The end of Winter is synonymous with grief. The snow melts and the cracks in the earth and the asphalt shine through its thin layer. I feel constant sadness, the brokenness of the world around me. Not around, I correct myself, as now more than ever I feel adrift in the general brokenness. The cracks shining through the thin layer of snow, of civilization, are identical to the ones in my heart. The end of Winter feels like a church with perfect acoustics: every personal pain and longing is mirrored and amplified through the millions pain points scattered across the universe. I am just one of these pain points, but without me the chain of transmission may be broken. With me, the chain becomes a complete circle. In the end of Winter, I refuse to look forward towards brighter and warmer days. I refuse to hurry towards the beginning, but choose to stay here, in the stage of dying, melting away, crumbling, and ending. There is a strange comfort of feeling broken in a broken world.

Putting my younger child to bed may take anywhere between forty minutes and two hours. That’s plenty of time for self-reflection. Today was a warm day, for February. I took a walk around lunchtime, went all the way to the forest. On my way, I noticed that the clouds were pink. I listened to a good webinar. The sunset tonight was even prettier than the lunchtime clouds, I had some good conversations and children ate their salad without fussing. It was a good day. Then I remember that for a couple of families in Ste-Rose, a small town north of Montreal, today was the last day they hugged their children. Their children were murdered by a public transit driver who slammed his bus into a daycare, intentionally. I pray that one day these parents find some form of healing, but they will never have a luxury to forget what happened on February 8. I remember parents, children, family members, neighbours pulling at the rubble in a desperate effort to save their loved ones after the earthquake. I remember about the war, because I remember about it every day of my life.

So, how pretty was my sunset? Can one have a good day? Has one a right to “live, laugh, love” in a desperately broken world? Am I being insensitive? Or celebrating my own survival, the fact that the worse only happens to others? I am grasping at straws and then I find a quote by Arundhati Roy that expresses perfectly how I want to show up in this world. It doesn’t make anything better, but I write it down.

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.” 
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

Today

marked eleven months of the war

that twelve months ago, I would not have imagined.

I am sitting on the fifteenth floor of a corporate high-rise,

The kind with wooden panels, soft lights, high-speed elevators and bergamot-smelling hand cream in a gender-neutral bathroom,

And listening to a story of hunting a deer

I am looking out of a wall-sized window on the imperfect symmetry of glass, metal, concrete and smoke

I am thinking that it used to be a forest.

The last day of the two and a half years of my life

(the same two and a half years that may still cost me months of therapy)

(the two and a half years when I met my best friends)

(the two and half years when I became a better person, sometimes because, sometimes despite of all that happened)

wasn’t at all eventful

except this one moment, when, as I was walking through the storm

I realized that the clock in my head stopped ticking.

Earlier, I didn’t even realize the clock was there

I didn’t hear it

or maybe I thought it was a sound of my own heartbeat.

That clock that for two and a half years kept telling me

do more, work harder, meet your deadlines,

never be late, never be sick, never be weak,

make sure you are better than everyone else,

because nobody would want an average person with your accent.

Well, guess what? On the last day of the two and a half years of my life

the people who used to praise me for working hard, meeting my deadlines,

being better than everyone else, weren’t even there to say good-bye.

But the ones who were

who were there for me all the time, didn’t say

thank you for being such an asset to our capitalist system

instead, they said

you have no idea how much we love you.

The Saulteaux creation story says

That time and space were made as a part of the physical world

This means

That time has nothing

On your spirit

This means

That you are not obliged to say:

After this pain I will learn to be happy

Or, at least, I will remember how to smile. 

If time does not exist

For the spirit

There is no after, nor is there before

Everything is forever

This pain

This joy

The moment you read that someone you didn’t know was killed near Bakhmut

Someone younger than you

Someone who was, who isn’t, who won’t be

The moment someone tells you that hemoglobin and chlorophyll cells

Have identical structure

The same four elements arranged in circle around a central atom

Proving that there is connection between us and everything else

And your brain explodes with this new unfathomable knowledge

This joy

This pain

Everything all at once

Arranged in circle.

I decided to document this highly emotional journey from job-addiction to, hopefully, freedom and a place of thriving.
So, today, I drank three cups of coffee, discovered that I concurred, at least temporarily, my fear of saying no. Chiefly, because I am no longer desperate to be liked. I cancelled many plans, without feeling frustration. I bought a new notebook for my future job – it felt like a ritual. The notebook is sky-blue. I felt silenced and erased by my superiors and I cried, just once, after receiving a message full of love from a colleague.

Then, when the day was almost over, I saw this. Tu t’en sors bien – you’re making it. I’ve been smiling ever since.

I am now in the process of leaving a job that I loved. I loved this job deeply and with passion. I was very good at it. This job brought me joy and meaning, but it also hurt me and traumatized me in many ways. It was one of those relationships that blurs the line between love and addiction. Where your friends keep asking you to leave your job and you get angry because they don’t understand. Where your mum asks you to take it easy and you promise you will, instead you loose sleep and work deep into the night and check your outlook compulsively. Still, you love it until one day you don’t.

I was lucky because I could leave when I couldn’t go on anymore. I could leave holding my head high and without much sacrifice. The way out was there, the door opened when I needed it most. Now I am leaving my job, feeling sad and hopeful and frustrated and nostalgic and exhausted by this tsunami of emotions.

I feel a pinch in the heart, from time to time, an anticipation of loss and a surprise at how I feel the saddest about leaving behind small and random things.

I will miss Rose de mai – a small coffee shop in the Petite-Patrie neighbourhood of Montréal, where I was just once, by accident. It has an abundance of plants and the best home-made tiramisu I ever tasted.

I will miss coffee dates with Tina, my partner at the City of Montreal.

I will miss filling my Thursdays with neighbourhood visits, especially waking from the whatever metro to whatever meeting place, noticing local architecture, shops and people. Montreal is a great place for a middle-class nomad.

I will miss the feeling of emptiness and expectation close to the end of the day, when it’s too late to start a new task, but too early to go home and one can have a last cup of coffee and reflect on one’s day.

So, in the end, what I will miss the most is not money or connections or the feeling of power, it’s freedom of movement, feeling connected to a place and coffee.

In Kanyen’kéha (the Mohawk language), there are different verbs for acting slowly and acting quickly.

Wakatihsnó:re – I am quick to act

Wakatihsá:yen – I am slow to act

The pace and rhythm are embedded in the verb itself, they are not just adjectives that can be dropped and added at will.

My rudimentary language of Kanyen’kéha does not allow me to imagine possible contexts for using these verbs, but my imagination easily draws parallels. Most of the time, I wakatihsnò:re : I am quick, reactive, swept off my feet, unable to slow down, torn between fatigue and frustration. By contrast, these few days of the new year I wakatihsá:yen – act very slowly. These days, I find slowness and nothingness particularly appealing.

The slower I move, the more powerful I feel, like a well-rooted tree, unmoving and leafless, but very much alive under its winter nakedness.

Like many indigenous languages of the Turtle Island (North America), Kanyen’kéha is holophrastic, that is, a single Kanyen’kéha word can express a complex idea or a phrase that would require many words in English. A single verb can express a lifestyle of wholeness, healing and liberation: I.ACT.SLOWLY.

Sometimes I am try to imagine my day as if it consisted only of Kanyen’kéha verbs:

I slowly walk on fresh fallen snow

The sky slowly turns from white to pink to pale violet

Winter slowly turns into a false spring, then into blizzard

I feel awake