Controlled Edges

Most of the water I return to has some kind of edge built around it. The fenced-off harbour path. The Grand Quai. Ponds engineered to look wild. Canals with their concrete banks doing the work water used to do on its own.

The VM/S Hercules sits across from Habitat 67 and doesn’t move. It has a name, once you squint for it. It was built in 1962 in Sorel, sheerlegs, an A-frame made for lifting, and it travelled this river for most of its working life doing exactly that. Now it stays mostly in the Old Port and is called on less. Not retired, exactly. Something closer to held. Government property, docked in plain sight.

A few feet from where I sit, a sign. No swimming. No fishing. Someone decided what this water is for, on my behalf, before I arrived.

I exist in the wake. The totalizing wake. There is no space for breath here, only movement — the cars, the bus, the gulls lifting and landing, everything but this one barge in constant motion around me. I come to the water for stillness and mostly find its opposite, except for the one thing here that isn’t allowed to move either.

Some mornings that’s enough. Watching what refuses to move, until I can, too.

The other morning, I learned the edge extends past the water.

I was smoking outside the Canadian Centre for Architecture, headphones on, not paying much attention. A security guard told me I couldn’t smoke there. Fine, I said. I tapped the cherry off against the picnic table and let it fall into the grass, and she started yelling. Destroying property. Making a mess. Burning things. I had done none of those things, but she kept going.

A colleague of hers stepped outside while this was happening. White. Vaping, a few feet away, right in her face, unbothered. I looked at her, then at him, and said there was only one difference between what he was doing and what I’d just done, and I’d let them both spot it.

Same season, an election just starting: the Parti Québécois blaming immigration for overcrowded schools. Even the children of immigrants counted as immigrants, counted as a problem still to be addressed. A guard and a governing party, working the same instinct at two different scales.

Montréal is the city I have loved most in this country. I want to say that plainly, without qualifying it into something smaller. Kiki balls on a Saturday I can still feel in my chest. My book club, the one night a month I don’t have to explain myself to anyone in the room. I have wanted to put down roots here, to build, to let this place keep doing what it has done to me, which is genuinely a kind of enlargement. And still: it will not be home, because it will not let itself be home. I dedicated a great deal of who I am to understanding this place, and the place cannot fully receive that back. I knew this before I let myself know it, at the start of a PhD that is, in every sense, about here.

Toronto isn’t a memory I’m working through. It’s a door standing open right now. Things are lining up that would bring me there within the next months or years. I left that city once, on purpose, and I’m having to reckon with what it means to go back to a place I already chose to leave. The cost of living is similar to here. What I’d be paying for instead is not having to carry this particular weight in my body every day. I don’t know if that’s a fair trade or the only trade available to me. A whole new person, maybe. And back. I don’t know.

I have started, without quite deciding to, planning routes to water there the way I do here. Looking at neighbourhoods. Noticing which of my habits, the long walks, the reflecting, the writing by whatever edge I can find, are portable and which only work on this particular shore.

The Hercules doesn’t move. The lapping here returns eventually to the Atlantic. So does the water off Lake Ontario. This body, made of water. Near these bodies of water, however they’ve been fenced, however they’ve decided what I’m allowed to take from them.