“Cities collect people, stray and lost and deliberate arrivants.”
—Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

Friends,

There's a spot along the Lachine Canal, near the Daniel McAllister in the Old Port, where I've been walking most mornings this summer. Same bench, same stretch of water, same boat sitting still against the current. I noticed one week I'd started timing my walks around when the light hit the water a certain way. That's usually a sign I'm trying to hold on to a place before it lets go of me.

It's been a while since the last issue. Not because there was nothing to say, but because most of what was happening didn't have language yet. Some of you know this season too, whatever shape it's taken for you.

Closing my practice was already its own ending. Then pride season arrived, workshops and travel across Tiohtià:ke and Mi'kma'ki, one contract stacked on the next. Underneath that, applying for academic jobs, trying to picture a future while still standing inside an unfinished present. My body kept a ledger of all of it, weeks where the wear showed up as ache and fog before I had words for what it meant. And then this feeling.

I've only felt this exact way in my body twice before. The first time I was fifteen, and I couldn't have told you what it was, only that I stopped being able to sit still in my own house, like my skin no longer fit the walls around it. The second was in Ottawa, years later, the same restlessness, except this time it had a direction, toward here, with no reason yet that would hold up under questioning. Both times I moved first and understood later, and both times it turned out to be right, in the sense that it changed who I became, not just where I lived. I've felt it again these past few weeks. I still don't know exactly where it's taking me. I just know what it's telling me: leave.

And so that’s it: I'll be leaving Tiohtià:ke by the end of the year. My lease ends then. I hope to defend my dissertation by then. And Confluence, the reading cohort I facilitate, ends in December too. I didn't plan these around each other, not consciously, but I don't think that's an accident either. Something in me was counting down long before the calendar caught up.

So that's where I am. Applying, leaving, grieving a little, but mostly grateful to have been held by this place for a while, the way the canal holds the boats that pass through it. Watching the water a while longer before I go.

What I’ve Been Writing

These are the most recent pieces I have published on Fragments. Read, share, and leave a comment if something lands.

Every Ten Years traces a decade-old pattern of leaving and the morning after a picture fell off my wall, and asks whether the pull to go is about the place or something older repeating on schedule.

Circuit follows a trip through Kjipuktuk that turns out to be the same loop I walked years ago, and a backyard barbecue where I realized my entire doctoral committee had been in my life since before any of them were anyone specific to me.

The Pull moves through fog on a ferry and a bus across the Confederation Bridge onto Epektwik, between a warm meal with a Black server and being followed through a drugstore, and the thought that ballroom's own logic of building for the one person with no access might also be the logic for choosing where to live.

Controlled Edges sits by the water at the Grand Quai next to a barge that never moves, and names Tsí Tkaròn:to as a door standing open, a place I already chose to leave once, now asking what it would cost to go back.

Upcoming Events

Illegible, Not Invisible: Speculative Care Beyond the State
Saturday, 12 September @ 15:00
Cité des Hospitalières, 251 avenue des Pins

A talk on what care can look like when it's built deliberately outside the reach of the state, drawn from my dissertation work with the ballroom scene here. This is a part of Defund La Police Festival.

Lowkiki x Harambec: Roots to Radiance
Saturday, 19 September @ 13:00
Brique par Brique, 633 avenue Beaumont

An afternoon of reflection on Afrofuturism through discussion and collective creation, with a focus on somatics and speculative care. More info available here. This space is reserved for BIPOC folks.

Code Vestimentaire présenté par Club Sexu (en français)
Thursday, 24 September @ 18:00
Office national du film, Îlot Balmoral,
1501 rue de Bleury, Salle Alanis-Obomsawin

Club Sexu invites you to a screening of Code Vestimentaire, a six-episode NFB docuseries that raids the closets of non-binary folks. It’s part comedy, part intimate portrait of figuring out who you are when the world keeps telling you you're not non-binary enough. I'm moderating the panel that follows. Details and registration.

Rest

Tricia Hersey reminds us that rest is something we have to keep choosing, especially those of us who have been taught that our worth is measured by our output. Each issue ends with a card from the Nap Ministry's Rest Deck. Take it with you.

Divest from capitalism.
Lay down somewhere.
—
When you feel guilt and shame for resting, view it as evidence of your brainwashing via grind culture. Be grateful for this insight and use it to transform the guilt into power. Rest guilt-free knowing you are following a path to liberation. Rest is your right and an ancient practice. Rest. Deprogram. Repeat.

À bientôt,

Vincent