the fifth for a stadium they’re building to hold two hundred thousand people, on a street I used to just walk down to visit a friend. It all comes down by October 4th. Someone’s already decided the exact day all of this chaos stops.
My door never told me that. It just stopped, the way it stopped, and I spent longer than I’d like to admit doing arithmetic on when it might happen again.
Every ten years or so my body announces it’s time to go. The first two times I didn’t argue with it—I just left, fast, already knowing where I was headed before I’d finished packing. This time is the first time I’ve had an actual date instead of just an itch. Not a guess about when the feeling might resolve, an answer: the end of this year. A date I can walk toward instead of a feeling I have to keep re-litigating at four in the morning: the same certainty Avenue du Parc has right now, its own.
I didn’t do the old arithmetic this morning, knowing exactly when normalcy will return. Instead, I made coffee and let the not-sleeping be information instead of a verdict, the same way I’ve finally let the decision itself be a fact instead of a question I keep reopening.
It’s twenty past seven now, the sky finally clearing. I’m sitting at the edge of the lock, taking a sip of my now lukewarm coffee, watching the water keep doing exactly what it’s always done here, on no one’s schedule but its own, the same as it will after October 4th, the same as it will after December.
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