Week 20, 2026: Flying solo
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. Whether Mark Twain said it or not, it’s true. Here and now, it's true.
It started with some packing. Lena Dunham interviews in the background. A printed transcript of a talk about the free software movement. My mother and I, eating sandwiches in her dark car. My toenails painted a shade called Flying Solo. Free as in speech, not free as in beer.
On Tuesday morning, I went for an early walk along the beach. I sat on the shore, rummaging through my playlist for the perfect song, when a shirtless man marched towards me like I was sitting in his spot. Arab, he asked. I mumbled an affirmative. But I’m not in the mood, not in the mood at all, so when he asks where I’m from, I say what I’ve always wanted to say in these scenarios. I’m really not in the mood to talk to you. He surprises me by sitting down next to me and telling me that since I don’t want to talk to him, he doesn’t want to respect my desire for solace.
I get up and start to walk away. Screw this. Screw finding the perfect song and screw entertaining a shirtless man with a stupid silver necklace. He follows me and starts to beg me to just tell him where I’m from, so I do. He starts to tell me about himself. Egyptian-Italian, works as a cook at a hotel restaurant, lives near the other beach, likes poetry and ravioli. He asks for my name and when I return the question, he passes me his work ID, which endears me to him. It may be at this point – as I read his name aloud off the plastic card – that I decide that this could make for an interesting conversation.
He guides us to sit down on a rock and I start rattling off questions. He went to the disco yesterday and it’s his day off today, so he thought he’d go for a swim. He likes going to the disco and sometimes goes there to meet women. It never goes the way he wants it to because they “all ask for money” and he finds it weird to pay for “that kind of thing”. How much are we talking? I ask with a grin that would irritate people who love me, a grin I can’t fight off when I’m asking a ridiculous question that I’m certain I’ll get away with by virtue of something I can’t help, like his finding me attractive. He gets weird, shy, before revealing how much the woman asked for last night. We agree it’s much too high a price.
I take this as a chance to let him know that the beach might be one of the worst places to pick up women, even if they’re more likely to be ones who don’t ask for money. I also tell him that I have a flight tonight to ward off any hopes, and he says he wishes he met me earlier so he could’ve convinced me not to go. In between quizzing him about his life story, about his relationship with his mother and his failed business venture, he flirts with me and I oscillate between seriously batting away his attempts and laughing at his earnestness in saying the corniest lines.
He annoys me at times but I mostly just feel for him, feel for the kind of guy driven by an ambition bordering on hedonism, a hard-worker who woke up one day to realize he’d been dealt all cards except for love. He talks to me like I’m some sort of golden ticket, like I’ll be yet another thing he’s failed if he doesn’t win my affection but it’s far from true. This is not proof of a personal failing, this is someone who finds his story fascinating, cataloguing dialogue snippets away for a blog post that will almost certainly be too long.
I tell him he’s going to make that money back and I bet he'd be a wonderful sous-chef. He will also make a woman extremely happy. It will be easy, too. Many women would love to marry a twenty-something biracial cook who recites poetry and still refers to nightclubs as the disco. He touches my hair while I’m talking and I can feel him picturing a future that’s going to dissipate the moment I dust off my leggings and walk away, this time without pause.
When I get back home, I borrow a beautiful nightgown from my mother and spend the rest of the day squeezing clothes into suitcases. I take breaks, often. My legs won’t stop shaking and the idea of eating sounds terrible. I manage it just fine in the end, packing my entire life into four suitcases. Two for now, two for later. The two I’m taking now mostly carry clothes and ointments. The kilogram math isn’t right at the airport, so my two lose a scarf, a towel set and a leather jacket. My mother bundles them into her arms with a deep frown and I repeat that it’s fine.
After they hug me goodbye, I check if they’re still there once I’m past security and I don’t see them. The stomach ache doesn’t go away with a walk from one end of the airport to the other, it sits through the gate checks, through the extra security checks where I stand in my red socks with a neutral expression as every item I’ve carefully packed into my backpack gets searched and prodded.
I’ve never been on a flight this long before. The friendliest of the flight attendants asks if I want to store my stuff in the secret staff storage section and I’m like yes please. She asks if what I’m holding is a ukulele, pronouncing it like the Hawaiians do, and raises her eyebrows slightly when I say I’d prefer my coffee without any sugar or milk please and these two things make me spend my flight dreams wondering if she plays the ukulele and if she wants to hang out when we land in Toronto or whatever. But she’s busy for all fourteen hours and I’m shy and in a lot of inexplicable physical pain for all of that time too.
My first nap on the plane lasts an hour, maybe an hour and a half. I wake up from it to learn that the empty middle seat is now occupied and we haven’t taken off yet. I spend the flight either napping or reading, stopping to breathe through the physical pain that has me eyeing up the floor and wondering if the friendly flight attendant would object to my lying there for some time. The flight lasts so long it starts to feel like it’s all I’ve ever known. Hot and cold, in and out of sleep, in and out of pain. Dry eyes that won’t ease the pain with tears.
Once I'm off the plane, everything moves quickly until I'm in the back of the Uber. I keep some small talk going with my driver, asking him about his time here and his favourite spots. We talk about how Toronto compares to London and AD. He asks if I like Turkish food, if I like to party, if I want to go to Niagara Falls because he can take me there if I just ask him on WhatsApp. My mother texts me back, saying it’s normal for women to bleed when stressed, even though I don’t know anyone who does and it’s never happened to me till now.
Once I take my two suitcases, ukulele case and backpack into my rented room and up a flight of stairs, I shower off the fourteen hours and run every big errand in my to-do list. The subway for a PRESTO card. The phone shop to buy what I would later find out is a too-expensive package. I don’t think the sweet Aquarius girl who’s only been working there for a month meant to screw me over this badly. Or if she did, I’m sure she had a good reason. I love the month of December, she had said as she inspected my ID. The bank, where I'm not screwed over and the woman who helps me is equally lovely, looking at my ID and saying Zeina is such a beautiful name. I’ll now be expecting a compliment anytime anyone looks at my ID.
Back in my rented room in the shared home, where I could hear coughs and footsteps but never saw proof of life whenever I opened my door, I downloaded the myriad of apps that I was told I had to log into and update some sort of personal detail. I wanted nothing more than sleep but it was still 4pm. welcome to the free world, my ex texted me when I landed, our time difference is better for calls now. Let's have one then, I responded. And we did. We talked until it was 11pm and time for bed.
I was worse for wear on Thursday. It made sense that I was exhausted and jet-lagged but I couldn’t shake off the irrational feeling that just knowing the cause of my fatigue should’ve partially alleviated it. I couldn’t. I just napped.
On Friday, I took it upon myself to learn the city. I’ve always had a strong distaste for feeling like a newcomer, so I spent ten hours trying to shake off the feeling by matching my steps to the heartbeat of the city, walking and studying and people-watching. Like London England, Toronto Ontario has an Islington and a Kensington, though the latter seems to also favour subway stops with women’s names, like Jane and Christie. Pedestrians have a lot of stock here. In Chick-fil-A, they use physical descriptors when you place an order and stick it on the receipt. Mine was: GRY T-SHIRT.
Things I’m getting used to (again): Flushing TP in the toilet. Drinking tap water. Looking at physical subway maps for no longer than ten seconds to avoid appearing like a tourist. Smiling at handsome postmen in shorts. Being reaffirmed that I fare best and belong most in cities where elderly women have pixies and wear leggings.
Things I’m getting used to (for the first time): Walk-in closets. Supermarket pies. Black squirrels. Cybertrucks and U-haul trucks. Fire hydrants. Shoes off at the door at every house and flat, without exception. Tapping once on public transport, in but not out. The alien feeling that I’m in a TV show when surrounded by people in conversation, not because any one of them is particularly interesting but because I’ve had a North American accent playing on a screen in front of me or on a device in my ears since I was a small child.
I had spent the morning window-shopping for room rentals on my phone when I saw a message from an Italian guy telling me to check out his ad. I checked out his ad. The room looked big, the flat clean and pristine, the area not too sketchy. I asked when I could pass by to see it in person. He was free at seven and stood outside waiting for me at six fifty-five. We walked up the two flights of stairs and I carefully slipped off my sneakers at the door. It was exactly as pictured.
He told me to make myself at home and I drank from a tall glass of water on one of the kitchen bar stools while I thought of questions to ask. I mentally ran through a list of the sorts of things people cared about – water pressure, neighbourly noise levels, cleaning schedules – but couldn’t get myself to care enough to ask about any of them. I eyed his pans and pots. Can we share kitchen stuff? I asked. Without a moment’s hesitation, he replied: Of course, we can share everything, just tell me if there’s anything of yours you’d prefer I didn’t use and I won't touch it. Almost all of the kitchen stuff I once owned in London belonged to my friends now, so I laughed. I currently only own one mug and you can definitely use it. He opened one of the cabinets. That’s perfect, he said, I have space for exactly one more mug in this cupboard.
As he walked me back to the front door, he said you got a good vibe in his surprising accent and I stammed a you too. He had mentioned that there was a nearby beach where he liked to spend his summers, so I went to check it out. The sand was freezing cold, the coldest and wettest to ever hit the soles of my feet. I tip-toed my way to the shore, sat next to the water and hoped that this walk from the flat to the beach would one day become routine. There was so much work to be done before this was something that could be true.
On the weekend, I met up with the one person whose number I had in Toronto – bar my Uber driver, who had been messaging me everyday asking me if I wanted to party tonight. That person was my mother’s second cousin, a born-and-bred Gazan who I had never met. He picked a downtown cafe for us, where we both arrived ten minutes late. We sat upstairs, sipping on Turkish coffees and firing personal questions at each other. He’s a year younger than me but behaves exactly as I’d expect someone with his upbringing would, like he’s decades older and carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. All matters were trivial to him, not worth a faff or a fuss. His laughs were curt, which made every one I pulled out of him fill me with a short-lived euphoria. He kept checking the time on his phone like he had something more important to tend to but when I asked if he had any plans today, he said he didn’t.
The problem with the Arabs here is that as soon as they move abroad, they fall into one of two camps, he said. I know, I nodded vigorously, it’s either the bar or the mosque. Yes, he repeated, bar or mosque. It’s hard to break down how the bar-or-mosque categorization works because a bar person doesn’t have to be someone who drinks in the same way that a mosque person doesn’t have to be one who prays. It’s loosely similar to the binaryness of labeling people as either liberal or conservative, where being unable to identify with one invariably makes you the other.
My grandmother would love Clamato. Whenever she used to tell me to try something she cooked for me, and then self-consciously add that she wasn’t sure if I’d like it, I’d respond with whatever you like, I like, remember? And it was true, whatever she liked, I liked. We enjoyed when things were extra tangy or extra spicy or extra bitter. I could imagine her saying tomato juice? with a smile that said she really didn’t want to try a new food for the first time in twenty years but would’ve, for me. She would taste it and squint her eyes and say now that is tangy!
On Sunday, I woke up in the mood for Clamato and the desire to have closure with my ex. She didn’t know this, couldn’t have, but it was a year ago to the day that I had broken up with her in the airport. I didn’t intend for it to align that way but it felt right. It felt right that we were trying to be friends again now and that we could neatly agree on a linear narrative of everything that went foul. It felt right because I don’t have much experience in this area and I imagined that all healthy exes did this sort of thing. I called her with the intent to steer the conversation that way but the vibe felt wrong. Again and again I tried but it felt wrong. I tried to force it anyway and I ended up missing a film screening, pushed to tears, feeling miserable. We ended up fighting, a big bad fight that took us both back to the old days.
I spilled out a row of apologies afterwards and, after a long pause, she responded saying that if somebody walked up to someone else in a bar and punched him square in the mouth out of nowhere, nothing that person did in response, no matter how dirty he got, could match the cruelty of that initial unjust punch. I’m sorry for metaphorically punching you in the mouth, I said, listening hopefully for the twitch of a smile, for redemption, but there was none.
We hung up not long after and I laid back in my bed to finish reading Famesick, comforted by Lena’s words and wit, wondering if I could ever be this funny, this sincere, this loveable.