Tag: Grief

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.
Fediverse Reactions
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.
Fediverse Reactions
2026-04-29
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
The Body as First Register

My body has been the first place where things gather. A pressure sits in my back—a low bracing that has begun to feel structural, the kind of tightness that doesn’t shift with stretching or rest. It moves without ever fully leaving. Some days it settles between my shoulder blades; other days it spreads into my neck or rests heavily in my hips. The sensation is diffuse, hard to locate, yet immediately recognizable once it arrives. Everything feels slightly drawn inward, as if the body has deliberately narrowed its range.

The ache doesn’t spike. It remains steady, more background than signal. Muscles stay engaged even at rest, as if something still needs holding and hasn’t yet been set down. There’s a readiness in it, though nothing immediate is forming. I notice it most when I slow down. Sitting brings it into focus. Pausing sharpens it. When movement stops, the pressure moves forward and the body organizes itself around it. The sensation doesn’t ask for attention; it simply refuses to disappear.

Living this way has altered how I understand what’s been happening. The body feels occupied, involved in something ongoing—not injured, not malfunctioning, but engaged in sustained effort without a visible task. This is the place I’m writing from: a body compressed and alert at once, held together without a complete story yet for what that holding is preparing for.

A Quiet Overwhelm

Over time, it became clear this wasn’t random. The body was registering something before I had language for it. The tension built gradually, without a single moment to point to, accumulating over weeks and months and settling quietly rather than arriving all at once. What surprised me was the form this overwhelm took. There was little panic—no rush, no spike, no outward agitation. Instead, things slowed. Initiation became difficult. Small tasks grew dense. The body responded by becoming still, narrowing its range, holding position.

I would sit in front of my laptop with the lid open, the screen dimming itself while I stayed there, hands resting on the keyboard without moving.

This kind of stillness is easy to misread. From the outside, it can look like avoidance or delay. From the inside, it feels like containment. Energy pulls inward. Movement pauses. Output reduces. The system stays intact by limiting how much it releases at once. I began to recognize the pattern as it repeated. Each time something shifted—each time another layer of uncertainty entered—the body tightened slightly, not as protest but as stabilization, a way of staying upright, of keeping things from spilling.

There’s information in that response. An early warning that doesn’t speak in sentences. The body adjusts first, marking change through sensation and letting the holding register before the story catches up. Over time, this read less like pathology and more like pattern recognition: the body noticing accumulation and responding in the only way it knows how—by slowing down and staying in place until the next shape becomes clearer.

Loosening Frames

At the same time, several forms of scaffolding have been loosening—not abruptly, but through gradual unfastening, felt before it was fully understood. The PhD is coming to an end, along with a structure that has carried weight for a long time. Its timelines and rhythms organized my days and sense of direction. As that frame thins, the body seems to notice first. The absence registers as space, and space carries its own pressure.

The lease is ending too. The rooms I move through each day no longer feel fixed. Space has become provisional. The body responds by staying alert, keeping itself gathered. Even familiar corners take on a different texture when they’re no longer guaranteed. Beyond that, the next steps remain unformed. There isn’t a clear container waiting to take shape. This doesn’t arrive as a dramatic void. It appears as a background hum that keeps the body from fully settling.

All of this unfolds within a broader atmosphere that never quite recedes: political instability, escalating violence, systems coming undone. These conditions don’t remain outside personal life. They enter the body like weather, a constant barometric shift that makes everything heavier and harder to place. None of these shifts stands alone. They layer, overlap, and accumulate. The body holds the sum of them, adjusting quietly as the ground shifts underneath.

Where Things Stall

As these layers built, freeze began to appear in ordinary places, in small procedural moments. Initiating simple tasks took longer. Messages lingered unopened or half-drafted. Anything requiring sequencing or follow-through felt dense. Often the body reacted before thought finished forming. A screen would open and something in my back would tighten. An inbox would load and the body would brace. Lists and calendars brought on a full-body pause—immediate and physical—as if the system had already shifted gears.

Mail collected on the edge of the table, unopened, the same envelopes moved from one corner to another over several days.

Stillness became common. Movement narrowed. Energy pulled inward. Attention shortened. The effort to move from one small step to the next increased. The body organized itself around slowing down, especially where accumulation was highest—administrative tasks, ongoing correspondence, anything requiring continuity across time. Engagement reduced. Output thinned.

Seen closely, this freeze carried information. It mapped density. It marked where too many threads were being held at once. The system paused to stay intact until pressure eased enough to allow movement again. Over time, the stillness took on shape. It wasn’t empty. It occupied space. Muscles gathered around it. The pause held.

What Can Be Held

When several structures loosened at once, the body narrowed its field. When demands accumulated without clear edges, movement reduced. Fewer motions. Fewer decisions. The body stayed closer to itself. Engagement continued in some places and not others. Tasks requiring sustained attention stretched the system thin. The body responded by slowing initiation and working in short intervals.

The pause had boundaries. It wasn’t total or random. It clustered around sequences that extended forward without a clear end. The body adjusted its pace to what it could hold without spilling.

The narrowing had a threshold
Enough.

The Form No Longer Fits

The decision to end my private practice arrived through the body. It showed up as contraction, as effort that no longer redistributed. The work remained meaningful. The form no longer fit. Capacity and structure stopped aligning in a way the body could negotiate. I noticed it in the preparation it took, the recovery afterward, the back tightening before language did. The work demanded continuity across time.

And something in me would not go there again—not cleanly, not fully, not without paying a cost I could already feel.

The body responded by pulling inward, signaling a limit that didn’t soften with reassurance.

The decision wasn’t dramatic. It settled slowly through repetition. Each return to the question carried the same physical answer. There is grief here, low and steady—a grief for a form that once held something real, for relationships shaped through care, for a version of myself that lived inside that structure.

Responsibility remains. It appears in careful timing, in communication, in how endings are handled. The body still holds that weight even as the boundary is set. Ending the practice feels less like rupture than closure—a form laid down because it no longer matches what the body can sustain. Care remains. The limit remains. Both are held.

Work Beneath Stillness

What began to make sense was the compression itself—the narrowing, the inward pull, the body staying gathered. There’s logic in that compression. When a form is no longer viable, work turns inward. Systems reorganize without consulting the calendar. Energy reroutes. What once moved outward turns back toward center.

This phase doesn’t look spacious or restorative. It’s dense, pressurized, full of friction. Beneath the surface, the body works continuously—redistributing weight, testing configurations not yet named. From the outside, little changes. Movement slows. Output thins. Inside, everything remains active.

There’s no timeline attached to this work. The body stays in it as long as needed, reorganizing around what can be sustained next. This isn’t rest. It’s internal labor.

Care Finds Its Scale

As this reorganization continues, my relationship to care and obligation shifts. The body responds differently to what asks for attention. Some requests land cleanly. Others stall before reaching language. Care feels more precise now. It gathers around what can be met without strain. Long arcs of responsibility register as heavier as they extend forward.

Obligation has slowed. Urgency has thickened rather than intensified. Timing and pacing matter more. Commitment hasn’t disappeared; it has cooled. Energy collects before release. Attention stays closer to center, conserving what hasn’t finished forming.

This doesn’t feel like withdrawal. It feels like recalibration. Care finding a shape that matches capacity. Responsibility adjusting its scale. The body setting a tempo it can maintain. What I’m allowing arrives quietly: accompaniment without translation, delay without panic, unfinishedness without collapse. Messages wait. Tasks unfold over days. Threads remain open.

I’m allowing the body to set the pace, letting sensation determine when to move and when to stay still. I watch where effort gathers and where it drains. These allowances aren’t generous; they’re necessary. They create just enough room for the system to keep reorganizing without tearing.

Orientation

Where I am now feels specific. The compression remains. The pressure hasn’t lifted. The body stays alert, organized around holding. At the same time, there’s less confusion inside it. The sensations are familiar enough to be read. I move more slowly—not hesitantly, but attentively.

I walk the same short route most mornings, past the same trees and parked cars, noticing how often I stop without realizing it.

There’s steadiness here—not ease, but orientation. The body recognizes itself in this compression. It knows how to stay upright. I’m not waiting for resolution or trying to see past this moment. The present has texture: dense, close, manageable in small spans. The body stays with what’s here.

This feels like a place rather than a passage.

Arrival, for now, looks like remaining intact—staying in relationship with the body as it does this work, letting sensation lead without rushing it into meaning. Integrity lives here: in listening and pacing, in allowing form to change without demanding a finished outline. What comes next will arrive when it’s ready. For now, the work is contained in this holding. The body stays steady and attentive until the shape ahead becomes clearer.

2026-02-09
The Wrong Kind of Grief

Who’s Allowed to Mourn in Public—and Who’s Not

It was quiet at first. Just a few of us lying on the cold concrete outside of McGill University. Keffiyehs folded. Bodies arranged—not for spectacle, but for mourning.
The die-in wasn’t meant to go viral. It was meant to say what the system refuses to name:
Gaza is being erased.
And health workers know what genocide looks like.

I remember the weight of my own breath as I lay there.
Not heavy. Not performative. Just present.

Someone walked by and snapped a photo without asking. Another didn’t stop at all.
When we stood up, nothing had changed. Not on the street. Not in the news.
But something had settled in my chest. Something that hasn’t left.

Because we weren’t only laying our bodies down for Gaza.
We were laying down with the knowledge that our grief is never allowed to be grief.

Not when it’s Black.
Not when it’s queer.
Not when it’s tied to Palestine, or trans lives, or state violence.

That kind of grief doesn’t get candles.
It gets cops.
It doesn’t get statements.
It gets silence.
And sometimes, if we’re not careful, it gets turned inward—
Treated like something to suppress. Something to explain away.
Too emotional. Too disruptive.
The wrong kind of grief.

Black Grief as Threat

Black grief has never been read as grief.
It’s read as aggression.
As instability.
As a problem to manage.

A vigil for a Black life becomes a police incident.
A protest gets framed as a riot.
A mother weeps on camera, and the story pivots to property damage.

This isn’t new.
But that doesn’t make it any less violent.

Even in so-called progressive spaces—health orgs, queer collectives, activist networks—there are unwritten rules:
Don’t cry too hard.
Don’t speak too plainly.
Don’t say something that makes people uncomfortable.

I’ve been in those rooms.
Told I was “too emotional” for naming what hurt.
Asked to “come back when calmer” as if grief needed to be reasonable to be real.

But Black grief doesn’t belong to institutions.
It doesn’t need to be tidy.
It doesn’t need to be polite.
It shows up where it’s needed:
In kitchens. In bathrooms. In the street. In the quiet moment after the meeting ends.

And maybe that’s what makes it dangerous.
That we still feel.
That we still care.
That we refuse to forget.

Because in a world trying to erase us, grieving is a form of resistance.

Palestinian Grief and the Politics of Denial

If Black grief is read as a threat, Palestinian grief is denied altogether.
Or worse—criminalized.

In recent months, we’ve watched mourning itself become a battleground.
Vigils banned.
Flags confiscated.
Photos of murdered children labeled “too political.”
The dead rendered offensive.
The living forbidden to name them.

The message is clear:
You can grieve, but not like that.
Not too visibly.
Not too loudly.
Not in a way that disrupts the narrative.

The same governments funding the bombs demand silence about the bodies.

But Palestinian grief refuses to stay quiet.
It pours into streets, onto murals, through chants.
It insists on being seen—even when the world tries to look away.

And that insistence resonates.
Because for many of us—Black, queer, displaced—it feels familiar.
We know what it means to mourn in public and be told it’s too much.
We know what it means to be asked to tone it down, make it palatable, put it away.

Still, we mourn.
Together.
In public.
Without apology.

Queer Mourning and Rituals of Refusal

Queer people have always built our own ways to mourn.
No one gave us space.
So we carved it out ourselves.

In clubs. In alleyways. In bedrooms and chat threads.
We’ve lit candles in parking lots.
Laid flowers on steps where no police ever came.
Held vigils that no news crew covered.
Carried names no one else bothered to say.

This is part of our lineage:
ACT UP die-ins.
Ashes delivered to government steps.
Protests that doubled as funerals.
Grief that refused to be silent.

That legacy is still with us.
Every time a trans name is whispered online because no outlet printed it.
Every time someone cries in a bathroom after reading a headline and someone else holds them.

Queer mourning doesn’t always look like mourning.
Sometimes it’s awkward.
Sometimes it’s loud.
Sometimes it’s just showing up.

But it’s always a refusal.
A refusal to grieve quietly.
A refusal to perform respectability.
A refusal to act like this world hasn’t taken too much from us.

This grief is a kind of care.
Not the kind taught in workshops.
The kind that says:
“I see you. I’ll carry this with you. Even if no one else will.”

Grief That Doesn’t Fit

I’ve been in spaces where I knew I wasn’t allowed to grieve.
Not really.
I could speak, maybe. But not feel too much.
Not shake the frame.
Not say something that might get labeled “too intense.”

Sometimes, the silencing is subtle.
Someone avoids eye contact.
A conversation gets politely redirected.
A room falls quiet—not in respect, but discomfort.

I remember being told I was ben énervé for naming the violence of Black bodies on slides, with no disaggregated data, no context, no care.
Just images.
Just performance.

I wasn’t angry.
I was grieving.
Grieving the way our lives get reduced to symbols.
Grieving the absence of real recognition.
Even that was too much.

Most of us learn to shrink our grief until it fits.
Until it sounds strategic.
Until it’s digestible.

And when it doesn’t shrink, we’re called unstable.
Disruptive.
Unprofessional.

But grief isn’t supposed to make people comfortable.
It isn’t a moment.
It’s a condition.

It lingers in the breath, in the body, in the way your shoulders won’t release even when the meeting ends.

Some days, I carry it like fog.
Some days, like glass.
Some days, it doesn’t arrive until I’ve taken off the mask and closed the door behind me.

But I no longer apologize for it.
Because I’ve learned something simple:
Grief is proof that something hasn’t been taken from me.
Not yet.

Toward Abolitionist Mourning

We need to stop pretending grief only matters when it’s quiet, clean, or backed by institutions.

We need to stop asking the systems that harm us to validate the losses they cause.

Abolitionist mourning doesn’t wait for permission.
It doesn’t ask for policy.
It doesn’t make pain legible to power.

It mourns on its own terms—messy, collective, unsanctioned.
It stays with what hurts.
It lets the wound speak.

We’ve always known how to do this.

Black and Indigenous people have mourned in ways the state can’t hold.
Palestinians have carried memory through exile and massacre.
Trans people create rituals that no church would sanctify.

We don’t need more professionalization of pain.
We need more space for its truth.
More honesty.
More refusal.

Because grief is not what breaks us.
What breaks us is having nowhere to put it.
And what repairs us—if anything does—
is knowing we don’t have to carry it alone.

We’re Still Mourning

We don’t need the state’s recognition to make our grief real.
We don’t need institutions to validate what our bodies already know.
Our mourning isn’t excessive.
It isn’t disruptive.
It isn’t unprofessional.

It’s memory.
It’s survival.
It’s care.

And it’s not going anywhere.

If the world refuses to hold our grief,
then we will keep finding other ways to carry it.
We will light candles where they say we can’t.
We will chant the names they refuse to speak.
We will gather in the cracks and hold each other there.

Our grief isn’t the problem.
The problem is a world that only makes space for it once we’re gone.

We’re still here.
We’re still mourning.
And we’re not asking for permission.
Fediverse Reactions
2025-05-26