Week 30, 2026: Low battery
An alarm woke me up on Monday. It was loud and it wasn’t coming from my phone. I stormed to the kitchen, trying to guess which appliance could produce such a terrible noise. Nothing seemed suspect. I unplugged the microwave. And waited. It beeped. I waited again in case it made a mistake. It beeped again. I got back into bed and ignored it as best I could with a book. Will I have to deal with this when my flatmate goes on holiday? I think I’d rather just live with the noise. Dying fire alarm battery, I later learned.
I met a nice man at a golf club. His fifth sentence on the first topic change was I’m okay with immigration but I worry about whether they’d fight for the country if a war ever took place. I said that was a fair concern. Since learning how young Canada is, I’d taken to asking white people about their lineage. His was English. He got teary-eyed at the mention of Queen Elizabeth’s death. I was in England when it happened. My strongest memory from that time is a girl telling me she brought that day’s paper home because she figured she could sell it on eBay in fifty years and get really rich. I wonder whose side he’d be on if a war ever sprung up between Canada and England. It’s tricky with immigrants, you see.
He taught me how to golf and let me use up half the balls in his basket and that was already kind but then he gave me a ride home too. We’d spent most of the evening talking to each other when we were meant to be talking to everyone else and that builds a kind of trust. It’s a big deal to hand a stranger your Thursday evening.
I liked the weekend. A and I watched improv and shared mozzarella sticks. I finally went into the fancy restaurant in my neighbourhood and ordered beef tartare and a semifreddo. The only event in my calendar was an art fair but I either couldn't find it or it looked so uninviting that I assumed I hadn’t. Instead, I found a Chinese market and did a spot of shopping (pre-cut melons, seaweed salad, sour radish, banana milk for porridge). I settled in a nearby park to help myself to the melons. The breeze tickled my back through my semi-backless dress and the melons were perfectly juicy and I was so happy I had to close my eyes.