Week 38, 2026: Momentum
I was at The Garrison, about to watch a series of lectures I’d nabbed tickets for that same day, with that exciting opportunistic feeling of being at an event alone. I’d feel it again at the Arabic cheese-making workshop and blog-making workshop. I have a decent idea of how both are made but I like to be reminded around people who want to learn in public. When you meet someone, all you need is one thread of commonality to gain momentum, to brave asking for a number or a second meeting. You here alone too?, I said to a girl a couple of months ago and now we’re sharing pierogies on a Saturday.
I’ve even noticed it when I’m registering people at an event, which has become an intermittent part of my life. I’ve been put up for it, been partial to it. There’s this micro-experience at the start when someone who’s come to the event alone spots you around the room and smiles because you’re a person they know a bit in a room of people they don’t know at all. I smile big back to let them know I remember them and we both hold onto that.
It’s the other way round catching up with an old friend. You just need one thing to drive a wedge into a relationship nearing its second decade. You end your sentences about the future with if god wills and I try to remember when that rolled off my tongue like it does yours.
It was only this week that I told the friends I’ve known the longest I made the move here. They’d met up in Montreal the same week I was there. None of us even live in Quebec. Was this, like, the first time since we’d all met up?, I asked, and couldn’t believe her nod on FaceTime. That was years ago, back in the Persian gulf. I had a pixie and my Polaroid camera still worked. Maybe that’s god’s will, I hear myself say. And the nod again but slower this time.
Why not Ottawa?
There’s French there. And I’m afraid of new places with ghosts.
You think I know French?
Yes. You have, like, two degrees in linguistics.
It’s no surprise she likes language-learning. When we were children, her parents would switch from Arabic to a language I’d never heard before when they wanted to converse privately in public. What language is that, I asked. Russian, she said.
I’ll have to revisit the Royal Ontario Museum because the most interesting wings were closed and I wore jeans so tight they were cutting off my brain circulation and not allowing me to enjoy any of the open ones. I know that because, as I was looking at historical chairs on the third floor, I kept thinking who gives a flying fuck? and normally the answer is me.
My relationship with cooking is abysmal but slowly improving. I watched Anouk make us dinner and made observations. I didn’t know aubergines were this easy to cook. It’s so clever to freeze hot chillies. I will procure garlic puree and shatta. Meal-prepping helps, I’m learning. I’ve taken a break from running to give meal-prepping all of my attention.
Being at home feels like a lot of work, shadowed by a spot of domestic trouble, so I’m finding home inside of a video-call or a video. Taskmaster and poutine. The Cineplex and butter popcorn. SNL UK and gochujang eggplant. In staying out so late, home becomes a mere bed.