Tag: Methodology

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.
Fediverse Reactions
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.
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