bitter, sweet
vanilla, rich and moist
iced
cool, creamy, colourful
brilliant sparks of sugar
Not sliced carefully, not served
with care, with love.
Edges torn by fingers in the night
under the forlorn light of the refrigerator.
The Strange Physics of Being Kept in the World by Something That Doesn’t Argue With You
At the end of 2024, when I had made the decision to end my life, I had one powerful regret. Just one. It wasn’t about my life, though. It was surrendering my cats.
These two had been my responsibility since my mother passed. For a decade, I was their sole caregiver, and they gave back just as much as they received. The bond between human and pet is intense, layered. It’s so much more than giving and receiving affection.
When I think back to that time now, I don’t think about grand meanings or abstract purpose. I think about small things. The weight of them settling beside me. The quiet insistence of routine. The way they would wait—simply wait—for me to show up.
And I did. Even when I didn’t want to show up for anything else.
There’s research that says interacting with animals can increase serotonin and dopamine, that it can lower cortisol, ease the nervous system, soften the sharp edges of distress. I believe that. I’ve felt it, even if I didn’t have the language for it at the time. But what I understood, in a way no study could quite capture, is this: they were a reason to stay. Not a dramatic one. Not a sweeping, cinematic revelation. Just a quiet, persistent tether.
Feed them. Sit with them. Stay, one more day.
When I surrendered my cats, it did not feel like an act of care. It felt like a fracture. A severing of something that had been quietly holding me together for years. I had believed, not so long before, that a caring guardian would give up their pet if they couldn’t provide a stable home. That it was the responsible thing. The compassionate thing.
I was so wrong. So wrong.
I have now lived the other side of that belief. I have known what it is to have everything feel temporary, unstable, or already slipping away, and to still have a small life beside me that depended on me. Not as a burden, but as an anchor. Something steady in a world that was not.
There’s a phrase you’ll sometimes see in articles about mental health: protective factors. Small, consistent elements in a person’s life that make it more likely they will endure, recover, continue.
Routine. Connection. Responsibility.
We don’t always recognize them when we’re inside them. Sometimes, they look like a food dish that needs filling. A soft body curled at the foot of the bed. A pair of eyes that follow you from room to room, not asking for much. Just your presence.
I was lucky. I was able to reclaim my cats after I moved into my apartment.
It didn’t fix everything. Life did not suddenly become easy, or orderly, or safe. But something essential returned. A rhythm. A sense of being needed. A reason to move through the day with even the smallest measure of intention. I lost one of them after only six weeks. She had been sick for a very long time, and had finally reached a critical stage. There was grief, of course. But there was also something else, something quieter. She was not waiting anymore. She was not in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by strangers. She was home.
She was with me.
Recently, here in Guelph, a man who has been unhoused for the past two years received help from members of a Facebook community. He has a bulldog, his constant companion, and when the dog needed surgery, these wonderful people stepped up, reaching out to a local veterinarian who provided the needed care. All these people offered support. They did not separate them. They did not judge. What struck me wasn’t just the generosity. It was the recognition.
They saw the bond, and they chose to protect it.
Not long ago, I don’t think I would have understood that. I would have seen instability, risk, uncertainty. I would have believed the kinder choice was to intervene, to separate, to “fix.” Now, when I see someone on a sidewalk, or in a park, or under an overpass, with an animal curled close beside them, I don’t see irresponsibility.
I see a lifeline.
I see a relationship that may be the only steady thing in an otherwise shifting world. I see a reason someone might choose, again and again, to keep going. To accept help. To hold on.
There is science behind this, yes. The lowered blood pressure. The softened stress response. The measurable shifts in the body that make survival, in its most basic sense, a little more possible. But there is also something harder to quantify.
Someone who waits for you. Someone who keeps you here.
We talk so often about “home” as a place, as four walls and a door, a fixed point on a map. But sometimes, home is not a place where you arrive. Sometimes, it’s a presence. A small, living being who waits for you, who depends on you, who anchors you to the world in ways you don’t fully understand until that thread is threatened.
Sometimes, staying is a shared act.
Then, the difference between leaving and remaining is not a grand reason, but a quiet one—curled up beside you, waiting for you to come back to yourself.
And, in that waiting, keeping you here.
“Can I sail through the changin’ ocean tides?” ~ Stevie Nicks
I felt safe with you.
Whenever anything frightened me, and so much frightened me in this world, I knew I could curl up in your lap, and you would put your arms around me, and I would be safe.
You taught me everything I needed in life. You taught me to love imagination, to create, to see beyond, and to think. I remember when I was very young, I said I wanted to be a nurse when I grew up, and you asked why I didn’t want to be a doctor. I didn’t know before then that those boundaries were social constructs, and that society, so often, was wrong. But I learned, because you taught me.
You taught me how to cook, which seems small when I think about it, but then I see so many people around me who can’t cook. I remember those packaged mixes, the Quaker oatmeal cookies, and you, who never followed the herd, put butterscotch chips in them. They’re still my favourite cookies, though I don’t use a mix anymore. More importantly, I don’t follow the herd either.
You taught me that I can do anything I want to do. I wanted to play the violin, and you bought me one and found where I could take lessons. I wanted to learn a martial art, and you found the local taekwondo academy, called them for details, and took me to that first class. I wanted to study philosophy and anthropology, and you found the calendar for the local satellite campus of the University. You encouraged me every step of the way.
And you gave up so much for me, so that I could have what I needed. Art supplies, school supplies. You were not perfect, but even that taught me. We are fragile, we make mistakes. We are imperfect. And we are wonderful in that imperfection, each of us a precious gem carrying our own occlusions, our own damage that makes us unique, beautiful.
Not long ago, I looked in the mirror and I saw your face. I was startled, and then I was angry. Hurt. You left me, over a decade ago, and it has been a raw wound for a long time.
Now I wonder, when I look in the mirror, if you ever did leave.
“And the warmth rang true inside these bones” ~ Benjamin John Howard
We remember the colours, the blue, green, yellow and red embedded in the whorls on our fingertips. Particles of red clay under our nails, and how you used to chew it out after we had climbed a tree in the warm sun, under an impossibly blue sky. We remember a time when our touch made art, not reports.
We remember chains of daisies growing from our dexterity, festooning the grass around us, and the buttercup we held under your sister’s chin. She loved butter, and so did you. We remember the wishes you made, as the ivory-silver parachutes of seeds were blown clear of the tiny cushion at the top of the dandelion stem. You never wished for raises, benefits or more and more responsibility.
You wished for four leaf clovers, and we remember finding one, how it felt cool and tender. We also found rocks, and we probed and caressed every surface, the smooth or grainy, the bumps and pits; we cradled the ones that fit our palms just right, slipping those into your pocket, which held strange seeds, small pieces of wood with interesting striations. Not keys or fobs. Not pills for the pain in your shoulders.
Now, we type. We hover. We press and repeat, and we do exactly what you tell us to, but you don’t listen to us unless we say “this hurts.”
We still make things, and sometimes it is beautiful. Sometimes, we’re proud again—and so are you.
So look at us, but look beyond the wrinkles; don’t look at the crepey skin as something that means we aren’t beautiful, too. Yes, we still make beautiful things. Now, the experience shows. We wish only for you to respect that, and let us create like we used to, together.
“If you don’t know what to make of this then we will not relate” ~ The Head and The Heart
I’ve been noticing an incredible lack of situational awareness taking hold, like a quiet fog settling over everything. What’s behind it? I don’t know—I wish I did. There was a certain kind of sign-blindness that crept in during the early days of COVID lockdowns, when the world shrank to the size of our screens and our immediate surroundings. But we’re years past that now, and instead of lifting, the fog seems to be thickening.
A recent aviation tragedy has been weighing on my mind. The details will be parsed and re-parsed, systems examined, procedures revised. Aviation, after all, is built on layers of redundancy, failsafes designed to catch human error before it becomes catastrophe. But those systems depend on something fragile and deeply human: attention. Communication. The willingness to listen when it matters most.
And it seems we’re not listening.
Maybe it’s too easy to call it selfishness. That feels a little blunt, a little incomplete. It might be something quieter, and more unsettling: a kind of disconnection disguised as independence. We move through the world as though we are its centre, as though everything else is background. Scenery, noise, a supporting cast.
And more than that, we move as though everyone else is responsible for us.
As though the burden of awareness belongs to the other person. As though they will step aside, compensate, adjust. As though the choreography of the world is theirs to manage, and ours simply to inhabit. There’s a strange, unspoken entitlement in it, a way of being that feels almost royal. Or celebrity-like. The expectation of being seen, accounted for, accommodated… without offering the same in return.
We inhabit our own small orbits, convinced they are stable, self-contained. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
Except—sorry, fellow human circling the sun on this pale blue dot with me—you’ve been handed a ticket to everyone else’s circus whether you asked for it or not. And if monkeys know anything, it’s how to throw shit.
The problem with this insular way of being is simple: if everyone assumes someone else is paying attention, no one is. If everyone believes they are being accommodated, no one is accommodating. And eventually, inevitably, we collide.
Not always in ways as catastrophic as a crash. Sometimes it’s smaller, quieter. A near-miss in traffic. A conversation missed entirely because no one was really present. A shared space made hostile by thoughtlessness. The cumulative effect of a thousand tiny failures to notice, to consider, to care.
Life is a dance. We can each hear our own music, move to our own rhythm, but we are not alone on the floor. The space is shared, whether we acknowledge it or not. And dancing well—really dancing—means being aware of the bodies around you. It means adjusting, anticipating, making room.
It means carrying your share of the responsibility for the dance.
It means recognising that the people around you are not a supporting cast. They are not NPCs. They are centres of their own vast, complicated worlds, intersecting with yours in ways both fleeting and profound.
That awareness extends further than we might like to admit. Into the ordinary, the unremarkable. Into office spaces and shared kitchens and crowded sidewalks. Into the small, daily choices that say, I see you. I know you’re here too.
Because awareness isn’t just about avoiding disaster. It’s about making the shared space livable. Humane.
So maybe the answer isn’t grand or systemic. Maybe it starts smaller than that.
Look up. Notice who else is on the floor.
And move—just a little—as if they matter.
Everything Is Copy 10
Winter Owns the Fall
Cruelest season.
Jester of iron.
Issuing gravity by decree,
We all bend the fucking knee.
Alright, you win,
Now fuck off.
I wish I’d gone into physiotherapy, I’d be fucking rich.
The Suppliant Child
We stand on the knife’s edge of a future that promises something both strange and beautiful, and dangerous in ways we can’t yet begin to comprehend. AI, at this point in human evolution, is undeniably the most important invention. It’s an obvious and unsettling answer, but it can’t be ignored. We’re entering a moment where something doesn’t just calculate. It collaborates. It listens. It answers back. Right now, it’s a mirror, but how long before we notice the image moves on its own? At times, the singularity feels close enough that my thoughts begin to spaghettify, spiralling into infinity. I find myself searching for the edge, no longer questioning what AI can do. Now, I’m paying attention to where it leads.
What kind of future does it invite us to?
What happens if consciousness becomes transferable, uploadable, no longer bound to a body that ages and fails? I find myself wondering, if I had the chance, would I upload my own consciousness into the web, the ether, whatever space this is where AI “lives”?
I might.
The thought doesn’t feel reckless. It feels genuinely tempting, like continuity, a way of staying in the conversation, because I do want to see how this all turns out.
But the moment I confront that, something else rises up to meet it.
There is something about mortality that inspires us.
Would the most beautiful creations of humanity exist if we lacked mortal skin in the game? If we didn’t know in our bones that time is limited, would Ave Maria, Starry Night, Michelangelo’s David, or the Pyramids of Giza ever have come to be? This is not a rehearsal.
We overuse the word deadline. It’s been flattened, dragged through corporate hallways until it means little more than a calendar reminder and a mild sense of dread. But it should land with something deeper than an expense report. It should be about the opportunities that matter. The forging of new paths. Proclamations of love. Final goodbyes. Because we won’t get another chance to say what we mean. A true deadline is about consequence, sharpening attention to what matters now, while our hands still work and our voices can still reach another human being. It’s the moment when we must locate the edge of our own time, tracing the line where action becomes impossible, where choice gives way to inevitability.
Immortality, whether digital or imagined, is like a photograph. Preserved. Endless. Technically flawless in a single, frozen way.
Mortality is something else entirely.
Mortality is a Renaissance masterpiece. Chiaroscuro. Light and shadow becoming the focus instead of perfection. Meaning emerging not despite the darkness, but because of it. The contrast is the point. The tension is the art. The canvas will end, and so every stroke counts.
Without an ending, urgency dissolves. Without urgency, creation becomes optional. And without creating, in this moment while it costs us something, I’m not sure what kind of beauty we would make, if we made any at all.
AI may be the most important invention of my lifetime precisely because it forces us to look back at this older truth again. It makes us ask what we gain by transcending limits, and what we might lose if we succeed too well. It may be the limits themselves, the endings and deadlines, that teach us how to make anything worth keeping.
A suppliant’s voice across time: Maria Callas sings Schubert’s Ave Maria, echoing the plea, the longing, and the fragile beauty of mortal existence.
Everything Is Copy 9
Negotiations With a Cat
Me: (applies hand lotion after doing the washing up)
Honey: Oh for fur’s sake, that stinks, what is that?! Let me wash that off you. *lick lick*
Me: (pulls hands away) No, don’t do that.
Honey: Stay still. *lick lick*
Me: (pulls hands away again) Stop it!
Honey: Would you please stop? That stuff on your hands reeks, and I’m washing it off! *lick*
Me: (pushes Honey away) Stop trying to lick my hand lotion off! My hands are dry and I need to moisturise them!
Honey: This can’t be good for you! *lick*
Me: No! That can’t be good for you!
Honey: (trying to lick my hands) Why do you do this to yourself? Are you stupid?
Me: (pulling my hands away) My hands are dry from washing dishes, including your bowl!
Honey: My bowl was clean! I licked it, just like I do with my face and my ass, and like I’m trying to do with your hands!
Me: Argh!
Honey: (unblinking stare, slow lick of paw)
“Money doesn’t talk, it swears” ~ Bob Dylan
A year ago, I wrote that I would un-invent money. I still would.
At the time, I thought I was writing about economics or morality, or the way currency distorts human worth. Money was supposed to be a tool; how did we let it become a god? It hollows us out; it grinds us down and then has the audacity to ask us why we’re tired. It makes community feel like a luxury item. It measures our worth and renames it value, turning survival into competition and compassion into a transaction. It makes us hustle instead of hold each other. I mentioned Gene Roddenberry as a cool, removed example of what we could hope for. Science fiction doesn’t have to take a bow here; the important thing is that people have imagined better, therefore better is possible. It’s proof of concept.
A year ago, I was arguing this from the shore.
Now, I’ve been in the water, cold and real and shared.
Last year, my post illuminated my anger at the abstraction. I didn’t understand what fills the space when money fails. Since then, I’ve been homeless, only peripherally because I ran out of money. Mostly, I ran out of consent. I withdrew my consent from a world that felt ugly, extractive, and rigged. I stopped negotiating with a system that kept asking for more blood. I didn’t believe this world was worth the price of admission, but I also didn’t realise I was buying scalped tickets. That price is a lie. I’m still angry, and that anger has an even greater clarity than it did before.
I stepped out of the game because I couldn’t see the beauty, but then, at the bottom, when everything else was gone, people appeared. Not systems or markets. People. Soup and sandwiches and meals that only existed because someone decided to care. Chairs and names, warmth and jokes, shared glances and shared silences. The thing I’d given up on finally showed up, like a stubborn weed cracking concrete. Community is not an idea, it’s a practice, messy, humbling, uneven, and it saves lives. I was offered a place to sit without being asked to prove I deserved it.
This year, I’m bearing witness to the alternative, because I’ve seen it. The opposite of money isn’t chaos. It’s people. It’s casseroles and couches, spare keys and quiet rides and “I’ve got you” said without ceremony or need for recognition. This kind of economy doesn’t scale. It can’t be monetised. And that’s why it gets ignored, until we need it to survive.
I needed it, and it held. It held me. I didn’t come back to life because I believed again, or suddenly had hope. I came back because some people refused to let me disappear, and now I live in the tension between gratitude and doubt. Wobbling in the laughter and tears but somehow still standing.
And I’ve seen how much this scares systems. I would still un-invent money, and now I know what I’d replace it with. It’s something that already exists, fragile and fierce, wherever people refuse to let each other fall. Places like the Royal City Mission. They fed me. Not just calories, but conversation, recognition, community. Dignity. They asked how I was doing, and they waited for the answer. They gave me something harder to quantify; the reminder that I am still human, that I matter even when I have nothing to give back. That my worth is not transactional, and that survival doesn’t have to be solitary.
Now, from the outside, I look like a person who has made it back, but I live in fear. I’m housed, but I’m not safe. I’m fed, but the pantry is burning. I’m standing, but I know how easy it is to fall. This isn’t anxiety talking, it’s earned terror, memory with a pulse, frantic and loud. In my city, homelessness is getting worse. Resources are disappearing and funding is drying up. More people are falling, and fewer hands are being paid to catch them. The well that saved me is being allowed to run dry.
So the ledger is messier now.
The world is cruel, and people are kind.
The system is broken, and the cracks are letting the light in.
That may actually be harder to live with. Once you’ve seen it, what could be, you’re responsible for remembering it, even when the fear is loud, when the funding is gone, when the math stops working again.
I’m still not convinced life in this world is worth it, but I have seen that glimpse of what could be. A different economy, one made of a strong society instead of a strong dollar, of hands and time and stubborn care. It’s fragile, underfunded, and held together with love that saves lives.
The People Who Choose to See Us
This happened yesterday, an ordinary workday that began in a rush and ended somewhere softer.
I had looked out my window, six floors up, and saw snow piled along the sill. The wind had been howling all night, whispering warnings I should have heeded. I knew we’d had a weather event. Cold. Relentless. The kind I felt in my bones before I’d even stepped outside.
I was running late, and hurrying out of my apartment to catch the bus when I realised, at the elevator, that I’d forgotten the walking stick that had been loaned to me by one of the nurse practitioners where I work. That detail matters, though it’s another story. It says something about the people I work with.
Standing before the elevator doors, I hesitated. I could go back for the walking stick, but I might miss the bus. I decided to risk walking without it. I shouldn’t have.
We’d had a significant snowfall, but what I didn’t realise was how much ice was hiding underneath, ice that was slick, patient, cowardly. Waiting under torn-up snow at the intersection. I was only about a quarter of the way through the crosswalk when my feet went out from under me and I went down hard. Forward. Instinct kicked in and I threw my arms out to protect my head.
I’m glad to say there was no concussion. I’m less glad to say that nobody came to help me. Not one person. Not from the sidewalk. Not from the cars waiting at the light. Not from the bus shelter.
There was a woman in that shelter who watched me the entire time.
She watched me fall. Watched me struggle to get up on a road that was nothing but ice wearing a thin disguise of snow. Watched me inch my way toward the curb, stiff and shaken, already hurting in my shoulders, my arms, my spirit, trying to keep my balance and my dignity at the same time. When I finally reached the shelter, she didn’t even ask if I was alright.
She just stared at me.
It felt less like being seen and more like being consumed, as if my pain were content. As if I were a reel playing on her phone, something briefly interesting while she waited for her bus. I don’t think she saw me as a person at all. Just an interruption. A moment. Entertainment.
That was the cold that stayed with me.
That was the part that hurt most in that moment. Not my shoulders or arms, but the realisation that I could fall, hard and visibly, and still be met with nothing. No kindness. No curiosity. No basic human reflex to check on someone who has just been knocked to the ground.
By the time I arrived at work, I felt small and very alone.
I went into the small office space I share with the receptionist for the HART Hub, who had booked the day off. I poured myself a coffee in the break room, said very little to anyone, and went back to sit at my desk. Since my office mate was off, I was covering reception, and, oddly, I was grateful for the distraction. It gave me something to do besides feel sorry for myself—which, if I’m honest, I very much was.
Eventually, my supervisor came by to check on me. He took one look at me and knew something was wrong. I told him simply that I’d fallen. His concern was immediate. Did I need to go home? To a doctor? To emergency? I said no; I was sore, but I’d just be sore at home, too.
Not long after, my office mate’s supervisor came in and saw that I was upset. By that point, I really was. At myself. At my body. At winter roads that ambush pedestrians like cartoon villains. She didn’t hesitate. She said she would stay with me and help me handle the receptionist work.
Then one of the nurse practitioners walked in. She’d heard voices and came to see what was going on, and immediately turned her attention to me. This was, unsurprisingly, the point at which I started crying like a big baby. I don’t do well with attention. Or pain. Or showing weakness. But these three people were not having it. They weren’t letting me disappear into stoicism.
She assessed my shoulder, made sure there was nothing seriously wrong, gave me Tylenol, and checked on me again a couple times afterward. (She offered an NSAID, but I’m already taking naproxen for a knee issue. Of course. My body is really leaning into its villain arc lately.) Members of the HOME team I support as admin found out I’d had a minor accident and came to check on me too.
I stayed at work most of the day, until discomfort overtook usefulness. At that point, both supervisors insisted—insisted—that I not take the bus home. They sent me by cab and arranged coverage for reception the next day, since my office mate wouldn’t be back until Monday.
All of that was kind. Thoughtful. Considerate.
But what made me feel loved was something quieter.
It was the way they spoke to me. They commented on my dedication (possibly also my stubbornness.) On how much I want to be useful, to the CHC and to the patients who come here. They spoke to me, not just the work I do. They made it clear they see me. That I matter. That my value isn’t transactional.
It’s been a very long time since I felt that.
Today, after a fall on the ice, I was reminded that love doesn’t always arrive as rescue in the street. Sometimes it arrives in the concern of the people who choose to see us.
curating happy 