people x places

Amelle calls it being "out of time". Final exams have finished and here we are feeling out of time. I am finished with the first half of my first year at university. There is a tiny blue ice-skate stamp on my hand from yesterday. (Amid all the 2016 presidential-Aleppo-Berlin mess, I write about me yet again.) I'm kind of embarrassed to say that while others around the world have suffered so much these past few months, I have found all these forms of fulfillment. And it wasn't even unnatural growth, but small incremental growth.

PEOPLE

There's Mackenzie, her hair is dipped into green. There's Silas and his soft way of looking at the world. There's Diana and the tattoos and loud snorts. There's Si Ran - she'll offer advice in a goofy way, while still managing to stay genuine. There's Alix and the afro-beats she'll blast when she's taking a shower, for all of residence to hear. There's Bowen, the quiet kid who is in engineering, who is so much more than the quiet kid in engineering. There's Saskia and Evalena and their conversations about feminist intersectionalism and pipelines and the rhetorical situation of Bitzer. There's Eden and her cynical humour and doodles of planets. And then there is Amelle. Amelle is sitting next to me at the moment, she is drawing in her journal and we are listening to "the city is my church", a playlist Kat made me. Surrounded by all these people, it's kind of hard to feel the loneliness and disconnectedness I felt six months ago.

PLACES

I thought my sense of orientation would get better in Montreal. It didn't. My mind is full of disjointed places. The Corona Theatre with the DJ girl who was way up there. The fresh bagel place, where the cream cheese came in tiny tubs. Poisson noir, the small underground dance apartment we went to on my eighteenth birthday two weeks ago. Panthère verte, the fast-food vegan place which has the best hummus in Montréal. The late-night dépanneur on St-Mathieu. The library, the Hall building, the chapel in residence where people go to study. The cafeterias and the awful top 10 charts music playing in a loop there!

I've done so much. But now, I feel like curling up on my bed and it being dark and warm. And not really reflecting, or projecting just being.