The Geometry of Writing

3 AM in my well-curated bedroom in Killarney, and I’m hunched over my mechanical keyboard, the soft click-clack of Cherry MX Brown switches a gentle percussion against the winter silence. My coffee has gone cold—decaf, black, in the chipped wolf mug I stole from Value Village years ago. Dozens of text files clutter my desktop, each one a fragment of this growing obsession: “tracking_draft.md”, “untitled_meditation_4.txt”, “sacred_directions_notes.gdoc”.

The project began simply enough. One night, thinking about the future—both hopeful and in rage—I wrote:

I. I stand Horatian on my soapbox, immune to irony-poisoning, shooting love-tipped arrows in the dark. World needs tenderness, not less. Wild sage gathered at Nose Hill's wind-swept slopes. Needs surrender to possibility. Each handful a God-gift. I want to kneel before you like Judas with his kiss—not as betrayal, but in recognition that the darkest acts birth redemption. Let me burn optimism into your bones with smoke—the scent of rain on prairie dust. When the end is nigh, I'll show how endings birth beginnings. When despair is preached, I'll testify to stubborn persistence. The best worst time to be alive is now—when magpies still raid garbage bins at dawn, when strangers hold doors for strangers, when we fucking try. The cynic can keep his sophisticated despair. Give me the holy fool's courage to believe in tomorrow. Give me the strength to love this broken world not despite its cracks, but because each fissure is space where light sneaks in. I want to make medicine from morning dew and parkade puddles, want to heal everything I touch. Call me naive. Call me dipshit sheltered bubbled mark. Someone must keep believing, must keep building, must keep dreaming up better worlds while this one burns. Might as well be me.

II. The personal is political. I remind my postcolonial lit professor on the first day of class and he repeated the mantra until the end of semester. We read epistolary work of African wives with unfaithful beating husbands, with sons killing white anti-Apartheid allies in the streets. When are we free? My ex says she isn’t a feminist and waves Queer flags high. Somehow doesn’t get it. The poetry of friendship is political too—each relationship its own border crossing, its own contested territory. Platonic love is the purest revolution. And sometimes the revolution eats its children. When Queerness becomes commodity packaged and sold back to us at pride parades sponsored by weapons manufacturers killing innocent brown children. Right now. The white feminist says he understands intersectionality while stepping over NDN women sleeping in doorways. Blames fentanyl for their own lack of humanity. Doesn’t know I grew up with no electricity or hot water. Every border crossed is a stone w