Indoors
Place: My couch next to the window, Quartier des spectacles, Tiohtià:ke Date: 2026-09-21, 21:36 EDT Conditions: Damp from sweat. Lit by dim phone light in a dark room that’s just a touch too humid. Noise from the city below is barely perceptible in the background.
It started, as it usually does, with the flick of my thumb. A muscly anticapitalist influencer in a tight tank top offers a sharp analysis of the creeping tides of fascism. Denied a fish, a sea lion snorts and barks in perceived indignation. A clip of a butch queen voguing fem from the last ball. The limbless body of a wailing child, carried on a stretcher to a hospital that no longer exists. An exclusive review of the new folding iPhone. Official US government accounts posting fascist propaganda. A dog in a Christmas sweater howling along to Mariah Carey. Another village is wiped from the map, turned into yet another non-native forest; this one bears my country’s name. I scroll to the comments, click “see more,” and read people begging for a crumb of recognition from under the jackboot of genocide. One person replies: “Reported.”
One last flick to close the app, followed by a deep, shaky inhale. I glance around the room—clothes strewn across the floor and tables cluttered with dishes and granola bar wrappers—and I am undone. The feed doesn’t sort by weight. Catastrophe and restaurant reviews share the same pane of glass, the same brightness, and demand you navigate the unfathomable gaps between them at the speed of a swipe. And I did, until I couldn’t.
Had it come to mind, I might have counted all the nights where my chest tightened like a fist, all the mornings spent doomscrolling until my breath went high and shallow, all the times the room tilted while my hands shook, low and steady. I’ve been carrying this cursed rectangle of weather in my pocket. Every once in a while I’d pull it out, mostly out of habit, before being consumed. I’d sometimes call it “staying informed,” and I’d sometimes call it “a lifeline to community.” With increasing frequency, I was also calling it “bearing witness.” Nobody tells you that all that looking can become a duty, and there’s only so much looking the body can take before something gives. And then something gave, and the body sat alone. Shaking. Sweating. Sobbing. Sinking.
This current has been holding me for years. My body aches for another water.
Jason Arday’s name has been sitting in my chest for weeks. He was the youngest Black professor in Cambridge University’s history, before being accused of plagiarism by a far-right postdoc at the University of Ghent and mercilessly piled on by the British press. He resigned and was found dead days later. My body read it as being pressured out of the world for his excellence, for having dared to claim a place in the halls that would exclude us. The same halls, incidentally, that were built with the wealth stolen from the resources and forced labour of our ancestors.
I hadn’t gone looking for the story. The polemic surfaced in between the sea lion and the folding iPhone, and it settled in my sternum before I could say his name. I carried him around. I swallowed his story like a stone.
That night, on my couch next to the window, another name crossed my feed. Thélyson Orélien. A Haitian-Québécois novelist, recent winner of the Prix du roman Fnac, was accused by an anonymous account on X of having written his novel with AI. He denies this, but the outrage machine is already turning. I felt that same tightness in my chest from weeks earlier: strangers certain they’d caught a fraud, our very own Arday, mais en français. It’s hard not to see the pattern immediately: Black excellence, then suspicion, then the pitchforks. I’m still not sure my body can hold the weight of it again.
It’s been a few days, and I’ve since deactivated my Instagram account. I found a tool that deleted all of my Blacksky posts. I archived Fragments, my one public-facing writing project. Long scrolls of my own voice, rushing down the drain. It didn’t feel like leaving. Not quite. More like taking my hands out of a current I’d been feeding with my body and my story for years, everything I’d put there travelling without me into rooms I’d never see.
So this is what I built. If you stumbled across this page after wondering where I disappeared to, welcome. Littoral is the other water I’ve been aching for: a place for things to arrive, be noticed, be set down, and be stayed with for as long as I need to. These pages are currently bare because I’m rebuilding them to be about what my body’s meant to carry.
As for Fragments, it’s not gone. It’s simply moved indoors, where I can tinker with it away from the public eye. I’m hoping to shape it into something I can publish, once my body and I are ready for all that entails.