Category: Personal

Trophies

Eight-thirty and I’ve been awake since six. The body has been doing this since I sent the dissertation in: waking itself before I decide to wake, some obscure bodily alarm I didn’t set going off in the dark. I ended up at a coffee shop I’d never tried before–less by choice and moreso because all my usual spots are all still closed–an oat milk moka slowly going cold in my hand. I don’t fully know why I came to sit here, under this ash tree at the edge of the Lachine Canal, except that the body has been leading and the mind has been following.

The bike path is busy even now, this early. Commuters, runners, a construction worker setting out cones thirty meters from where I’m sitting. Birds are picking crumbs off the stone edge of the canal, and I can see an RTL bus from Longueuil crossing the Mill Street bridge above my right shoulder, moving through without stopping.

The story broke a few days ago: officers from Station 39 in Montréal-Nord had been stopping Black men and men of Arab origin at rates that required formal explanation, issuing tickets on the basis of ethnicity, making racist remarks inside a unit culture that circulated them as ordinary. The investigation had started in March, already underway before anyone outside the unit knew to ask. Then, in the coverage, a detail: some of them had been ripping off locs during police interventions and keeping the pieces as trophies.

Trophies.

What I notice is which part of this incident dominated the headlines. The stops, the tickets, and the remarks are the texture of daily life for people in that neighbourhood: the unremarkable climate of being under a specific kind of management. It took the “trophies” to produce the press conference, the mayor calling it disturbing, the police chief holding the room with his own face as evidence that the institution has changed. Frank B. Wilderson writes that anti-Black violence circulates as atmosphere, the condition against which civil society confirms its own moral coherence. Scandals like this, almost predictable in their recurrence, are necessary precisely because the atmosphere is not. The trophy takes the heat so the remarks and the tickets and stops don’t have to. Then the reform response arrives on cue: body cameras, reassignments, oversight, the machinery that allows the atmosphere to be named without being changed.

This logic doesn’t stop at the institution. A progressive journalist in this city who has covered SPVM violence for years and has built a sizeable following opened their Station 39 video with: “The SPVM is scalping people.” The image is vivid, which is the point, which is also the problem. Anti-Black violence is passing through a progressive media network as affective content, producing moral feeling in audiences who will likely never be stopped in Montréal-Nord on a humid Tuesday evening. The feeling confirms alignment: it circulates, metabolizes into outrage, and then the next story accumulates. I want to be clear about this: none of this requires bad faith. Civil society built the execution scaffold, and we mount it before we decide to. This is what Wilderson means by background affect: the Black body in pain as the ground condition that civil society, including its critics, requires in order to feel itself.

Vincent Woodard writes about the consumption of Black bodies as inherited logic: the taking and keeping of the souvenir. Locs accumulate over months and years, the hair carrying its own time, and cutting them during an intervention is taking that time alongside the dignity and the agency and the flesh. What the officer does with the trophy and what the viewer does with the progressive journalist’s video share a structure. In both cases, the Black body is made available to someone who is not subject to it, received and held briefly, used to produce something — possession, feeling, the confirmation of one’s moral position — and then the Black body remains where it was: in Montréal-Nord, subject to the next ticket, the next racist remark, the next unjustified stop. The trophy is the version that made the condition legible. The underlying assumption was already there before the scissors, before the camera, in every interaction that didn’t make anyone’s feed.

Saidiya Hartman says gratuitous violence doesn’t require justification. It enacts a prior condition. The analysis is not a shield against it. I have been studying this for four years. The dissertation on my committee’s desks right now is over a hundred pages about how communities care for themselves when institutions won’t, and I am sitting here under this ash tree at eight-thirty in the morning with a chest that weighs more than it did yesterday. The knowing doesn’t stop the landing.

A duck comes down the canal with a few others trailing. The water here is built, cut through Kanien’kehá:ka territory in the 1820s to make commerce legible, to route water according to a particular purpose, to bend it to the capitalist’s will. There is still life in it. Their attempts at control failed, as they always do. Water finds a way.

Christina Sharpe writes about residence time, the measure of how long an element stays in water. Sodium for 260 million years. The water doesn’t release what entered it. This canal connects to the St. Lawrence connects to the Atlantic, and the Atlantic received—and the Atlantic holds. Holds the bodies, holds the names that were never written down, holds the ones whose lives were rendered unremarkable long before the Station 39 officers kept their trophies. The surface in front of me has always been holding something it won’t disclose, and I have been sitting beside it long enough that I stopped checking.

I was starting to gather myself to go when I realized it was raining. Had been raining for a little while, actually. There was no forecast for it, so I hadn’t brought an umbrella. The ash tree had been holding it off without asking—the canopy dense enough to keep me dry—while the canal surface in front of me was already pocked with it, thousands of small entries. I hadn’t noticed because I was protected. I don’t know how long I’d been sitting inside this weather I couldn’t feel.
Fediverse Reactions
2026-06-23
Saskatchewan!

The train came through while I was still settling into the grass, while the ground was still negotiating with my weight. Slow, rounded cars on the tracks between the canal bank and the silo, heading toward the harbour. I could read the side of one as it passed. Saskatchewan! with the exclamation point. Green paint, the province’s name in a typeface that expects enthusiasm. The train slowed. Stopped.

I’d come from my coffee shop. The usual people, the particular warmth of a Thursday morning in a place that has become a place, where someone knows to ask what you’ve been reading. Someone asked what I’d recommend and I said All About Love by bell hooks without having to think about it. Then I walked here, to this thin strip of grass between the canal and the river, Lock No. 1 just down from where I’ve settled, the Daniel McAllister moored somewhere behind me. I didn’t decide to come. The body has been here enough times to know the way.

The grass is long and undisturbed around me, dandelions in every stage, some still yellow, some gone to seed, the white puffs of them catching what little light the grey sky is offering. Gulls overhead. The canal moving the way still water moves, everything happening at the surface, nothing disclosed about what’s underneath.

The car is across the water, directly in front of Silo No. 5. The silo is nearly half a kilometer of corrugated metal and concrete cylinders, the last structure of its kind in the country, built to receive grain shipped by rail from the prairies and export it by sea to Europe. Its scale is wrong against the sky in the way that only very old industrial things are wrong, too large to be decorative, too ruined to be functional, present in the way that monuments are present even when no one intended a monument. The tracks run directly into the building. Tags on its walls reach floors that require real commitment to reach, people going to extreme lengths to mark presence on something the city hasn’t decided what to do with, evidence of unauthorized arrival at heights that shouldn’t be accessible. The car sits below all of it, still announcing itself, grain from treaty land at the door of a building that stopped opening thirty years ago.

I don’t know what to do with any of this. I keep looking.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes that the first thing a snowflake does when it lands is form bonds with its neighbors. A snowflake lands and immediately begins joining. Slow deformation. She calls it sintering: communal transformation, bonds with staying power. Fractal. What we do on a small scale is how we exist at the large scale.

I’ve been coming to this water since winter. Sintering. Forming bonds at this bank through repetition that accumulated across a season, a snowpack building without announcement. When I started coming here the canal was grey and iced-over, the willows bare, the bank a different kind of undisturbed. The willows have leafed out since then. The dandelions have gone through their whole cycle and started again. I finished Theory of Water a few days ago and recognized something I had already been doing, the practice visible in retrospect the way a path through grass is visible only after it’s been walked enough times. Simpson gave me the word after the knowing had already happened.

The grass holds the shape of me. The sky is doing what it’s been doing all morning. Across the water the silo stands in its wrongness against the clouds, the same wrongness it had in February when I first sat across from it, and I am a different kind of settled than I was then, bonded to this bank through the accumulation of mornings, through every time the body led and the mind followed after.

There’s a water strider near the edge of the canal, just below where I’m sitting. It moves in short quick jumps, and where it lands it leaves a small circular ripple that moves outward and flattens before the next one arrives. The ripple moves through water going somewhere: canal to river to St. Lawrence to Atlantic. The strider doesn’t know. It leaves its mark anyway.

Simpson writes that her ancestors spoke to their ancestors through the sound of rushing water, and that locks close off those channels of communication. Lock No. 1 is just down from me, the Lachine Canal cutting through Kanien’kehá:ke territory since the 1820s to make this stretch of the river legible to colonial commerce, to move grain and goods eastward toward the sea. The locks try to control what the water does, but it always finds its way past the container, moving through the gates regardless. The sound is still there.

The water moves east. The St. Lawrence runs to the Atlantic. I look at the surface of the canal, the way it holds the grey of the sky without giving it back, dark green-brown and nearly opaque, the colour of something that keeps rather than reflects. You cannot see the bottom. You cannot see what the water is holding. This is what the water always looks like from here, from the mouth of things, where the canal opens into river opens into sea. I have been looking at this surface since February and it has never once disclosed what is underneath.

Christina Sharpe writes about residence time, the oceanographic measure of how long an element stays in the water. Sodium has a residence time of 260 million years. Sharpe thinks this alongside those Africans thrown, dumped, jumped overboard during the Middle Passage. She is not speaking in metaphor. The chemistry of seawater holds what entered it. The dead did not go somewhere else. They have a residence time. They are in the water still, in what Sharpe calls the wake, which is the path behind a ship, which is a keeping watch with the dead, which is a coming to consciousness all at once. Alexis Pauline Gumbs has listened for them in that water, attended to what it carries, what it will not release. Simpson has learned from them both, has brought this knowledge to this river, to this territory, to me sitting at the mouth of the canal on a grey Thursday morning in May not knowing what I am sitting beside until I do.

Every drop of water on this planet is all the water that has ever been here. The canal is fed by the St. Lawrence. The St. Lawrence opens to the Atlantic. The Atlantic received my ancestors, which means the Atlantic holds them still. There is no distance in this. I am not drawing a line between here and there. I am sitting at the mouth of the canal, at the threshold where the water I have been looking at since winter opens into the water that has never stopped being a grave, and they are not two different bodies of water. The surface in front of me is the same surface. The opacity I have been looking at all morning, the water that holds the sky without giving it back, is holding other things too, has always been holding them, will hold them for longer than I can think about without losing my footing. 260 million years. The dead are not in the past. They are in the residence time, which means they are here, which means the water I have been sintering beside, forming my small bonds, accumulating my mornings, is the same water that received them and did not let go.

The water strider leaves its mark. The ripple moves through what is, and has always been, full.

Down at the lock, people are fishing. Unhurried, present, the particular stillness of people who have been at the water long enough to stop waiting for something to happen. The sound of water moving through the gates, which Simpson’s ancestors might have known as something else entirely.

This has always been a meeting place. Long before the canal was cut and the locks built and the silo raised, this convergence of water gathered people because the water itself required it. Confluence produces meeting the way certain conditions produce certain weathers, because a place where waters join is a place where everything moving along those waters eventually arrives. You don’t choose a meeting place so much as find yourself already in one.

I arrived here through repetition without deciding to. The water required it.

The sound at the lock. The people still fishing. The silo enormous and still across the water, the tracks below it empty now.

At the end of this month I hand in the dissertation. Then the defense. Then it leaves my hands and becomes whatever it becomes in other people’s hands. I have been building this argument for years, and the months at this water were part of that, the body arriving here before the mind had a name for why. I’m standing at a confluence, the way this canal opens into the St. Lawrence opens into whatever is further east, the water moving past the point where you can follow it. You don’t choose what comes next so much as find yourself already in it.

At some point while I was sitting here the Saskatchewan! car moved on. I got a photo before it did, from where I was in the grass, but the train has continued toward the harbour or somewhere further east. The silo is still there. The tracks are still there. The locks, the people fishing, the sound of water moving through the gates. The dandelion puffs lifting off one by one into the grey air.

The car said what it said and kept moving. I get up from the grass and go.
Fediverse Reactions
2026-06-01
Place d’Youville

May 20th, 10 AM. Twenty-three degrees and the wind is moving through the field in a way that keeps changing its mind. I’m sitting near the old Customs House, just off rue McGill, in what is now a wide green space ringed with historical plaques. This is where the first Parliament of the Province of Canada convened in 1844. The building burned in 1849. A mob set it on fire the night Governor General Elgin signed the Rebellion Losses Bill. The plaques are careful about this.

I came here without a book, which almost never happens. I’d nearly finished the nonfiction I’d been reading and realized it on the walk over, so I stopped at a nearby bookstore, bilingual, Francophone in its orientation. I wanted fiction for once. Something more porous, less argumentative. I asked if they had anything by Black Québécois authors in French.

The question on the face.

What followed was Dany Laferrière, of course, and then a migration story. When I said migration wasn’t the direction I was looking for, the category shifted without either of us naming the shift: non-Black Palestinian and Colombian authors. I clarified. Black francophone fiction, I said, broadening it, not requiring Québec specifically. That didn’t help either. The broader frame returned the same result.

Each time I offered more information about what I was actually asking for, something tightened in the person’s jaw. At some point I watched her notice the same gap I’d been watching from the beginning. That must have done something to her. Being seen not to know by the person you couldn’t locate.

The reflex is what I keep returning to. If I had walked in and asked for Québec literature with no further specification, I suspect the shelf would have looked different. The reflex showed it. If every Black Québec story is for you a story about arriving, you cannot imagine Black people as having always already been here. And if your frame for not-white is general enough that Palestinian and Colombian and Black are interchangeable categories, then Blackness isn’t what you’re reaching for. It’s a placeholder. It’s difference, undifferentiated, available to be filled with whatever the shelf has to offer.

The presence precedes the Haitian immigration narrative by centuries. Black people were enslaved in Nouvelle-France. In this city. In the predecessors of these buildings. The Parliament whose ground I’m sitting on held its first session while that history was still recent and living in specific bodies. Charlène Lusikila and I traced some of this a few years ago, in a paper about why the intercultural frame in social work keeps failing Black Montrealers: treating Blackness as something that arrived, rather than something the city was organized against from the beginning.

There are no plaques for that. The city decided what to mark. The decision is ongoing.

Near the end of the conversation, the person pulled out a book by Rebecca Makonnen. Transracial adoptee, they said, with a slight shift in register, as though this were a different route to the same destination, more legible somehow. And I’ve been sitting with that grammar ever since. Laferrière gets to be called Québécois now. He’s Haitian, too, and I’m not taking anything away from what that means. But notice what had to happen first. The migrant who earns recognition through what the community decides is exemplary. The adoptee. Each route requires prior authorization from the same structure that just spent ten minutes finding me migration stories when I asked for Québec literature.

I could claim Québécois. The claim would be legitimate. I’ve been here long enough, loved this place through several versions of itself and several versions of myself. What resists in me when I reach for that word is not uncertainty about who I am. It is the specific difficulty of loving a society that keeps showing you the conditions attached to its love. Loving it anyway. Both of those things are true and they don’t resolve each other and I’ve stopped asking them to.

All I wanted was literature.

The field is quiet. A few tourists reading the plaques with the careful attention of people who arrived this morning and will leave by evening. The St. Lawrence is so close to here, obscured by the Customs House to my left, the one that has been deciding what moves through it since 1838. The new book is in my bag, barely opened, bought because it was the least fraught option available.

The city put a park here. The grass is doing its patient work over the ground where the Parliament burned and the river keeps moving past all of it, indifferent and uninterrupted. The wind is still changing its mind.

I might return the book.

2026-05-23
Fort Street

May 9th. Sunny. I’m walking past the Winnipeg Police Service headquarters at 11 in the morning when I turn off Graham onto Fort Street and the timing is what it is. Two men coming from the gym, laughing, easy with each other and with the morning. They glance down at the man on the sidewalk as they pass, barely adjust their path, and keep moving. He’s Indigenous, wrapped in a Canadian Red Cross blanket, folded against the building at 11:15 a.m. The Red Cross blanket is the detail that stays with me. The disaster relief organization’s blanket, on a man on a sidewalk, on a weekday morning, in a city where urban Indigenous homelessness is not a crisis in the sense of something that arrived suddenly but a condition, the accumulated result of specific decisions made over a long time about whose life constitutes an emergency and whose constitutes a landscape. The two men are already half a block away, still laughing. They didn’t break their conversation.

Disappointment but not surprise. I knew before I turned the corner. The body knew before the mind finished the sentence.

I arrived on the afternoon of the 5th and went looking for the river almost immediately, dropping my bag at the hotel and walking out before I’d properly settled. I followed the Red River east, crossed the pedestrian bridge into Saint-Boniface with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights rising behind me, visible on the way over, visible on the way back, not demanding to be addressed.

In Saint-Boniface there’s a mural large enough that you see it before you understand what you’re seeing. Louis Riel at the centre, the Basilica behind him, Red River cart to his left, flowers below all of it in reds and yellows that don’t apologize. The body stopped before I decided to. I had no claim on this image and stood in front of it anyway because it was asking me to.

A few streets over I found a bookshop and was served in French without explanation required. I left with Gabrielle Roy, De quoi t’ennuies-tu, Éveline? suivi de Ély! Ély! Ély!, and opened her on a bench before I made it back to the water. She was doing something to me immediately, her descriptions of this land so precise and so felt that reading her while moving through it produced a particular disorientation, the prose arriving slightly ahead of the landscape, the landscape confirming it, the two things in a conversation I was overhearing.

The Forks is where the Red River meets the Assiniboine, the reason the whole city exists where it does, and I sat near the water that evening trying to be honest about my relation to it. This is not my river. I don’t mean that as a dismissal: this is the only honest position available to me. The Red River named a people who built their identity from unresolvable multiplicity, French and Indigenous and neither and both, named after a river valley that named them back, and I can hold that without claiming it. I read Roy at the water’s edge as the light changed, her sentences about the prairie moving through me alongside the current, both patient, both older than anything I was bringing to them.

I sat there unsettled in a way I didn’t immediately know what to do with.

The conference was the next morning. A labour union, its members doing work the state has largely abandoned, had flown me out to speak about decolonizing gender and the kind of care built outside institutional frameworks. There was something clarifying about that specific framing, being brought here by people who already understand that the official structures don’t hold, to talk about the communities that build their own. The room was practical and attentive in the way of people who work with their hands and their relations and don’t have patience for abstraction that doesn’t land somewhere. I tried to land somewhere. I think it did.

That night I went back to Roy. The hotel room, the flatness of the city pressing in through the window even in the dark, her sentences doing their patient work. She wrote about this land as someone who had been changed by it, who didn’t arrive with the landscape already interpreted but let it instruct her. I was trying to do something similar and was aware of how much further she had gone.

The following evening, I went to a drag show at Club 200. Someone I’d met at a ball in Tiohtià:ke, one conversation on the sidewalk in the afterglow of the function, had said if you’re ever in Winnipeg. I was. The room was warm and specific and full of a kind of attention that felt continuous with the Forks and the conference and Roy and the mural, different surfaces of the same thing: people making something real in a place that doesn’t always make it easy to. I stayed later than I meant to.

I carried Roy through all of it. On a bench, at a counter with coffee, back at the hotel. She kept describing the land with a care I was trying to learn from, the way she held the prairie’s scale without flinching, finding in its exposure not emptiness but a particular kind of honesty. Everything visible. Nothing apologizing for being what it is.

De quoi t’ennuies-tu, Éveline? suivi de Ély! Ély! Ély! Somewhere in Winnipeg, between things.

The Exchange District is right next to the Fairmont where I’ve been staying, neither of which I chose. I’ve walked through it almost every day since I arrived. The buildings are genuinely beautiful: ornate stonework, terracotta detail at rooflines, warehouse facades that speak to a moment of civic confidence, a city that built as if it expected to keep building. Many of the buildings now stand empty. I feel this as texture before I understand it as fact, the particular quality of a street where the architecture is present but the life isn’t quite, where you are aware of your own footsteps in a way that means something. There’s a gap between the ornamentation above and the sidewalk below and that gap is not accidental. Investment moved out of this city the way investment moves, quietly, structurally, with the consequences landing on specific bodies in specific places. What I keep returning to is not the emptiness of the buildings but the decision, ongoing and recursive, to leave them empty rather than house the people folded on the sidewalk beneath them. Anti-Indigeneity is not only ideology. It’s an allocation of resources, a determination of what counts as an emergency, a Red Cross blanket on a Fort Street sidewalk on a sunny morning while two men laugh their way past and the buildings above stand ornate and vacant. I walk through it and feel the logic before I can fully name it.

Anti-Blackness is operating here too, on its own terms, and I’m not going to collapse them. What I’ve been watching for four days is both, simultaneously, on people whose bodies this city has decided are not the ones worth protecting. The weight of already knowing and seeing it anyway is its own specific exhaustion.

I’m walking down Main toward Portage and asking myself whether I could actually live here. One of the positions I applied to was at the University of Manitoba. I never ended up visiting it. By the 9th, it doesn’t feel like the question it did on the 5th. The city has substituted a different one.

The mural and Fort Street and the empty Exchange and the river that isn’t mine and Club 200 and the conference and the man wrapped in the Red Cross blanket are all the same place. They don’t resolve into a verdict. They accumulate into something I’ll be sitting with for longer than the flight home.

I finished Roy this morning over breakfast. Her last pages, the land still doing its patient work on her, the sentences still making room for what the prairie keeps insisting on. I had been reading her as I moved through the territory she wrote about, and something about that had made the whole stay more porous, more available to being changed by what it actually was rather than what I had expected. I closed the book and walked out.

The wind at Portage and Main hits you before you’re ready for it. Nothing interrupts it for miles in any direction. That’s the thing about this place: everything arrives at full force, unchanged by whatever it passed through to get here.

I kept walking.

2026-05-09
Peel Basin, 09:15

Under the Bonaventure Expressway. The Five Roses sign at an angle I hadn’t expected from here. REM trains to my right, sliding past without sound from where I’m sitting. Water. I’m always near water these days, and I’m starting to think that’s not incidental.

A bus passes overhead and the whole structure hums. Rain making texture over the basin, fine and persistent, the kind that doesn’t announce itself. Black railings, rusted, graffiti-covered, dripping. Lines of water just waiting to fall. Sand. One of those public workout structures no one is using at this time on a Saturday morning. A group of runners in high visibility spandex and shorts run down the bike path. The city in every direction, and Griffintown beyond it, for rent signs on every building.

I’ve been coming to this city as someone who’s leaving. I didn’t notice until I sat down.

I developed a habit, somewhere in the last year, of waiting for the role that already speaks my language. The one where the job posting uses words close enough to mine that I can step in without translation. I projected myself so completely into those futures that when the doors didn’t open, I had to grieve whole lives I had never lived. And then came the questions, quieter and more damaging than the disappointment itself: I thought I was made for this. I didn’t even get an interview. What do I do with that?

Yesterday, I applied for more jobs than I had in all of last year. Something loosened. I sat with the grief and then I just started applying. Not waiting for the role that already recognizes me. Apply, and release. The worth of the work is established in other rooms, by other accountabilities. A search committee is not the final word on any of it.

I’m finishing a PhD in fields being actively criminalized south of the border, at a political moment that has shifted so much since I started that some days it’s hard to remember what the urgency was supposed to look like from the outside. When I began there was appetite. Now the appetite has moved, or curdled, or gone underground, and I’m here with a dissertation about fugitive care and speculative health and Black queer survival, graduating into a structure that is rapidly deciding this work is a liability.

And yet. The peer review. The publications. The editor’s face at the ball. The collaboration still coming. Something has expanded inside the work that I didn’t plan for. The quality of attention is different than it was three years ago. I can feel it when I write, the way a sentence finds its own weight now, the way I trust the observation to carry more than it used to. I didn’t manufacture that. It accumulated through drift, through coming back to the same water in different weather, through learning to let the body lead and follow after it with language.

I can’t be expected to always produce from what I carry in my body. That wouldn’t be research. That would be extraction.

I also deserve care.

I also deserve care.

Not to break the fourth wall or anything, but I keep thinking about these posts. How they might eventually compile into something. A monograph, maybe, or the evidence of one: a methodology demonstrated rather than argued, drift as a way of knowing, the fragment as form. What I’ve been building out here, in public, might already be the work. Not preparation for the work. The thing itself, accumulating. That feels important to say out loud, even just to myself, under the expressway, in the rain. And then an Amtrak train rolls backward across the bridge over Wellington, toward Gare centrale, and I think about Avery Gordon, about haunting, about what it means to walk grounds that announce their own history on interpretive signs beside empty lots.

This is one of the birthplaces of industrialization in Canada, the signs say, and the land they mark is largely vacant. The apartments going up in Griffintown are full of people who arrived after whatever the land remembers. Irish famine migrants came through here in 1847 carrying typhus, tens of thousands of them, and the ones who didn’t survive were buried in mass graves not far from where I’m standing. The Black Rock near the water marks some of them. The neighbourhood that bore their labour and their dying was eventually abandoned, then razed, then rebranded as a market for luxury condos with exposed brick and river views. The exposed brick is original. I’m walking through it, making my own record, adding my body to the account.

The running club has crossed to the other side of the canal. I don’t know when that happened.

I want to stay in this city. I have wanted to stay. But I know what it means to be this particular person at this particular moment in this city’s politics, and that knowing sits in my chest differently than the wanting does. They are both true. They do not resolve each other.

I don’t have a job. I’m tired. I said that in my previous post and it was real and it needed saying.

And also: I’m not stuck. I have a place to stay, for a few months or longer if needed, with a friend I love. The flexibility I’ve been reading as precarity is also, just barely, freedom. The frantic searching, the plans that keep changing because they always do because that’s the nature of these structures, maybe that’s what has been keeping me half out the door. Engaging with the city as someone already in transit. Already gone.

I think receiving the news by the canal on that day unbraced something in me. The body did the work and the mind caught up later, slow and a little embarrassed. Maybe this is the same thing. Maybe I need to let myself unbrace again: to be here, in Tiohtià:ke, under concrete, watching water. To hold the basin, the railings, the grey of the sky, without requiring any of it to resolve.

Maybe when I stop the frantic searching, direction makes itself clear. It has before. I have evidence of that. I can use it.

Pacing and waiting and unbracing at the Peel Basin. The rain drips and the texture changes. A REM train speeds back toward the mountain. The water waits.

Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that was always enough.

2026-05-02
Eastward

The ice is gone.

I notice this before I’ve settled fully onto the bench, the oat milk moka still warm between my hands, the pines along the boardwalk doing their slow work in the wind. Habitat 67 sits in my peripheral vision the way it always does. The Jacques-Cartier Bridge. The amusement park still closed for the season, rides standing idle behind the fence. This is the same bench, the same eastward orientation I keep returning to without quite deciding to. The Grand Quai in late April looks like a different river than the one I’ve been sitting with all winter, and in some ways it is. What I’m looking at now is water that has finished its holding. The ice that was here, the particular piece I wrote about once, the one that had taken the shape of a perfect triangle and pointed east the day I submitted my application, is gone. The river took it. That’s what rivers do across a season, with what they’re given.

I came back because the body knew to, before the rest of me had a reason.

Yesterday the city was warm.

I had finished a book on a terrasse on rue Saint-Paul, the last page coming the way last pages do when you’ve been living inside something long enough — not with surprise but with a recognition that the shape had completed itself. I sat with the last sentence for a moment before closing it, the way you sit with the last note of something before the room starts being a room again. Espresso. A crepe. The sun was doing what it had no business doing in the last days of April and rue Saint-Paul was receiving it without question, the old stone of the buildings holding the warmth differently than the glass towers do, softer, like the city remembering an older version of itself. People moved slowly. Faces turned up. I had nowhere to be and the body knew it and settled accordingly, shoulders dropping to a place they haven’t reached in months, the jaw unclenching, the particular luxury of a Tuesday that belongs entirely to itself.

I walked to the Lachine Canal after. The streets through the old port were still carrying the warmth, the light coming off the cobblestones at the angle it only reaches in spring, low and honeyed, the kind of light that makes the familiar look briefly precious. The Daniel McAllister was sitting in the locks the way it always sits, red and massive and indifferent to what the afternoon was doing around it. I found a patch of grass near the water, soft from the recent thaw, and lay down with my backpack as a pillow and let the sun press into my face and chest and the fronts of my hands. The body settled into the ground. The canal moved beside me with the particular quietness of still-cold water in a warm month. Somewhere across the water a bird was doing something persistent. I closed my eyes.

The body was already somewhere it recognized. Water, the eastward pull, the quality of attention that arrives in me when I’ve been near this city’s waterways long enough to stop performing being near them. I didn’t know I had brought anything. I thought I was lying in the sun on a warm day with a finished book and nowhere to be. The email came into that. I stared at the water for a long time after. Not thinking. Not yet. The canal kept moving the way it had been moving before the email arrived, indifferent to the reordering that had just occurred inside my chest. The sun was still doing what it had been doing. The Daniel McAllister hadn’t moved. I lay there with the phone face down on the grass beside me and let the body do what it needed to do with the information before I asked it to do anything else.

Not even an interview.

I knew it before I opened the email. Had known something was coming since morning in the way you know certain things through the body before they arrive as language — a low settling, a particular quality of stillness that isn’t peace. I had been waiting eight weeks. The waiting had lived in my shoulders, in the bracing I’ve been writing about for months, the compression that doesn’t shift with rest or movement. And then the day had been so good. The book finished, the sun, the terrasse, the city briefly being the version of itself that makes you forget you know better. I think now that the body had been preparing the whole time, had been carrying the knowledge forward through the morning and into the afternoon, had found the water and lain down beside it because it knew what was coming and wanted to be somewhere it could receive it.

Four days before this, I was at a ball.

The editor of a collection on queering research methods was in the city — they had already read the chapter I submitted, the one that takes ballroom as its methodological site, had held the manuscript in their hands and followed the argument through — and it happened, the way things sometimes happen in this work, that there was a function that weekend. Le National was filling up as they arrived, the air carrying that particular charge a ballroom space holds before the first category is called, sweat and cologne and anticipation and the low thrum of a sound system that knows what it’s there for. This is my place. The place where my body remembers things about itself it forgets in other rooms.

The commentator was electric that night. It’s the girls I see, it’s the girls I know, it’s the girls I LOVE! — the chant landing and lifting and landing again, the whole room carrying it forward without being asked, the way a room becomes a body when the conditions are right. For Bizarre and Face the effects came out, light and smoke and the particular theatre of a category that understands spectacle as argument, and the walkers moved through it like they had built the universe the effects were gesturing toward, because they had. Then the commentator called for the DJ to cut the beat. Someone deserved their flowers. The praise came slowly and specifically, the way real recognition does when it isn’t performed but meant. I turned to them and said: imagine what a moment like that does for your self image.

They were watching the room the way you watch something you’ve read about but hadn’t yet felt in the body. And I was watching them watch it, and I was also just there, inside the thing my chapter is about, the thing I have been trying to describe in academic language for years, and for a few unrepeatable hours the distance between the researcher and the researched was not a methodological problem I was managing but simply gone. They saw the work in its own element. Saw what the work knows that the chapter can only point toward.

The hiring committee reviewed my file and moved on without making contact.

These are not the same kind of not-being-chosen and my body knows the difference. It also knows the longer record. The tissue that received the email yesterday has received other decisions, earlier ones, ones that arrived before I had language for what it meant to be assessed and found not quite right for the available position. The committee doesn’t know that. The file doesn’t carry it. But the body holds the full archive anyway, and what lands on it now lands on everything already stored there — every room that looked at what I was and made its calculation, every process that moved forward without me, every form of not-being-selected that taught me, before I had words for any of it, that my belonging somewhere was conditional on someone else’s decision. The hiring committee is not the first institution to review my file and conclude I wasn’t what they were looking for. The body has been here before.

What I know is that my work circulates. It reaches into rooms before I do. The professor who was hired for the anti-colonial social work position I applied for once asked me to lecture in one of their courses, on anti-Blackness, because of the strength of what I had built. The editor came to the ball. The work is not invisible. What it is, is illegible to the institutions that would need to legibly credential it in order to shelter it. There is a difference between being seen and being chosen, and I have been living inside that difference long enough to name its specific texture — the way it sits in the chest distinct from ordinary disappointment, distinct from failure. This is not failure. It is something more precise and in some ways more exhausting than failure, because it requires knowing the value of what you’re holding while watching the institution decide it doesn’t know what to do with you.

I have to pay my bills. I don’t have a job. In a few months the PhD will be finished and the structure it provided — the funding, the timeline, the container — will be gone, and the practice is already closed, and the position didn’t come, and I am sitting at the bottom of every scaffold at once. I know the work has value because I have watched it have value, repeatedly, in rooms that received it on its own terms. I am also scared in a way that doesn’t care what I know.

A triangular piece of ice, pointing eastward, on the surface of the Saint Lawrence in late February.

I came back to the Grand Quai this morning because this is where I picked it up.

Eight weeks ago there was ice here. A piece that had taken the shape of a perfect triangle, pointing east, and I had stood at this water and let that mean something on the day I submitted the application. I know what I felt standing here, the particular quality of a sign you don’t go looking for, the way the body receives it before the mind has decided whether to believe in that kind of thing. I let it mean something. I carried it forward through eight weeks of waiting, through the compression and the bracing and the not-knowing, and I brought the weight of it with me to the canal yesterday and it was still there when the email arrived.

The ice is gone now. The river took it back sometime in the weeks I was waiting, dissolved it into current the way it dissolves everything it’s given across a season. I’m looking at open water. The same eastward orientation, the same bench, Habitat 67 still on the opposite shore, the boardwalk’s pines still swaying slowly in the wind. The place hasn’t changed. What it was holding is gone.

I’ve been watching this stretch of water long enough to know what it looks like when it’s finished holding something. This is what it looks like.

So I put it down.

Not the work. Not the knowing. Not the particular exhaustion of being this person in this work at this moment. Those travel with me. What I’m putting down is the version of the future I had been carrying in my chest since January: the particular mornings I had been imagining, the quality of quiet in a small town, the body that might exist there, less braced, more available to itself. The version of myself that had a title and a campus and a room where the work could happen on its own terms. I had given that version a lot of grace. I had let it become specific. I had let myself want it.

The ancestors came from the direction this water runs. The shard of ice that pointed east is already out there somewhere, dissolved into the Atlantic, returned to the water that carried my people. I’m not the first one to sit at this river and give something to the current. I won’t be the last.

The trucks are still beeping in the distance. The pines are doing their slow work in the wind. Habitat 67 and Île-Sainte-Hélène and the Jacques-Cartier Bridge still sit in my peripheral vision, the amusement park still closed, the rides standing idle. The oat milk moka has gone cold in my hands. The sky is the particular grey of a day that isn’t going to change its mind.

I’m still here. I’m still undone. The water already knows what to do with what I’ve brought it.

2026-04-29
Consequence as Weather

The coffee shop near the Palais des congrès is already full of Liberal Party of Canada convention delegates when I join the line outside. Cop cars are parked down the street. Inside, every table has a staffer. Suits. Baseball caps. #LIB2026 lanyards. Louboutins under a table where someone’s set a Prada bag on the chair beside her. Laptop messenger bags open across tables the staff need to turn. Pins with Mark Carney’s face. Meticulously curled hair. Khakis. The particular self-assurance of people who’ve decided their presence anywhere is appropriate. Then one woman moving through the room with an umbrella from the Fairmont, the red of her dress the party colour, coordinated, intentional. She passes a barista without looking at her and something tightens in my chest that’s been tightening for days.

I’m wearing a keffiyeh and I notice the moment they notice it. Something shifts in the room that nobody names. A delegate near the door clocks it and looks away with a speed that’s its own kind of statement. I’m used to being read in spaces like this, used to the particular attention that Black presence draws in rooms that have decided they’re for everyone. The keffiyeh adds a layer. They know it and I know they know it and we all sit with our coffees pretending the room isn’t doing what the room is doing.

The REDress Project places empty red dresses in public spaces to hold the shape of the women who are gone, the ones this government decided this week, this specific week, don’t require sustained investigation or resources. The woman with the Fairmont umbrella didn’t choose red for that reason. The colour was assigned. Coordinated. By a party that also welcomed Marilyn Gladu across the floor, a woman whose votes against queer and trans people are part of the parliamentary record, and called it coalition. This is the party that marches in Pride parades. That points to marriage equality as proof of its character. I’m a queer person in this room and I’ve known for a long time that the shelter had conditions. My body doesn’t receive Gladu as shock. It receives her as confirmation, one more piece of evidence landing on top of everything already stored, every previous moment the walls showed how thin they were. That’s how it accumulates. Weight settling into the chest and the shoulders and the jaw, invisible from the outside, carried forward into every room where you’re told to be grateful for the protection. The woman in red moves through the coffee shop. The barista clears a table. None of them look up.

This is my coffee shop. At the counter there’s a different kind of exchange available, the kind between people who’ve been showing up for each other across enough ordinary mornings that the terms are established. We don’t have to say much. I make a joke. He laughs in a way that’s also an exhale. We talk briefly about what it costs to serve people who treat you like infrastructure, who order without eye contact, who leave without acknowledgment. Nobody says Liberal Party. Nobody has to. The room keeps doing what it’s doing around us.

Three tables away a delegate checks his phone. This government is complicit in a genocide and has spent considerable resources avoiding that word, and cut funding for investigations into missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people this week, and has used every available tool to avoid the connection between those two sentences. The funding, the votes, the abstentions, the phrasing carefully chosen to avoid the words that would require action. Somewhere a family is in rubble. Somewhere a child is being pulled from concrete. Somewhere a woman is missing and the file’s been defunded. Here we are, here I am, here they are, in Tiohtià:ke on a blustery Thursday morning. The woman in red passes the window on her way to the Palais. The Fairmont umbrella catches the light.

I finish my coffee. Close my book. The room’s still full when I push through the door and turn south toward the Palais des congrès, toward the metro, past the cop cars still parked where I left them.

Around the Palais the police are everywhere. The apparatus arranged in a perimeter around the people who command it, who fund it, who’ve always been the reason it exists in the form it does. The woman in red moves through that perimeter without breaking stride. I’ve never been the person that apparatus was arranged to protect. The people I love have never been that person. The people whose deaths we mark and carry forward, the ones the red was supposed to hold, whose files were defunded this week, the ones in rubble whose names this government will not say, have never been that person. The police are at the Palais des congrès because the people inside it put them there.

What stays in my body is the knowledge that nothing I feel or say or write will reach these people in any way that costs them anything. They’ll leave the Palais and return to their lives and the decisions they make will continue to land on the same bodies they’ve always landed on and they’ll sleep. That’s what impunity actually is. The ability to move through the world without your actions ever returning to your body as consequence. I’ve spent my whole life in a body where consequence is the weather. Where what I do and how I move and what I wear and who I am carries risk in rooms like this one. They’ve spent their whole lives in the other kind of body. The kind the police are arranged to protect. The kind that gets to feel frustrated about service at a coffee shop without that frustration being a threat assessment. We’re in the same city on the same Thursday morning and we’re not in the same world.

These systems don’t hold forever and the people inside them know it even when they perform certainty. I’ve watched enough of these rooms to recognize the particular discomfort of people who’ve learned to read threat and have started to feel it coming from directions they didn’t expect. It’s in the way the delegate clocked my keffiyeh and looked away. It’s in the way entitlement requires an audience that keeps agreeing to the premise, and that audience is getting smaller and louder about its refusal. The collapse of these systems will be disorderly and the people with the least protection will absorb the most of that disorder on the way down. That’s not a prediction. That’s the pattern, repeating. The keffiyeh. The barista who laughed in a way that was also an exhale. The agreement these people depend on is breaking and they can feel it.

The most honest thing that happened this morning was a small pastry set beside a coffee without a word, between two people the room wasn’t watching. I’ve been thinking about that on the walk down here, about what it means that the thing that held the most required the least. The police were outside the coffee shop when I left. They’re all the way down the street and around the Palais des congrès, the same apparatus, just more of it, arranged in a perimeter around people who’ve never had to think about what a small thing costs or what it holds. I’m still thinking about the pastry.
Fediverse Reactions
2026-04-10
What the Credential Requires

The process is specific. A recognized bachelor’s or master’s in social work. More than 350 hours of supervised fieldwork. Registration with a provincial regulatory body. Annual renewal. Professional liability insurance. Continuing education requirements that must be documented and submitted on schedules the regulatory bodies determine. In most provinces, certain activities are reserved exclusively for licensed practitioners, creating legal perimeters around forms of assessment and intervention that can only be practised by those the provincial order has recognized. The details differ by jurisdiction. The logic is the same across all of them.

The stated mandate of professional regulatory bodies is the protection of the public. The mechanism for that protection is the control of professional practice. Those two things are presented as the same project.

They are not the same project.

To require that care be delivered through a licensed practitioner is to require that it be delivered through a person the institution has recognized, trained, insured, and made accountable to the institution’s own standards. The supervised fieldwork hours are not hours of learning how to be in relation with people. They are hours during which the institution evaluates whether the candidate’s practice can be named in its terms. Regulatory bodies define supervision as a formal, continuous process of reflection that integrates the values of the profession. The profession’s values. Not the community’s. Not the client’s. Registration is not a recognition of competence. It is an entry into a register. The register is a list of people whose practice can be found, audited, disciplined, and withdrawn.

This is not bureaucracy failing to do what it promised. This is bureaucracy doing exactly what it was built to do.

To require that care be standardized, documented, and reproducible is to require that it be made available on institutional terms. The institution sets those terms in relation to its own interests, which are not the same as the interests of the people most likely to need care. The session note is not a record of what happened between two people. It is a translation of that encounter into language an insurer can evaluate, a court can subpoena, and a regulatory body can review in the event of a complaint. Every translation involves loss. The losses here are not random. What falls out of the session note is precisely what made the session matter: the quality of the silence, the shift that happened that neither person could have predicted, the particular texture of someone’s survival. What remains is the presenting problem, the intervention modality, the plan. The care gets documented. The care does not survive the documentation intact.

This conversion is the point. The credential is not incidental to it. The credential is the mechanism through which it happens.

Licensed practitioners gain access to something specific: legitimacy within systems that were not built for the people most likely to need care. The ability to bill insurers. To work within institutions. To produce assessments that carry weight with courts, hospitals, employers, child protection services. That weight is deputized. It flows from the same institutions whose ongoing function includes the surveillance, regulation, and management of the communities those assessments are most often used against. To enter those institutions as a credentialed participant is to enter on their terms. The terms of participation are established before anyone arrives, regardless of what they intended when they applied.

People still choose this. The choice is made, and the harms that follow from it belong to the people who enact them. The structure does not absorb individual accountability. What the structure does is make certain harms legible and defensible. It provides frameworks within which things can be done to clients that would, outside the professional context, be recognizable as violation. It provides language that converts those violations into documentation of professional practice. It provides discipline processes better designed to protect institutional authority than the person who was harmed. The credential is not incidental to this protection. It is how the protection works.

The work that happened in this practice was real. Something moved between people in those rooms that was not reducible to the structure surrounding it. The quality of attention that accumulates in sustained therapeutic work, the particular thing that becomes possible when someone knows they will not have to start over next week, when the person across from them has been paying attention long enough to notice what has shifted and what has not. That is real in the way that relation is real. It happened, and the fact that it happened inside a structure organized to convert it into auditable service does not unmake it.

What it does is make the contradiction sharp enough to become impossible to continue carrying.

The practice is closing because continuing it would mean continuing to agree, in practice if not in belief, to what the credential requires. To keep routing genuine care through a structure whose function is to make it legible on institutional terms. To keep producing documentation that serves systems organized against the people sitting across from this desk.

The care does not close with it. The obligation that came from being trusted with people’s survival does not dissolve when the annual registrations do. What those who were in those rooms carried here mattered, and it was received as mattering, fully, outside any framework the regulatory bodies provided for receiving it. That does not change. What ends is the agreement to deliver care through a mechanism that extracts something from it on the way, that requires it to pass through institutional translation before it can count as real.

That extraction was always happening. This is what it cost.

2026-04-05
Salt

The ice is sweating. Moisture gathering at the surface, at the precise line where the ice meets the water it’s in the process of becoming. I’m watching it from the bench on the pier, the same bench, the same eastward orientation I keep returning to without quite deciding to. Gulls have settled at that line and they don’t move. They know something about thresholds. They sit exactly where the transformation is occurring and they stay.

The St. Lawrence in late March. The ice still holds toward the middle, grey-white and flat. At the edges it’s releasing, the surface doing its slow work, and the water that was held all winter is beginning to find its way back into current. I’ve been sitting here long enough to watch it happen. I haven’t moved either.

There’s a specific quality of attention this place produces in me. I come here when the body has been holding too much and needs to set it down somewhere that can receive it without asking what it is. The body keeps returning to this exact spot, this exact orientation, facing east, the city at its back, and at some point the repetition itself becomes information.

I put the city at my back when I sat down. I know what’s there. I know this city the way you know something you’ve loved through several versions of itself and several versions of yourself — its pace, its particular generosity, the specific texture of its contradictions, the way care gets built here inside difficulty. I’ve walked these streets through enough seasons to have accumulated a real knowledge of this place. That’s most of what I know about how to survive.

The most enslaved people in what is now called Canada lived here. In these streets. In these buildings’ predecessors. They moved through this geography, were bought and sold in it, built what became the city now sitting behind my left shoulder. Montréal, Québec City, the towns along this river — the institution put down roots here, made its records here, established itself in French and in English and in the silences between the two. The history is documented and specific and present. It’s in the soil the city was built on. It’s in the financial foundations of institutions that are still standing. The place holds this whether I acknowledge it or not. What I try to do is be someone who doesn’t pretend otherwise while I’m standing here — who doesn’t let the beauty of the water or the particular way the light falls on the ice in March do the work of making the ground feel neutral.

Follow the St. Lawrence east and you reach the Atlantic. The Atlantic is the route of the trade. The trade is the origin of my lineage. The river in front of me, moving in the direction it has always moved, is carrying water toward the ocean that carried my ancestors. The body standing at the edge of this pier and the current visible at the edge of this ice are not separate things. There’s a line from here to there that is literal — longitude, current, the specific direction water moves when the land finally releases it into the sea. I keep facing east. I keep coming back to this exact orientation. The body keeps choosing it. The eastward pull runs deeper than this lifetime’s accumulation of difficult days and necessary walks. The ancestors are in the direction the water goes. Facing east, here, at this river, is a form of relation.

Ancestral presence feels like a quality of attention, a pressure in the chest that arrives when you’re standing somewhere that holds more than it shows, a recognition that moves through the body before the mind has assembled the full sentence. I’ve felt it here before. I feel it today. Something in the body responds to this geography in a way it doesn’t respond to other geographies, and I’ve learned to follow that response without demanding it become more legible than it is. I’m not the first Black person to stand at this water. I’m not the first to face east from a shore on this river and feel the weight of what the water knows. There’s an accumulation in a place like this — of the people who came before, of what they survived and didn’t survive, of the specific grief of those who were brought here and those who were born here into conditions not of their making. That accumulation sits in the body alongside everything else, indistinguishable sometimes from ordinary grief, sometimes from the particular tiredness of carrying one’s own history through a world that keeps asking you to set it down. I stay with it. I’ve stopped asking it to become more coherent than it is. Some knowledge arrives in sensation and lives there, and the staying is the practice.

The gulls haven’t moved from the line where the ice sweats. I keep returning to what they seem to understand about that specific location — the threshold between states, the place where one thing is becoming another and the process is incomplete and you can see both at once if you look closely enough. The grief of knowing what the water knows is structural. It predates you and will outlast you. It lives in the body as inheritance rather than as event. The grief of standing at a river that runs toward the place your people were taken from, in a city built in part by their labour and their captivity, in a body that carries the record of all of it — that grief has no clean edges. It doesn’t arrive in a single moment and it doesn’t resolve in one either. It moves the way the ice moves. A slow release at the surface, the held thing finding its way back to motion, not all at once but gradually, at the line between what was solid and what is becoming current again. The holding is structural, which means the release is too: slow, incremental, happening at the edge where the conditions finally allow it. This is one of the few places where the grief the body carries and the geography underfoot are in direct relation. Where the river is already doing the work of holding the history, because it runs through the same history on its way to the sea.

There’s a practice in returning. Each time the body is slightly different — more tired, or more clear, or carrying a different weight — and the place receives that version without distinction. What accumulates is a relational knowledge, built through repeated presence, through being changed by a place over time and being willing to notice the change. I know this stretch of the St. Lawrence in winter. I know what the ice looks like at different stages of forming and releasing. I know the quality of the cold here and how the wind comes off the water and where the light lands in the late afternoon. That knowledge was built through return, and it means something that it was built at this geography. The body knew to come here today. It knew the turn toward the water before the thought to turn had fully articulated itself. This is what happens when a practice has been sustained long enough that the body has internalized its logic. The walks have their own intelligence. The route has its own memory. And underneath that memory, older routes: the ancestors returning to water, finding their way to shorelines for their own reasons, carrying their own knowledge of what the water holds. Some of those routes were interrupted. Some were destroyed deliberately, the paths erased along with the people who made them, the knowledge scattered in the violence of what was done. The practice of return is partly an attempt to hold what was held, to keep a thread from breaking entirely, to maintain a relation to geography that was never supposed to be maintained. I have this river. This body. This bench facing east. I’ve stopped waiting for more before taking it seriously.

The ice is still sweating when I finally stand up. The gulls have shifted slightly but they haven’t left the line. The water at the edge is darker now than when I arrived, more current visible, the release progressing through the afternoon. I stand there for a moment before turning back toward the city, facing east with the cold on my face, feeling the specific quality of attention this place produces and letting it finish what it was doing before I interrupt it with movement. The river will keep doing this after I’m gone from the pier. The ice will keep its slow release toward the edges, the sweating at the line, the water finding its way back into current. The St. Lawrence will keep running east the way it has always run, carrying whatever the city gives it, moving toward the Atlantic with the patience of something that has been doing this longer than anyone alive can remember. The ocean it runs into will keep holding the history it holds. The salt will stay salt.

At the end of everything, it all returns to that. The ocean that carried my ancestors. The river that runs into it. The body standing here, made of water and what water holds, at the edge of a geography that is mine and not mine, claimed and unclaimed, loved and not yet finished being grieved. The ice sweating slowly back into motion. The gulls at the threshold. The city at my back, built on what it was built on, holding what it holds.

The water already knows all of it. I come here to remember that I do too.

2026-03-26
Fool’s Spring

The air is doing something it has no business doing in March.

I notice it before I’m fully awake to noticing—something in the chest, a small release, the jaw unclenching in a way I didn’t realize it had been clenched. I’m already on the route when it registers. The cold that’s been structural for months, the kind that doesn’t ask permission and doesn’t negotiate, it’s just gone today. In its place there’s this softness, almost embarrassing in how good it feels, like the city decided to be generous without warning and didn’t tell me in advance so I could defend against it.

People are outside. Not the usual bundled determination of Montréal winter movement, heads down, getting somewhere. Actually outside, taking up space, faces turned up. Someone’s dragged a chair onto the sidewalk in front of a café that has no business having outdoor seating yet. A man is standing on the corner doing nothing, just standing there, which you don’t see in February. A woman I pass makes eye contact and almost smiles and I almost smile back and we both look away like we almost said something too honest.

The city’s doing the thing—I know the thing, I’ve watched it happen enough times to recognize it immediately—and I can’t do anything with that recognition because the body doesn’t care what I know. The shoulders drop anyway. The pace slows. Something lets go without asking.

I’ve been coming to this route since November, which means I’ve been here long enough to watch the river do everything it’s done this winter. Not every day, not with any intention exactly. Just when the body needed somewhere to put itself that didn’t require anything back. The Old Port in winter is good for that. Nobody’s performing anything. The tourists are gone, the terrasses are stacked and wrapped in plastic, and what’s left is the river and the cold and whoever else needed to be somewhere that wasn’t inside their own head.

I watched the freeze happen in pieces. First the edges, where the water slows against the bank and the cold gets a foothold. Then the surface thickening gradually, going from dark and moving to grey and uncertain to the flat white that means it’s held. There was a week in January where the ice looked almost translucent in the afternoon light — blue-green, the kind of colour that doesn’t seem like it belongs to winter. I stood there longer than made sense. I didn’t write about it. I just kept it. There was a morning in February where snow had covered everything overnight and the whole surface went illegible, no texture, no variation, flat white meeting flat white at the horizon. The river looked like it had stopped being a river. Like it was waiting for instructions. I remember thinking the cold that morning felt almost like clarity, which made no sense given that nothing was clear, but the body makes its own logic and I’d learned by then to let it.

So when I come around the corner today and the river is moving—not fully open, there’s still ice out toward the middle, still that grey-white surface, but along the edges it’s dark water again, actual current—I stop without deciding to stop. I don’t know exactly what I’m registering. Just that it matters, the way some things matter in the body before the mind has caught up with why.

What I understand now, that I didn’t know walking those winter mornings, is that I was memorising. It felt like the opposite—like emptying out, like just moving through cold air with nothing required of me. But the body was doing something the mind hadn’t signed off on yet. Storing details. Noting the specific quality of light on ice in January. Learning the weight of this particular stretch of waterfront at this particular time in my life. That’s what grief does before you’ve named it as grief: it makes you pay attention. It starts archiving without asking. It turns ordinary routes into records of something you’re not ready to call an ending yet. And then I look up, and the city is still here, doing what it does, and I feel it anyway.

Montréal means it, though. That’s the part that’s always been hard to hold alongside everything else. When the warmth comes back and people spill out onto the sidewalks and strangers almost smile at each other, that’s real. There’s a genuine porousness to this place when the conditions allow it, a capacity for collective ease that I haven’t found anywhere else in quite the same register. I’ve loved this city through every version of myself. It taught me the pace of winter light and what care looks like when it’s built inside contradiction rather than despite it. The friends who showed up, the communities that held me, the particular way people here make room for each other in the margins of a place that isn’t always making room officially—that’s not nothing. That’s actually most of what I know about survival.

And it’s all present today. I can feel it in how the city moves, the way the warmth loosens something collective and for a few hours everyone’s a little more available to each other. I’m not outside it. My chest opened on this walk the same as everyone else’s.

But I’ve also lived here long enough to know the pattern. The warmth is real and then the policy conversation starts and the belonging turns conditional again. The city that holds you and then asks you to be less legible in certain rooms, to translate yourself into something more manageable, to accept that your safety is negotiable in the name of neutrality or order or whatever word is doing that work this season. The fool’s spring is the actual structure of what it’s been like to do Black queer abolitionist work here. The opening and then the slow close. The genuine warmth that never quite becomes something you can count on. You feel it every time. That’s not naivety. It’s just how it goes.

What I didn’t expect today is that none of that would settle the question.

I’ve been thinking of the leaving as something already decided, the walks a form of goodbye that was already underway, the compression becoming its own kind of instruction. And I still think that’s true. But today, in this light, with the river moving and the city briefly being the version of itself that I fell for, I don’t know. Not in a way that changes anything concrete. Just in the way that honest things are sometimes more complicated on good days than on hard ones. The hard days make the leaving feel obvious. The good days remind you what you’d actually be leaving. Neither one gets to be the whole truth.

I keep walking. The warmth stays on my face. I let it.

Somewhere in the middle of winter, I started reading job postings from small university towns.

Not obsessively, not with a plan. Just tabs that stayed open longer than they should have, descriptions of places I’d never been that I kept returning to without quite knowing why. Towns I’d have to look up on a map. Departments small enough that you’d know everyone’s name by October. The kind of campus where the work would have to speak for itself because there’s no scene to situate it in, no institutional politics to navigate before you’ve even started.

I told myself it was practical. The PhD is ending, the market is the market, you apply where there are positions. That’s true as far as it goes. But it doesn’t explain why those particular postings were the ones I kept returning to, or why imagining a smaller place felt less like settling and more like something the body was quietly asking for.

I think my nervous system has started making cartographic decisions. The way this city lands on me now, the weight of it — some part of me has figured out that scale is something I can actually change. There’s a version of this work that happens somewhere I’m not already exhausted before I begin. I keep picturing a quality of morning more than a specific place. The kind where the first thing the body does is breathe. Where you can walk to work and the walk doesn’t cost anything, doesn’t pass three corners each carrying a different memory of who you were trying to be when you lived near there. Where the air is just air and the river, if there is one, doesn’t know your whole history.

I know how that sounds. Like I think a different postal code is going to fix something that lives in the body and travels with it. I know the difference between changing your circumstances and outrunning yourself. But environment is not neutral, and it’s taken me years to trust that fully. Doing this work in a city where it’s legible but not exactly welcome, where every institutional conversation requires a translation tax, where you’ve spent years learning to make yourself understood in rooms architecturally designed not to understand you — that accumulates in the tissue. I’m not burned out in the generic sense. I’m tired in a specific and located way. Tired of the particular labour of being this person in this place at this moment in its politics. More rest isn’t going to fix that. Distance might.

The teaching keeps coming up too. As something I actually want, in a way that’s become clearer the more depleted I’ve gotten here. Students who haven’t encountered this work before. A classroom where abolition isn’t the assumed vocabulary, where I’d have to find new ways in rather than spend energy defending the door. There’s a version of the work that gets lazy when it only ever talks to people who already agree, and I think I’ve been in that version for a while without fully admitting it.

Small university towns have their own whiteness, their own particular loneliness for someone who looks like me. I’ve read enough from Black scholars at isolated institutions to know that the quiet I’m picturing can curdle — a different kind of exhaustion, the work of being the only one in the room following you into a different room in a different city. But there’s a difference between what I’ve been absorbing here and the difficulties I’d carry somewhere new. One feels like something the city does to me. The other would at least be mine to navigate on my own terms.

I can go. That sentence is doing a lot of work. It’s a function of a passport, of citizenship, of options I didn’t earn so much as inherit through a specific geography of luck. Some of the people I love and do this work beside don’t have the same calculus available. The border that’s an inconvenience for me is a wall for others. There’s something uncomfortable about framing mobility as nervous system regulation when mobility itself is structural power. The leaving doesn’t stop being a privilege just because it’s also a need. That discomfort doesn’t get resolved by naming it. It just gets carried more honestly.

The tabs stay open. The towns stay imagined, their particular quiet, the version of myself that might exist there. On the hard days that feels less like fantasy and more like information.

I’m still walking this route. That’s the strange part.

The body still knows every texture of this waterfront, every place where the pavement shifts or the wind comes off the water differently. I still stop at the same spots without deciding to. I still look for the light in the same places. Nothing about how I move through here has changed, and yet something is already gone. Not left exactly. Loosened. The way attention shifts before the body follows.

I’ve been looking at this city too carefully for months. Too completely. Taking in details I never bothered with before — the particular colour of the light on Saint-Laurent in the early evening, the sound the métro makes pulling into Beaubien, the way snow sits differently on the mountain than anywhere else. It feels like love and it is love, but it’s also the beginning of an archive. You don’t memorise what you’re certain of keeping.

The walks have been this. Every time I’ve come down to the river since November, I’ve been doing something I didn’t have language for until recently. Saying goodbye to a place I haven’t left yet, to a version of myself that is going to stay here even after I go. There’s grief in that and also something steadier than grief, something that doesn’t have a clean name. The body moving through familiar space one more time, not performing anything, just letting it register fully before the register closes.

I’m still here. I’m already elsewhere. Both of those are true right now, on this same walk, in this same body, and I’ve stopped trying to figure out which one is more real.

The warmth is still on my face when I turn back toward home.

I didn’t ask for today. Didn’t need the city to do this right now, to be this version of itself while I’m in the middle of figuring out how to leave it. It would’ve been easier if March had just stayed March, stayed hard and grey and unconvincing. Instead it gave me this — the river moving, the strangers almost smiling, the chest opening before I could stop it. The kind of day that doesn’t argue with you. It just arrives and expects you to feel it.

So I did. I let it in.

I don’t know if I’m leaving. I know the tabs are open. I know the towns are still imagined, their particular quiet still hypothetical, the version of myself that exists there still unverified. I know Montréal is still the place that made me and that making doesn’t undo itself just because I’m tired.

The river will freeze again next winter whether I’m here to watch it or not.

The warmth will be gone in a few days. The cold will come back and close things over again. That’s fine. It got in while it could.

The body knows the route either way.

2026-03-09