I have had nothing of interest to write about all month. Sorry! I literally spent the past two weeks working relentlessly so I could use the coming week to move house unimpeded by commitments. Apparently the work I did was good? I find this hard to believe, because the process of doing it at speed and under pressure was, to put it gently, an ordeal.
Anyway: that’s been April. I knew it would be rough, but the reward is that I get to move house in a week’s time. I’m moving into a rooming house, basically, which overlooks the ocean but is a twenty-minute walk away from groceries. Its best feature is that it is about CAD200 cheaper than my apartment (also that it is not, as my apartment is, cursed). I think Atlantic Superstore does deliveries, so I guess I’ll make it work in terms of eating.
None of this is what I want to write about.
On Saturday I went outside. Properly outside, I mean; none of this round-the-corner-to-the-Sobeys-and-back hermit behaviour that has been the hallmark of my month so far. I went downtown to try on some trousers for the wedding, except that I got there a full hour before the place opened, which presented an excuse to sit in a park-type space and experience the world.
The public space in question did not really have seating. I’m increasingly aware of this feature of public spaces—seating is not a given, presumably because someone unhoused might want to use it if it’s there. If there is seating, it’s probably some arcane configuration of metal strips designed to impede lying down. In lieu of a bench, I repeated an old trick from Oxford: I sat on the steps of a war memorial, right on the cusp of its shadow so I could shift into the shade if I got too warm. No April showers here in Halifax. It’s brisk, but it’s remarkably sunny, to the point where the back of my neck had caught some heat by Saturday evening.
It turns out that being out in the world, even if just to sit and watch it go by, is good for you. I noticed a fun little archway in the middle of the space, which I had not previously seen. I watched tourists crest across the plaza, taking photos, moving on. I liked it so much that after sorting out an order for some wedding attire, I headed down to the waterfront to look at a whole different part of Halifax. This time I sat by the steps that lead down to the harbour, which look gorgeous under the sun. The water turns pale blue and oddly Mediterranean as it laps at the stairway; it’s a trick of the light, but it’s a very beautiful one.
(To anyone planning a visit to Halifax, I need to impress upon you that you should not engage with the water in the harbour. The amount of sewage that has been pumped into it over the years will cause your body to commit war crimes against itself. The stairs are a beautiful spectacle, but that is all they are. Simply do not do it. Cool? Cool.)
It was Earth Day on Saturday, so the waterfront was lively with demonstrators, along with its usual crop of musicians and tourists. I watched some kids return in triumph from looking at a warship of some kind; “Did you see the ship, eh?” asked an adult in their party, and I felt the same horrid frisson of delight I always feel whenever I hear a Canadian say “eh” in conversation. Canadians, I am truly not proud of myself for this. On the other hand, I finally understand why Americans lose their whole shit whenever I say, like, “going to the shops.”
I wrote, just under a year ago, about not having any traction yet in Canada. I still don’t feel like I have that, and I suspect that’s just a function of the visa I am here with; it puts you in a weird administrative purgatory where you count, but only just, and not in all the ways that matter. But walking around in Halifax feels less scary, now, and more like a thing I know how to do. I have mapped out the perilous edges of my new landscape. I might fall over, but I know how to keep from falling off.
The story about sitting on the war memorial steps in Oxford goes like this:
In the spring of 2017 I got a referral to the Adult Mental Health Team. I had been through three rotations—decreasingly helpful—with the self-referral mental health service, and the last rotation had ended abortively that morning. I felt so horrible, so dislocated and choked and incorrect within the space allotted to me in the world, that I made an emergency doctor’s appointment and took the afternoon off work. I cried abundantly in my GP’s office until he made the referral, and I cried a little longer after that.
(Within a matter of weeks, I would find myself battling to get a mess of misrepresentation corrected in my brand new AMHT file, in order to avoid being palmed off with medication for a mental health condition I emphatically do not have.)
(This wasn’t even as bad as things would get in 2017. Anyway.)
When I left the doctor’s surgery it was sunny outside, in the way it’s often sunny after rain. I was tear-streaked and red and ungainly, and I didn’t want to take the bus home early; I didn’t want to freak out my housemates. I wanted to sit someplace inconspicuous, put myself together, and wait out the next forty-five minutes until I could justifiably head back home.
I asked myself: Where is it okay for people to cry? I decided: Cemeteries. But the only cemetery in walking distance didn’t have seats, or an obvious public entrance. I reappraised the question. I decided: Okay, then. War memorial.
I don’t think anyone looked at me and assumed I felt some profound personal grief for Oxford’s glorious dead. Honestly, I don’t think anyone looked at me at all. I think I am just a little crazed about the possibility of being seen, about the risk of a lapse in man’s broad ambivalence to man. I sat on the steps and I watched a pigeon pace the perimeter of a still and glassy rainwater puddle, a perfect mirror to the clouds that wreathed the spires. It moved so uncertainly around the water’s edge.
I saw myself in the pigeon. I can’t explain this except by saying that everything feels more porous when a great stress is momentarily eased. I watched it navigate the details of its landscape and I felt a vast and tender sympathy: I didn’t know where the edges were, either.
The past few newsletters have been a little bleak. I wanted to wait until I had something more hopeful to say before writing this one—hence leaving it so late in the month, until all the work had been taken care of and I could be a person for a second.
And I do feel hopeful, I think. I’m still tremendously anxious (in the first instance about moving house), but this week has been a better week than many of the weeks preceding. That’s especially true if you take a long view. If you had asked the Waverly sitting on the Oxford war memorial where they saw themself in six years’ time, they would not have answered with anything like this.
I am living more precariously than I have in years. But there is so much possibility in that. I’m on another continent, making active preparations to get married next year. I have tested limits, found new ones, and stayed afloat the whole time. Sometimes, when the sun is shining and the sea is blurring its border with the shore, that possibility strikes me anew. I was right to do this, it says. It was a risk worth taking after all.