Littoral

i became a scholar of grief by accident. because if i hadn’t, the grief might have swallowed me whole. because if i hadn’t, whiteness would have come for it turned it into content stripped it of meaning sold it as proof of progress.

because if i hadn’t, my pain—my hurt—my refusal to be pitied would have disappeared into silence. would have been lost to the archive or worse, used to build it.

i became a scholar of grief to protect what cannot be replicated. to honour what we carry. And i will not let them take that too.

found on a walking sign, half peeled, half legible. housing crisis? deport muslims. unclear if it’s fascism or mockery. as if that distinction ever mattered. the horror isn’t the message — it’s that it blends in. nothing shocks. just one more trace in a city that trades blame for shelter, displacement for safety, violence for policy.

got taller, this building. more glass. more echo. they call it growth. we remembered something else.

july 2018— after slāv, after kanata, after another season of voices stolen, then staged. we gathered here. we named what they wouldn’t. not just as protest. as refusal.

they built around it. more lights, more money, no redress. just steel stacked over silence.

and now that silver figure, blue-faced sentinel watching nothing. a monument to forgetting hollow as every apology we never heard.

but we carry the crack in the concrete. we remember because they designed it so we wouldn’t.

rigs still hanging. the crowd’s gone. just light, angles, and someone wrapping cables in the distance. no urgency. just the slow undoing of what passed through.

for one of my best ones. the candles held. so did we. strawberries, sugar, a whole lot of light.

not a performance of joy— the real thing. held in the breath, shared in the room.

this is how we stay.

a march of mourning. they carry the names in cloth, the weight of what has been done. downtown tries to pretend it’s still normal. but we are past normal. this is not protest. this is a procession for the dead.

they call it wisdom but it reads like distance.

pages upon pages to say: perhaps you are real but not yet certain. perhaps you belong but only if it doesn’t make others uncomfortable.

they write of tension like it’s an external thing. they measure discomfort but not whose it is.

they gather everything but us.

no affected voice in the room, no hand in the margins, no breath in the footnotes.

somewhere, a child tries to speak and finds their name missing from the glossary.

walked here with oriol. afternoon sun too bright to ignore. the sign said bonjour like it meant something, but i was already thinking about leaving.

met with malica this week— potential postdoc supervisor at beniba. submitted the queen’s predoc application too. if it all goes through, this might be my last summer here.

the city looked soft in the light— like it didn’t know i was saying goodbye.

drift doesn’t ask for arrival. just movement. just the soft ache of being somewhere you already know how to leave.

it started slowly, like most good things. paul and i drifted through vieux-montréal, not in a hurry, not quite anchored. work came in waves—open tabs, notes half written, a reply sent too late but still meaningful. the afternoon stretched without agenda. there’s a softness in being accompanied without being watched.

the streets felt unfamiliar in a familiar way. like they’d been repainted since last week but forgot to dry. a man singing to himself passed us near saint-paul. no one looked twice.

by the time we reached frontenac, the air had changed. just enough rain to make you notice. just enough light to feel like something was ending.

we said goodbye without ceremony. no need for it.

i kept walking east, alone. the drizzle softened the sounds of the city. my breath felt louder than usual. there’s something about walking in the rain that makes your thoughts feel more like weather than noise.

the lights on sherbrooke flickered early. someone had chalked a heart onto the sidewalk that was already dissolving.

i didn’t take a photo. it didn’t need to last.

i just kept moving. not away, not toward. just through.

no caption needed. the city already said it.