Category: Uncategorized

  • Unmoored

    Unmoored

    The morning after the election, the city looks the same. Dry streets, brittle air, leaves pressed flat against the pavement. A jogger passes, breath clouding the cold, and somewhere, a car alarm starts and stops. Montréal continues its routine with the precision of muscle memory, a city that knows how to disguise grief.

    Inside, the kettle cools on the counter. I stand at the window, watching the light shift across the buildings. The light is hard, metallic, the kind that makes everything appear sharper than it is. The silence in the room feels heavy, almost physical, like something you could lift with both hands.

    Last night, Soraya Martinez Ferrada and Ensemble Montréal won the municipal election. The radio speaks of renewal, pride, stability. I picture the rented ballroom where speeches rang out: the clink of glasses, the smell of fabric softener and stage lights, laughter spilling into the dry streets, volunteers walking home beneath banners that promised progress.

    Progress, they say. But I can’t feel it. The air still carries the weight of something unspoken. Every party with a chance built its platform on the same foundations: language purity, economic austerity, the management of difference. Whether they spoke of pride, efficiency, or neutrality, the promise stayed constant: belonging for some, permission for others, surveillance for the rest. Strategic voting wasn’t the failure. The ballot was the trap.

    Some will say the vote split the left. They’ll insist that if we’d all lined up behind the same banner, things might have turned out differently, as if the problem were arithmetic and not ideology. As if the left they’re mourning hadn’t already increased police budgets, backed racial profiling, and dressed austerity in green. As if we were meant to keep voting for the same forces that have made so many of us less safe in our own neighbourhoods. There’s grief in watching people mistake management for care.

    Anger doesn’t erase love. It sharpens it. Even as the slogans collapse, I keep seeing the city’s face in the small things that once felt like home. I’ve loved this place through every version of myself. Montréal shaped my language, my work, my survival. It taught me the pace of winter light, the generosity of strangers, the way care grows inside contradiction. It held me through uncertainty and exhaustion. It’s where I built kinship, where I learned that love can live inside ruins.

    Lately, that love feels unreturned, and I know I’m not alone in feeling the distance widen. This loss feels like mourning in slow motion. What’s changing isn’t only the skyline or the slogans but the city’s sense of itself, the fragile coexistence that once made it possible to breathe here. Policies that promise safety and pride have become instruments of surveillance. Community centres lose funding while police budgets grow. Streets that once felt like gathering places now echo with a quieter kind of fear.

    I watch it happen and recognize the pattern. The same language of order and belonging spreads far beyond Montréal, across the provinces, across the border. It’s a choreography of control disguised as care, a politics that tightens around what it names as protection. Each new measure asks again and again: who gets to belong, and who must disappear? I grieve not only the policies but the narrowing of imagination they bring, the loss of what this city once taught me, that people can make worlds together even when institutions refuse to.

    The city that once felt expansive has begun to fold in on itself. The word values fills the news, followed by neutrality and order. The province denies systemic racism even as its laws rewrite language, dress, belonging. Policy takes the form of open arms that never quite reach. Every speech about inclusion carries the faint scent of repetition. This isn’t a sudden change. It’s the slow drift of habit, hardening like ice across the Saint Lawrence. The denial of injustice has become an everyday reflex. What I feel now isn’t surprise, but recognition. The city mirrors everything beyond it until reflection itself becomes suffocation.

    That reflection doesn’t stay on the glass; it settles beneath the skin. The air thickens around conversation. What begins as policy ends as posture. The city lives in the body: in the jaw that tightens before speaking, in the breath that hesitates before it leaves. Doing Black queer and abolitionist work here means learning to breathe within narrow margins, shaping language that can move through corridors built for silence, carrying whole conversations in the space between what’s said and what’s permitted. I’ve written reports no one read, proposals that came back without comment. Each silence taught me another dialect. I’ve learned the rhythm of translation, not of language but of self, a fluency in shrinking. That quiet labour settles deeper still. The lungs forget how to widen. The skin learns to anticipate tension. The body absorbs every moment of being misunderstood.

    And yet, grace persists.

    A friend leaves soup at my door. A neighbour cracks a joke, and we both laugh longer than expected. A kiki ball fills the night with sound, and laughter becomes a kind of heartbeat. These gestures don’t repair anything. They make living possible within a structure that resists it. The tenderness of this city lives in the people who refuse to stop loving it. They keep planting, cooking, teaching, dancing, writing. They hold each other through exhaustion. They create small interruptions in the machinery of forgetting.

    Love keeps me here. It isn’t safety. It is endurance, and endurance has a cost. I’m tired of pretending that staying is a choice. They say patience. They say progress. They say it takes time. But time is what they’ve stolen.

    I’m nearing the end of my PhD, standing in the quiet between endings and beginnings. I’ve started reading job postings from other cities, looking for roles that might let me live and work at a distance. I read slowly, careful not to look too far ahead. I tell myself that leaving could continue what began here, that movement could be a form of care. Still, there’s guilt in mobility. Even leaving is a privilege, though it doesn’t feel like one. I’ll cross borders others can’t, carrying a passport built from contradictions. But staying has its own kind of disappearance.

    Lately, I’ve been imagining what life might feel like elsewhere. The thought arrives gently, without certainty: rooms with different light, mornings that move without hurry, work that grows without needing to explain its own worth, air that feels generous. Beyond this city, there’s no clear refuge. Borders reopen old wounds. Fires, floods, droughts, storms, fear. Billionaires call their escape routes progress while governments trade care for resilience.

    I keep hearing the same logic in every headline. The slogans change, but the project’s the same: control the language, control the border, control the breath. What’s happening here isn’t local; it’s the rehearsal of a world learning to survive its own cruelty. Everywhere, the same sentence repeats: you’re on your own.

    And yet, even in that sentence, I hear an echo — the sound of people refusing to let the world end quietly.

    I think about the scale of this unravelling, and about the people who still find ways to love. I think about how living with honesty feels like defiance. I want to spend what time remains building something that holds life, like a room with open windows. I want to work with intention, to write with purpose, to live without apology. I want to move through a world that gives instead of withholds.

    Montréal stays inside me: the bagels on Saint-Viateur at two in the morning, the smell of snow, the hum of the métro at night, church bells layered with ambulance sirens, the sound of languages mingling in a café, the sight of people helping each other carry groceries through the rain, laughter and smoke drifting from balconies into the dark. These memories form a pulse. They remind me that a city isn’t only its institutions; it’s the gestures that persist. I hold those gestures close. They’re what keep the city alive when the headlines fail it.

    When I walk to the river, I listen. The water moves without hesitation. It carries the weight of the sky and keeps going. I think of other seasons: the river in thaw, in flood, in stillness under ice. The city has always tried to contain it, yet the current keeps finding its own line. I stand at the edge and feel the cold reach my fingers. Behind me, the city hums. Ahead of me, the current folds into itself, steady and endless.

    Movement feels like a kind of truth. I don’t know if I’ll leave, or when, or where I’ll go. I only know I’ve started to listen for motion. Montréal lives in me: the rhythm of its languages, the tension of its contradictions, the lessons in its beauty and its harm. I’m still here. I’m already elsewhere.

    I want a life that breathes. I want to find places where care isn’t a performance, where living doesn’t require permission. I don’t know if those places exist, yet I move toward them, in thought, in hope, in practice.

    The river keeps its rhythm. The wind carries the scent of cold. I whisper gratitude for what this city has given, and for what I’ve learned in its arms. Then I turn toward home, where the kettle waits on the counter, and the light settles once more across the window.

  • Keeping Each Other Alive

    Keeping Each Other Alive

    Good morning.

    When I first heard the theme What’s at stake, I thought about crisis — the headlines, the smoke, that feeling that the world keeps ending. But when I let the question settle lower, into the ribs, it changed. It stopped shouting and began breathing.

    What’s at stake lives in how we breathe through the losing. How we keep each other alive — in body, in memory, in breath.

    We gather here in Tiohtià:ke, this island city colonially called Montréal, where the river holds its conversation with the sea. The Kanien’kehá:ka have called and cared for this place since before the measure of time, and still the river moves with their keeping.

    If you stand at its edge in the early morning, when mist lifts off the St. Lawrence like smoke from a slow fire, you can smell the ocean far away. The same current that laps these docks once brushed the shores of Ghana, of Trinidad, of Nova Scotia. This water has carried so much — salt, sorrow, survival. It remembers even when we do not.

    To live here is to live where rivers hold court with memory. And I’ve learned that the river always has something to say if you stand still long enough to listen.

    When I walk by that water, I feel it remembering me. The wind catches in my chest the way it must have caught in theirs — those who crossed, those who tended, those who waited on a different shore. The ocean and the river are not symbols to me; they are witnesses. They hold what language tries to bury — the tremor in a hand, the grit of a long-dried tear, the weight of a glance over a shoulder — everything we thought was gone, still moving.

    When I ask the river what’s at stake, it answers in layers: memory, sediment, and breath. Everything carried forward because someone refused to let it sink. The river teaches that what’s at stake is never abstract — it’s the remembering itself, the persistence of movement through loss.

    Christina Sharpe tells us that we live in the wake. I feel that every time I pass the port. The air itself carries residue — of ships, of chains, of prayers that were never written down. The wake is not simply history; it’s weather. And I’m still learning how to live inside that weather without drowning in it.

    The water keeps teaching: remember, and still move. Forgetting feels like stillness but pulls us under.

    Cole Arthur Riley writes that there are truths the body remembers even when the mind forgets. I know that truth. My shoulders tighten when I hear sirens. My breath catches at the sound of a crowd shifting tone. Our bodies are archives of every crossing, every warning, every survival.

    So when I ask what’s at stake here, in this body that remembers, I hear the pulse answer: the stakes are in the breath we keep taking, even when the air feels heavy. They’re in the trembling that refuses to disappear. Our bodies keep insisting that life itself is unfinished work.

    So take a breath. Feel the cold of this river air in your lungs. That chill has moved through centuries of breath — through Indigenous keepers of this land, through enslaved ancestors who built the port, through migrants who came seeking rest. Their breath mingles with ours. The body is the shoreline where past and present meet. Justice begins in the diaphragm before it ever reaches the law.

    Audre Lorde reminds us that caring for ourselves is a form of political warfare. I think of that every time I cook for someone grieving, every time I sit in silence with a friend who can’t find words. Care gathers what’s been shattered. It steadies the trembling hand. It chooses patience when anger wants to speak first.

    And I think — what’s at stake when we care for each other this way? It’s more than comfort. It’s the memory of our own worth. It’s the refusal to abandon tenderness in a world that keeps demanding hardness. Every gesture of care interrupts despair. Every act of care is a way back into the current.

    Our Jewish kin say in Pirkei Avot: it is not your duty to finish the work, neither are you free to desist from it. The river teaches the same thing. It keeps carving, returning, remaking. To care is to join that motion, to step into the current that refuses to stop.

    Philippe Néméh-Nombré reminds us that to be Black in Montréal is to live in the shadow of the ocean. Even this far inland, salt lingers in the snow. The Atlantic hums through the pipes and the bones of the city. I feel that hum when I ride the metro at night, when the doors open and cold air rushes in — the memory of tides still breathing through concrete.

    Every community that survives lives by a promise: to keep showing up, to tell the truth even when it trembles, to hold one another through the long dark. We break that promise sometimes, but we return to it, the way the tide returns to the shore.

    The Qur’an says, whoever saves one life, it is as if they have saved all of humankind. The Talmud says, whoever sustains a single life, it is as if they have sustained an entire world. Different tongues, one breath — both carrying the same rhythm of mercy.

    And the Qur’an also says, weigh with justice and do not fall short in the measure. The river whispers this, too. Justice is balance — the quiet work of holding one another steady in the current.

    Sometimes holiness is nothing more than breath shared between weary people. When the news is too loud, when grief hardens in the throat, the most radical act might be to exhale and know someone else is inhaling.

    I think of February on the St. Lawrence — ice shifting, breath visible, water moving anyway. That is prayer.

    The Qur’an tells of a moment when the Divine breath entered clay, and the clay remembered how to live. I think that breath has never stopped moving — through us, between us, through every mouth that still calls another name in love. Every breath, then, is borrowed holiness — an echo of that first divine exhale. Even when words fall away, breath keeps the prayer going.

    Cole Arthur Riley writes, it is holy to weep, holy to rest, holy to be held. Holiness gathers in warmth built between bodies, in hands extended across the ache.

    And when holiness feels far, I remember what’s at stake: not belief, but belonging. Not certainty, but the fragile thread that keeps us reaching for one another even when we can’t see the shore.

    There are days when my own body is scraped thin from carrying too much, for too long. When another name appears on the news. When the apology comes before the grief has cooled. When the word solidarity tastes hollow, when every meeting feels like a funeral with snacks. There are days when I want to disappear — not out of fear, but because the grief has nowhere left to go.

    And then there are days when grief turns to fire. When I want to shout until the sky opens. When I want the ground beneath boardrooms to tremble with the weight of what’s been silenced. When I am tired of sounding calm in a world that keeps burning. When exhaustion becomes anger, and anger becomes proof that something alive still refuses to die.

    Because forgetting is the luxury of the unaffected.

    And if you know what it is to be Black, to be queer, to be Indigenous, to be trans, to be displaced, to be criminalized, to be border-crossed or borderless, then you already know this truth: the world is not neutral.

    That’s when I feel what’s truly at stake — the world’s capacity for feeling itself. The part of us that still flinches at injustice instead of adjusting to it. That flinch is holy. That fury keeps faith with what should have been protected all along.

    And when the fire quiets, when the lungs remember how to fill again, there is the small miracle of return — the reaching for another hand, the weight shared, the breathing that steadies across two chests. Keeping each other alive means carrying the rage and the tenderness in turns, passing them back and forth until the tide shifts again.

    So what’s at stake moves through all of this — the fragile, luminous us. The breath between bodies. The hands that build the table. The memory that refuses to fade.

    We are descendants of those who crossed and those who tended. We are what the river carried and what the land still holds.

    The Torah says, I have set before you life and death… therefore choose life. To choose life, in our time, is to keep choosing each other — to cook, to listen, to repair, to rest, to stay. That might mean checking on someone who’s gone quiet. It might mean making food, or sitting still, or saying, I’ve got you. Or I’m sorry.

    When I ask one last time what’s at stake, I know now: it’s this. The persistence of care. The endurance of tenderness. The choice to live as if the river’s work is also ours.

    So when you leave this space — when the air outside stings your skin and the city feels heavy — remember the river. Remember its persistence. When you hear sirens, when you see a neighbour fading from view, when exhaustion tempts you toward indifference — stop. Take a breath. Keep each other alive.

    Our faiths, however we name them, meet in this place: in the river’s return, in the body’s remembering, in the breath that refuses to end with us. May we live like the river — carrying what has been lost without surrendering to it, meeting obstacle with movement, finding our way again and again toward one another. That is how we keep each other alive.

    So take this breath with me. One deep inhale. One long exhale.

    Let it carry the ache. Let it keep us soft. And let it be a way back to each other.