I’ve forgotten that this is my “day,” and so the morning rolls out as it usually has for me this summer—sans the spectre of observation hanging over me. Except that’s not really true at all, because I’ve gotten into the habit of “sleeping in” (read: going on my phone) for hours after I wake these days, mentally steeling myself to face my roommates. It’s me, a new subletter, and a musician who’s not home very often living in my Montréal summer sublet. This is the first time I’ve ever lived independently. When I was 19 years old, I moved out of my mother’s house and in with my partner. Now, at 26, I’m living without my partner for the first time in my adult life. I sleep in until 9:30AM, and when I finally drag myself off of my phone and out of bed, I realize that I am in fact home alone; neither of my roommates came home last night, and I could have had the apartment to myself all morning. 

I eat two hashbrown patties from the freezer (the old subletter’s, who left them behind), and pair them with a teaspoon of the new subletter’s organic avocado mayonnaise (she’s given me enthusiastic permission to sample it). This unsatisfying meal serves as a stark reminder that I really have no groceries in the apartment at all. I decide that I’ll check out the cheap grocery store, Segal’s, that my friend has been raving about. At this point in the day, I’ve already checked for an email I’m expecting containing my big art grant application results about 50 times. Nothing yet. I’m not sure exactly when it’ll come, and this constant waiting has me on edge. 

I decide that I’ll walk the 40 minutes to the grocery store, and then bus back. It’s sunny. I’m embarrassed by my cat eye style sunglasses, but they’re my only prescription pair. On the way, I stop by Librarie Drawn & Quarterly to see if they’ve gotten the latest issue of Room in yet. I’m waiting for a contributor’s copy, but I’m worried the magazine has lost my address. This is another waiting-and-checking ritual that I’ve fallen into. While at D&Q, I linger in the poetry section and thumb through a copy of Jason Purcell’s Crohnic. I am working on a collection rooted in my own experience with a digestive chronic illness, and am interested in seeing how other people approach similar topics in their writing. I notice that Crohnic deals explicitly with the failures and limitations of the medical system, including incorporating scans of medical documents within the text, and I make a mental note to think about how to represent my own parallel experiences.

I move on, and stop at two vintage consignment shops. I spend a long time looking at a mesh bra that’s $5 and features a lot of confusing buckles and clasps. I consider buying it to wear for my upcoming reunion with my partner after five months apart, which is in two weeks, but decide against it because I can’t tell if it’s broken or supposed to look like that. I try on a Y2K bedazzled hoodie and some striped pants that are a bit too tight and buy neither. I worry that bringing my backpack into the changing room with me will make it look like I’m stealing, but I don’t feel like walking over to the till and explaining to the person behind, in my stilted French, that I am not planning on stealing something. No one comments on my backpack, and I leave the shop.

The cheap grocery store is very crowded, and I get overwhelmed quickly. I don’t buy as much as I’d planned to, leaving only with a bunch of bananas, lemonade, a grapefruit, two kiwis, two apples, a box of celebration cookies, Nutella, gnocchi, a head of broccoli, frozen pineapple, lemon yogurt, and strawberry soy milk. My total is $30, which seems just okay. I record a voice memo review of the experience for my friend who recommended the store to me, and then a written version for her sibling in Vancouver. Her sibling is my childhood best friend, and we have a longstanding ritual of playing “guess the grocery haul price”; it’s one of the many ways that we stay connected during frequent bouts of long-distance friendship. 

The buses are all disrupted by a bicycle race, so I walk home in the heat, pausing periodically to drink half the lemonade carton and eat half the pack of cookies on my trek. I’m aware of the loud sucking noise it makes when I gulp from the tetra pak carton, but I’m too warm to care. My bag feels very heavy.

I watch the first three episodes of Love is Blind France. A friend of a friend texts to offer me a DIY treatment for my health issue that’s worked for her, but I reject the offer because I’m afraid to jeopardize my healthcare by doing anything that might upset one of the three specialists I’ve seen. I’ve found them to be mercurial and moody—quick to anger when it seems like I am threatening their authority by taking my care into my own hands. I eat gnocchi with broccoli and regret not buying cheese or any kind of sauce to go with it. I’m too lazy to drain all the water from the pot and it functions as its own sort of gross, starchy sauce.

It is around 3:50PM, and it’s at this point that I bother to check my calendar and realize that this is my assigned “day”. I email to see if I’m still part of the project (I consider the possibility that maybe someone else has been assigned my day), then my roommate comes home and shows me a picture of her face painted with a big star in the middle. She’s taken part of an art photo shoot with a friend and used a rat toy from the apartment as a prop. 

I get ready to go out and meet a new friend. I board the bus, then realize that I’ve grabbed the wrong card and I am in fact trying to pay with my old graduate student ID. After some back and forth, the bus driver lets me stay onboard, and I buy a single-use ticket at the metro station even though I specifically reloaded my transit card just that morning. 

I’m a few minutes early, and I sit listening to music while I wait for my friend. It’s very windy in the station, and I keep having to pull my skirt back down over my knees. I watch a little girl swing her body over the railing again and again. I’m hit with an impulse to listen to the French music my middle school teachers pushed on us in order to improve our vocabularies. I listen to a few Radio Radio songs and then one by Samian. I share a meme to my Instagram story about having large breasts that gets a bunch of likes, then feel weird for doing so. My relationship with my body, and this feature specifically, is far too much to tackle in the moment, so I decide not to think about it too hard.

My friend arrives right at 8:00PM, and we make our way to a dive bar that they recommend. They tell me it’s a shared favourite spot with the mutual friend who introduced the two of us, so I text her just in case she wants to join, but she already has plans. It’s a Monday night and both of these friends have work in the morning. There’s something about this city that makes me feel like I can be more spontaneous than I usually am. It might have a lot to do with the fact that I’m working two part-time remote jobs right now, andhave more control over my schedule than I’ve had in years. Money’s tight, but my rent is half of what it was back on the West Coast, and I feel a million times lighter. I know that this phase of my life can’t last forever, and I feel anxious to make the most of it while I’m here. Sometimes I feel so much gratitude for the friends and community that Montréal has offered me in such a short time that I feel like I’m going to burst.

Many of my days in this city don’t feel like they’ve really started until nighttime hits, and this day is no exception. We grab a table at the dive bar and place our orders—a piña colada for me, and a long island iced tea for them, which is listed on the menu as a “LIIT”. Neither of us realize what a LIIT is, and we joke with the bartender about the name. I tell my friend about a poetry workshop on the theme of “holes” that I’d attended the day before, and promise to send them Eduardo Martinez-Leyva’s “Portrait of a Boy on the Other Side of a Glory Hole” when I get home. I realize that I haven’t taken any pictures for the project today and take a couple. We step outside for a cigarette. I don’t smoke, but it sounds cooler if I word it like that. We talk about the sensuality of Kaveh Akbar’s “Despite My Efforts Even My Prayers Have Turned into Threats”. I use the bathroom and notice when I walk in that the tap is running quite badly. I try for a long time to turn it off, but I’m unsuccessful and I don’t bother to tell the staff about it. I’m unsure if they already know, and would feel embarrassed if they did.

My friend and I walk back to the metro station and say goodbye. 

When I signed up to participate in this project, I had no idea where I’d be. No idea about where I’d be living, sure, but also no idea what my internal world would look like, either. This is the first night of the summer that I’ve had to wear a jacket. Summer ends officially in seven days. I’m leaving Montréal in two weeks, but at least I got to wear the bulky jacket I packed once. I find a hard candy in my bag and eat it as I cross the overpass. Get home at 11:50PM. Text my friend that I got home safe and send them Eduardo Martinez-Leyva’s poem. They send me Kaveh Akbar’s. I say goodnight to my roommate. 

Allegra Kaplan is a queer writer of Brazilian-Jewish and Ukrainian descent. Her work has recently appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Grain, Room, Yolk, LBRNTH, Beaver Magazine, Ahoy Literary, The Fieldstone Review,and more. Having recently completed her MA in English Literatures at the University of British Columbia, she is now working on her first collection of poetry. She lives on the unceded territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Songhees and Xʷsepsəm/Esquimalt) peoples.