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36,000 ft. Somewhere over the Atlantic ocean.

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Trigger warning: the story you are about to read contains references to sexual assault.

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The heat of summer wakes me up. I sleep on towels so that the sticky sweat doesn’t stain my virgin sheets. Three hours ago I tried to fall into a slumber while my sweat condensed behind my ear. I dreamed, but only lightly. I looked over at my clock. It was around one o’clock. The first wave of summer anxiety hits. A reminiscence of the day and a painful reflection of having nothing to do —or of having done nothing. It is a sickening feeling of emptiness that manifests as a lump of heavy air taking up space at the bottom of my glottal region. The feeling does pass. I assure you. But in the hour of the wolf, its takes a hold of your heart and rushes you through a whirlwind of future and past. A quick squeeze to your chest, then its gone but it leaves you frightened. Sometimes, you take your fingers, embed your nails, and pinch at your skin. You pinch hard and the pain erodes your thoughts. I can’t recall much of it now. Maybe next time I’ll remember to record it.

I recall my summer days while visiting family in the motherland. Jet lagged and tired, I would have sleepless nights. The light from the plaza shone into the room and cast orange shadows in the fractal patterns embedded in the frosted windows. I despised that orange light. Those nights, I spent alone in a room shared with four. All the others slept soundly. My little cousin, barely making two years old, was a peaceful sight as he lay directly in my line of vision. Countless times I would hear the nightwalkers make noise in the courtyard and I would futilely try to decipher their shadows against the windows. The seconds of the night ticked by to make minutes. Lost in boredom, I would creep into the living room desperately finding something to do. I found a place by the window that overlooked the plaza and, here, I would listen to the drunken folk scream and watch the motorbikes rumble carrying a delivery of midnight meals. These little excitements of the night would happen every hour or so. Eventually, I would quietly make my way back to bed and unknowingly fall asleep.

But what about when we grow old? When the lingering guillotine of death hangs from a weak string that will in due time snap from gravity’s pull. Death, you don’t scare me as much now. I’ve been desensitized. All those deep nights I’ve encountered you in the realm of my cosmic imagination. You frightened me with your presence in black holes and the void of space. My early nights were spent thinking of the people in my life, my disposition, and most importantly love. She was new. Mostly smiling and shy. Her teeth made her smile amazing. It was from afar that I first saw her. Meeting new friends, she looked happy. She fit in well. I remember thinking of her and smiling into my pillow.

I only remember the good memories. The free periods we spent studying together were calm and nice. She made her way to my study period from hers after telling her proctor that she had to work on math. I found the effort attractive. I waited six months. She knew only of two. In the middle of the two months, we had a trip to Seattle. There, on the first night, was the first time I had talked to you. I said one word and one comment. The first was “hi” and I forgot the second. It couldn’t have been that interesting anyways.

Oh my, do I remember the dark dancehall where you pulled me through the crowd while the soft serenade of Purple Rain rang while the flat laser lights swiveled in senseless directions. I remember your arm extending from the high of your shoulder as it pulled my hand and body in whatever direction you took me. I didn’t care. I was lost in the darkness and you were my guide. Close my eyes and remember. Pull up close again and I hope that you feel the shudder in my breath. Feel my heart throb in the erratic beat of love that is lulled into the comfort of a slow dance. Look at me again and whisper some nervous words.

I’m awake again. A welcomed breeze drifts through the curtains. I remove the towels from underneath me and pull my duvet over my shoulders then tuck myself in. The room is dark and I face the windows. The black silhouettes of tall trees sway to the gentle push of the wind. Looming and ominous, they dance against the gray background. I reach for the clock. The short hand was positioned slightly below the five. I look up to the looming trees, sigh, then turn to stare into the morning darkness.

I remembered a night in the middle of winter. The city sat glowing afar and the wine colored sky floated in the distance. I walked out of my building and ventured into the calm streets. Wispy snow snaked through the lowly airstreams, buffeting my ankles and running a cold chill up my pants. I walked upwards, towards the hill. Under an underpass and down one street, I arrived at a small neighborhood. In the middle of the neighborhood, white lights flooded a snow-covered court. Out of the lime-light, I found a clearing fashioned into an ice-rink. Small trees, stripped of their leaves and in the shadows, lingered around the rink, whispering with the rattle of their branches. I treaded carefully, slowly sliding my shoes across the ice, placing one step in front of the other. I made my way to the middle and, there, I sat staring up towards the speckled universe.

As I gazed towards the cosmos, there, on the cool ice that breathed through my warm jacket, I ignited. A great flame erupted from the void of space and caught my jacket, turning my body into a tall orange bonfire and sending its flickering arms towards the darkened sky. Black snow floated upwards, the smell of singed polyester filled the hot cloud of smoke. The fire, uncontrollable, illuminated the clearing and the shared shadows retreated behind the trunks of the trees, running further off into the looming distance –away from the perilous heat. Aflame, there I was, a lone light in the valleys of darkness, screaming to be heard. Will they listen? Will they grant? Will they do nothing, I suppose.

Morning light pushes its first rays past the trees and into my room, some reflecting off the mirror, striking my eyes awake.

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sometimes i say oh no in advance, right when i wake up, before anything technically bad happens. one example of something bad is if the girl i love with every cell i have calls me while im on the toilet and leaves a voicemail saying that she can’t make it to my birthday party. i would cancel my birthday and cancel the season summer and then shrivel into a shrimp and toss myself in the sea.

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Step One: sit alone at your kitchen table, wonder if his leaving her has anything to do with you, and assure yourself you could have fixed the breaks in the phone line with enough coats of blue-tack or two tin cans and the world’s longest piece of twine.

Step Two: yell at the fridge because you are angry that it still works, fight with your dog about the weather and about the dirt on her paws, even though she’s really just doing her best, and yell at the rain because you wish it were snow.

Step Three: if only she had waited, if only he had told her and clearly stated, if only time passed the same way to two people.

Step Four: open the fridge— not because you’re hungry and mostly because it’s a habit— pile rice pudding into a bowl that is the exact same bland shade, stare at the raisins and wonder if they feel depressed, realize you feel akin to the raisins in the rice pudding you have made.

Step Five: accept that both good and bad things come to an end, write a note-to-self saying you hope things get better soon, eat rice pudding until you forget to pretend, and wonder what Obama does when he’s alone in a room.

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The truth about father’s divine law is written in negative spaces for in the world of being there is only a mother tongue that sings out of tune when slipping through daughter’s lips and a faith that swallows her whole then spits back out her blandest bits.

Father doesn’t quite like that in negative spaces she kisses imaginary women and sells cultural secrets to imaginary spies.

In negative spaces like smoke she changes forms and father sees her again as a foreigner dreaming of a sacred space full of dust she blows into the empty corners disturbing ever so slightly the cosmic law of father’s restless gods.

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I used someone else as a placeholder for you when I started writing this; walking home alone at 3 AM all the bars on Saint-Laurent doing last call I breathe easy, knuckles cradling keys, smoking on the sidewalk and promise that this is yours and yours only, my love,   my love,  my love

slow traffic on Mont-Royal streetlights humming / luminous waste and me, kissing consecrated concrete (tastes a million times better than weed or anyone’s bottom lip ever could)

I love you for your bikes and brick walls, for the 80 running at some ungodly hour and warm bagels in paper bags and yr tongue foreign and romantic and cursed to never adhere to the roof of my mouth

I love you for the lovers you leave on my doorstep (for the lovers I leave at their doorsteps) (for every boy with a fine arts degree who I will laugh about six months from now)

For the cross on the mountain For the water below

For nights like tonight where the moon sits in Aries I love you I love you I love you

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Mouth meets space between bottom rib / top of hipbones meets cyborg surfaces and (me)      Mediation Meets strange delineations Meets skin as a site of loss

the body is built on precedent/passivity You tread minefields with yr              tongue

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Hannah is sixteen, and she sees her friends begin to change their bodies. Nature has already given them breasts and hips, periods and pubic hair. Now they metamorphose on their own terms.

Taylor walks in the first day of school with her hair cropped close to her skull. Jen’’s cheeks hollow amidst rumors that she eats only lemon wedges and chia seeds. Isabel lifts her shirt in the locker room to reveal a mildly infected rose blooming in the small of her back.

Hannah’s hair is long, her skin unpierced. Her cheeks are round with puppy fat. She eats pot roast and knishes and potato pancakes cooked by a woman whose hair was once shaved, whose bones were once visible, whose wrist still bears the number tattooed on her wrist so many years ago.

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She thought she would give birth in a world where Hawaii had been swallowed by the ocean where bear skeletons littered Arctic seabeds where sharks snapped in the watery remains of Miami.

She thought she would have to feed her child in a world of plastic soil and toxic fruits of burning rainwater, acid rivers of garbage islands in browning seas.

She thought she would raise her child in a world of a thousand new Atlantises of lands without seasons of barely-remembered snow.

Instead she gives birth in a world where electricity still hums where supermarkets still stand where snow falls gently outside hospital windows.

She is too young, the baby is too early, but the world has not ended yet.

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To wipe the past three years clean with one swish like dust on a carpet but the bitter taste in my mouth weathers all kinds of storms. See I am a woman who can forgive anything except when you turn on your axis and transform into someone that I for the life of me cannot recognise. It is easy enough to forgive my condescension when I am soft like fresh honey underneath but your core has turned hard and the ants in the neighbourhood have all been informed. The thing is it is not his business or her business the things I do and why I do them and I have razors stored in the linings of my coats for when winter gets too cold and I will lie and tell you that I lost control but I have never ever lost control. I know perfectly what I am doing but it is easy to roam off the earth and make it look like an accident. The neighbour shot himself in the skull with a gun as he cleaned it. You are always verbose in telling me the way you dislike my loopholes, my cop outs, but you are the first to escape into Wonderland and you know how this will cost you but you do it anyway and maybe next year you will be somewhere in the USA and I will be in Montreal and I will try to remember who you are as I sit in the weak sun reading a book about a lost life, a could have been, and I will smile because you could say it is a bullet that I dodged but the truth is that it has been three years since I took the bullet and I have not yet found an exit wound.

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Sensitive, strong Confidence all-encompassing; Channelling my perfect imperfection Until my last remaining belief

is in my own worthiness

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My
 mental health dangles by a thread – weighed down by lost loves and the sparse foundation of my family unit. Fibre by fibre, the thread weakens from the weight of being. So frail is the thread, though it has weathered storms past, there is no way to hide the

 overturned trees, floods, and sediment that have accumulated, blocking the sun from my eyes. I try to tell myself that I am just blinking, that I will soon open my eyes to cotton candy sunsets and children running to the ice cream parlour, but I know that

 I am only lying to myself. I am not clever enough to cover my own tracks.

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