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 wall torn down.

III. I drag myself home from the beginning of last semester of English, mind bent and fizzing with my Ex-Mennonite prof's neuroscientific/literary theories about hacking fiction through the physiological structure; our biology. Good news! My non-fiction counts because all narrative is fiction anyway. Each night I find myself writing eight meditations. Eight, double four. The false Medicine Wheel's sacred directions I was taught as a child. I didn't plan symmetry but here it is. Real as ceremony. Appropriation of sacred geometry. Spirit as Instagram aesthetic. White shamans selling sweat lodges. Eight meditations as eight cardinal sins—the eighth being the sin of staying silent when the world burns. Every story is fiction—the trauma, the treaties, the truth. My professor escaped one kind of colonial religion only to preach another. As though the replication crisis can be hand-waved, as though the double-blind scientific peer-review is acceptable gospel when the storytelling of medicine is inherent disregard. I wonder if he sees the irony in teaching Indigenous students how to hack our own stories, as if we haven't been since first contact.

IV. Beta blockers weigh down my sensitive heart, trading tachycardia for perpetual exhaustion. My blood is molasses. While scootering to Calgary's fish-shaped Central Library in the +35°C summer, pain shot through left arm, Apple Watch at 150bpm. After calling 911, the paramedic (handsome, kind-eyed) says go to emergency if it feels different than before. But it always feels different—each episode fresh terror. Ripe and newborn. If we have the right to live, don't we have the right to die? My heart keeps voting to stay. Keeps pumping. Filling with blood. The wellness industry profits off my fear, turning panic into prescriptions and meditation apps and talk therapy. Medicate the revolution out of us one pill at a time. The handsome paramedic votes conservative, thinks healthcare should be privatized, doesn't know his gentle hands are part of system designed to keep some of us barely alive while others thrive. Every arrhythmia is a reminder: the body remembers what the mind tries to forget. Each palpitation a small rebellion against colonized time.

V. The world ends daily, now. POTUS demands Greenland, the Panama canal, Canada—Home and Native Land. A child grabbing toys. I'm rehashing Bo Burnham's That Funny Feeling like any other dreadful millennial while writing my own apocalyptic shopping list. Am I to defend the stolen soil below my feet for an already-stolen country never loving me back? Irony tastes like pennies on my tongue. The same nation starving my ancestors will plead for me and my brother to die on 49th parallel north. Settler-colonialism wearing a maple leaf mask. Pledge allegiance to the flag wrapped around residential school survivors. My friends celebrate CEO murderer as vigilante. Yet, they’re too cowardly to build homemade pipe bombs or go to war for a false lover. Hurry up, please, it’s time. Yet, dawn still stubbornly breaks over Treaty lands.

VI. Missed grad school deadlines by seven stupid days. Applications were nearly finished. Eight books written, not one single poem queried to CanLit magazines. The halfbreed ndn queer boy who could be on CBC Reads, on #booktok, on some literary influencer's instagram thirstrap story. Instead I hoard my failures like magpies collecting tinfoil, building nests of almost-made-its. The award show strips away the word Scotiabank from their title but still want owned Indigenous trauma porn, want Queer suffering packaged neat and sellable. Token diversity which doesn't threaten their cottage-country book clubs. My unsubmitted manuscripts are war crimes against their sensibilities. I tell myself refusing to play is the only way to win. Self-sabotage disguised as rebellion.

VII. Still hurting for the girl with the mythological name. Tell myself I want friendship, tell myself I'm still good at practicing non-attachment, still vegan, still Mahayana properly. The magpies in the back lane know better. Picking through my garbage, finding the truth in black plastic bags beneath my carefully constructed stories. I am hungry, I am human, I am here. The magpies know all our sacred texts are just letters to what we've lost. I am my discarded principles. Coping mechanisms for the sober. Love poems disguised as theory. The birds know my secrets, watch me try to smudge away desire. The magpies build nests with pages from my journals, insulating with words I can’t write. There's always next season's migration pattern.

VIII. Once upon a high school dropout, I carried The Life of Pi as talisman to emergency counseling. The psychatrist pointed to the novel telling me my life was similar—what a stupid fucking thing to say to someone planning ending things now, or artistic-suicide-at-27. Makes me promise to stay alive, scribbling on her notepad while I clutch my backpack full of half-finished songs and charcoal sketches. I wanted to be Cobain-beautiful, wanted to write ballads bleeding bright and true before the final curtain. But here I am at 28, almost 29, stubbornly alive and wondering what that counselor saw in Pi's tiger reminding her of me. The 27 Club doesn't take applications from Indigenous kids in Calgary. Pretty white boys with track marks and trust funds only. No halfbreed poets with panic attacks. Survival is a crime I got away with. Statute of limitations on staying alive when you promised you wouldn't. Maybe she knew I'd end up surviving against all odds, floating on makeshift raft of words. Indefinitely. The tiger was never real anyway—just like my planned martyrdom, my romanticized self-destruction.

Originally posted here.