Littoral

A dull ache has been sitting high in my back for weeks. Between the spine and scapulae, a low pressure.

When I focus on it, I want to cry. Some feeling I can’t yet place, riding just below the noise.

My instinct is to explain it: list the stressors, trace a cause, make it make sense. But the ache came first. The urge to cry came first. I don't have the explanation yet. I just have the ache.

There's relational tension I've been carrying that I can't resolve. A new, intense dating situation, tripping older responses in the body—a tightness at the throat, a catch in the chest—that arrive before I've clocked why. I just…notice it. Noticing doesn't stop it.

Underneath that: weeks of prep, travel, and uncertainty. Defending a thesis. Closing a practice, no job lined up. A lease ending at the end of the month. And my body, braced, with nowhere to put any of it down.

None of that is the cause, exactly. Just slow weight accumulating around the ache.

The body got there first. I'm still catching up to what it knows.

Pressure behind the eyes before anything has a name. The phone is already in my hand, which means some part of me decided this before I noticed deciding. Breath going short and high, staying in the top of the chest, refusing to go down. Everything in me wants to curl toward the center, get small, take up less of the room, and the hand is doing the opposite, lifting the phone, turning the camera around, making more of me visible. Both of those things at once. I don’t have a word for wanting to disappear and producing evidence of yourself instead.

The photo, after: a face that is technically mine, at an angle I chose, doing something with the eyebrows I didn’t choose. I read it the way I’d read a face across a desk. Flat affect at the edges of something that isn’t flat. The eye that made it into frame isn’t looking at the lens. It’s looking past it, beyond the frame, elsewhere.

A few nights before, a woman on a screen, in a dark room, a friend’s film on the bill. She was in crisis, and then there was a gun, and I don’t remember deciding to hold my breath. I remember the exit sign. I remember my thumb finding the edge of my phone in my pocket and staying there, not taking it out, just confirming it was there.

I could tell you what my face was doing before I could tell you what I was doing. That’s the part that’s hard to say. The clinical read was easier to reach than the feeling underneath it. I have spent years training that reach, and standing in front of the mirror that morning I couldn’t tell what it was for, what it’s for, what it’s—

---

The coffee was good that morning. I want that on the record. The light through the curtain was doing the thing it does around eight, and the mug was warm in both hands, and for a few minutes the body was just a body holding something warm. Ordinary. The kind of minutes you don’t notice you’re having.

Then not.

A different day, a different threat, one I won’t lay out here. What I’ll say is what it did. The pressure arrived before any decision did. My voice got louder on its own, and every available resource went into one task, keeping my hands from visibly shaking, keeping the tremble out of the voice that was already rising. And under that, running as its own process: the awareness of how this reads. Who looks calm. Who looks like the problem. What a camera would see if a camera came out. I was in danger and I was also, simultaneously, doing the reading, tracking my own legibility in real time, because I had to, because the reading was part of the danger. The phone in my pocket was a fact my whole body knew about. Theirs too. Two phones, two hands, the same gesture available to both of us and not meaning the same thing.

Outward, that reflex is supposed to be protection. There was no one to protect against the morning of the photo. The hand reached for the phone anyway, and I still don’t know if that’s the same reflex wearing different clothes, or something else that just learned its shape.

I took the photo. I picked a song. I posted it.

Then the coffee went cold and I rinsed the mug and put my shoes on by the door.

il est parti vers dix-sept heures rien de grave là-dedans

ma poitrine s’est serrée pareil sous la clavicule

j’ai checké mon cell une fois deux fois trois fois avant même de me rendre compte que je vérifiais

rien n’est arrivé pour vrai c’est ça que j’arrive pas à expliquer à mes mains

avant j’appelais ça de la prudence

là je respire et c’est tout

je compte l’expire plus long que l’inspire et j’attends que mon corps croie ce que ma tête sait déjà

Tu prétends qu'à l'été tu danseras sous le soleil mais déjà à l'hiver tu t'endors sans apprendre le pas

– Jean Sioui, Des morceaux de temps, p. 31

je suis l'enfant des rues ténébreuses grandir est plus grand que mes espérances il m'arrive de parler à mes fantômes

imprévisible beauté printemps vagabond à piétiner les roses j'ai peur de l'azur

je m'appelle décolonial éloigne-toi de mes rives éloigne-toi de mes sept voiliers j'ai souvenance j'ai souvenance masque somptueux l'histoire m'appelle à contre-jour

— Rodney Saint-Éloi, Nous ne trahirons pas le poème, p. 33

I wake up early again today, following a pattern that has become an impromptu tradition. I swing by Tims first for a coffee (a medium French Vanilla this time), largely because nothing else is open. Then I make my way down to the Old Port. Taking a different route today, I walk down Boulevard Saint-Laurent, mounting the levees that once protected the city from river floods, before dropping back down to the banks to sit and write.

I'm always near water these days. Today, it's the pond right near the King Edward entrance—a body of water that passes for natural until you learn it's emptied each autumn and refilled each spring. The benches here sit low enough that the city appears to grow straight out of the water. Maybe that impermanence is why I'm facing it today, my back turned to the river and the tourist industries clinging to the industrial quays like barnacles to the hull of an ocean liner.

In the glare of my laptop screen, I can see the crane behind me that the bungee jumpers use. I've sat here enough times to watch a few of them drop. I still remember one whose head briefly dipped into the Saint Lawrence on the rebound: a baptism of sorts, a momentary connection with the ancestors. Yet, I am drawn back to this not-quite-pond, not-quite-fountain, with its calm waters and the grey limestone of Vieux-Montréal reflecting on the shimmering surface. Like many things in this city, the illusion breaks down the second you stand at the edge and look straight down; the usual sparse detritus of urban life sits at the bottom. But from this bench, with birds calling from all around me and the morning otherwise silent, it's more than enough.

Les gens ne semblent pas se rendre compte qu'il y a un nouveau prince dans cette ville même si je ne suis qu'un clochard pour l'instant.

— Dany Laferrière, Chronique d'une dérive douce, p. 55

“Pleasure is not binary. It exists alongside fear, sadness, and politics. That is the history of Queer pleasure. We tend to tell one side of our history—of riots and martyrs—but ignore how much sex is a root of that liberation. The folks who judge and police another consenting adult's pleasure are just policing their own. For the past decade, we have experienced a massive paradigm shift through tools unimaginable to our ancestors: PrEP, HIV undetectability, DoxyPEP, vaccines, GPS apps. Our history is full of Queers who lament eras they missed out on. Stop arresting your own development and abolish the cop in your head, beloved. We are in a sexual revolution—act accordingly.“

— Leo Herrera, (analog) CRUISING, pp. 134-135

The sun is out and the walk to the Old Port is warm and inviting. Recently I’ve been drawn to this bench that faces the river, the Grand Quai tower, and Habitat 67. This is my favourite part of the summer: mostly sunny, about 20 degrees, people out with their dogs and their coffees and their tote bags, crossing runners in short shorts with the light eastward breeze pushing through their hair.

The river’s surface is calm, sparkling in the sun.

Fitting: to my far right, a Canadian flag flutters in the wind, asserting its ownership over these stolen Indigenous lands and these waters that hold the remnants of my ancestors.

It was always a lie. I know this because we are still here.

I am still here. Still sitting in the sun on a Tuesday morning with nowhere to be but in the present moment.

Dionne Brand writes that every map a Black person makes begins at the door of no return — the rupture where the connection to origin was severed, where the Atlantic became the site of a dispossession so total that what it organized was not a journey with a destination but a navigation from a breaking that has no other side. The door does not draw you back through it. There is no back. What it produces instead is a particular structure of navigation: the body moving through geographies it did not choose, on land it arrived to under conditions not of its choosing, making maps from a point of irresolvable loss rather than from a legible origin. The water is where this structure is felt most honestly — not because it holds what was lost or promises what was severed, but because it is where the breaking happened and keeps happening, the ongoing condition of dispossession that the body is inside whether or not it has language for it. The St. Lawrence running east toward the Atlantic is not pulling the body toward something waiting on the other side. It is the body registering, near this specific water in this specific diaspora geography, the structure that has been organizing its navigation all along — the triangular piece of ice that pointed east from this river on a blustery February morning, the eastward orientation I keep returning to without deciding to, the body finding the water cities not because they were calling but because it is navigating from a rupture that makes every geography partial, every belonging conditional, every map a document of what cannot be returned to as much as of where you are. The body near Tiohtià:ke’s water, carrying what Kjipuktuk drew out of it, living inside Sharpe’s weather, navigating from Brand’s door — these are not separate conditions pressing on the same body but one condition, the structure of Black life in diaspora, felt here at the water’s edge.