I’m thinking about water again. No one is surprised.

*

This time, I’m thinking less about the mercurial expanse of oceans and more about rivers. I’m thinking less about the sea and its narratives of exile and more about the river as a place where one encounters herself and her wayward thoughts.

*

But in both, there remains: the motifs of splitting, dividing, distance, liminality, reflection.

*

I’m writing from Seville, sitting on a blanket riverside of the Guadalquivir. There are a lot of wayward thoughts I want to put down, to peer at, to savour, while I am here – because I am feeling rested. Because I know no matter how depressing the world is right now, I will in the future also want to have a record of good and beautiful things.

*

A week ago, exactly in the middle of February, the oranges here were harvested. There were ladders propped up against handsome dark green trees, and there were small containers on the ground that overflowed with fruit. So many ripe and bitter oranges escaped from collection to instead roll across the streets. They were eventually squished under a tourist (like me) or a car. It smelled like citrus everywhere.

I keep hearing about Seville in March, at the brink of spring, when the trees blossom. At this time of year, the scent of orange blossom, azahar, perfumes the streets. I like this word both because it reminds me of a friend and because of its Arabic roots, with zahr meaning flower. This is apparently the most coveted time to visit Seville, but I’ll be gone by then.

I think the oranges, too, are beautiful. I also love to witness the tree at its different stages – gorged, plump, ripe, heavy, bare, and at the cusp of reopening.

*

The river is vast and calm, and as I stare into its murky depths, I think time starts to move a little differently. The quality of this water is such that peering into it feels like peering into the many rivers I know. It isn’t clear. I don’t see my own face in it. I’m not clarifying myself or my body here.

I like living in cities bisected by rivers. Something about the way they cut through the noise of an urban space is in itself lyrical.

Edmonton, my hometown, had the North Saskatchewan River, which I think I never visited enough. I canoed down this river as a child and later rafted down its current as a fledging scientist. I visited its banks and lounged in its river valley as a young woman falling in love.

Eugene, the place that marks my brief time living in the Pacific Northwest, had the Willamette River. Is this the same river friends and I chased one year, looking for the best spot to view the salmon spawning? I’m not sure. It’s another river I never visited enough and it was so long ago now. My memories are like silent and searching clouds.

In Calgary, yet another home, there was the Bow River – which I actually visited quite a lot. I’d learned all about my obsession for watery spaces by the time I lived there. This river signifies my love for the Bow Valley, for the Rocky Mountains, and for the life I gave up when I moved away to Scotland eight years ago.

And Edinburgh, unlike Edmonton, feels to me like a waterlogged place. The Water of Leith is the main river running through the city I live in now. The river and sea coalesce. The Water of Leith spills into the Firth of Forth.

*

I can no longer think about the Water of Leith without also thinking about Amanda Thomson’s evocative art piece, Mainly in Sinuousities. Water is a portal. It invites us to think about time differently. Its surfaces reflect migration and movement and cultural change. Its depths hold the spectrum of everything that existed, once, near its banks. It is a purveyor of history, of myth, of dreaming, of spirit, of story.

Thomson’s piece, an essay in 31 and a half parts, tracks the Union Canal and its landscape across 200 years. What do we see when we enter that place where land and water meet? Perhaps the question is actually, when do we see.

*

A river is an access point. A river is also, sometimes, a point of control and made inaccessible.

*

Across the Guadalquivir is Triana, a district known for its ceramics, for its tiles and pottery. We visit one day, and to get there, we cross one of the bridges slung over the river. It’s only nine in the morning, and the weather is cool, the sky is overcast and foggy. From my vantage point over the side, I see multiple rowers training on the water.

I shiver while looking over. The water looks so cold and the scene around it emanates with darkness, as if the water is absorbing what little light there is rather than reflecting it. Right then, the clouds are heavy and dense and look unlikely to break apart any time soon. It looks properly wintery outside – the sun hidden, the river an austere slice through verdant rows.

It’s warmer, of course, but it almost looks like Edinburgh. It’s dreich, as they (we?) say.

At the café, the doors are wide open and the brisk day slips in. It keeps me just at the edge of cold. It feels durable.

In my physical notebook, which is, if possible, even more wayward and chaotic than this digital one, I renarrativised yet again, the time I was in Germany with friends. Specifically the time J threw open the windows early in the morning, inviting in the strong breeze.

That was almost exactly a year ago.

*

Yes, I’m very obsessed with memory. I can trace and retrace the same memory over and over again, feeling every imaginary texture, glancing at every possible angle, looking for every possibility of enlightenment. I’m physically here, in beautiful Seville, but when I see the water or when I feel the light touch of wind, I’m transported elsewhere. To elsewheres.

*

The below excerpt by Toni Morrison is often quoted. It is in my manuscript of essays. It is in one of my favourite poems by Natalie Diaz. It is the title of the remarkable memoir by Nada Samih-Rotondo.

I think it belongs here too:

“They straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and liveable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. "Floods" is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”

*

Strangely, I keep thinking about Calgary, arriving there over a decade ago, and the shape of my life back then. Who I was before I fell into the deepened grooves of my life as it is now. Who I am now. A writer, I guess. Or more accurately, a woman who is very sad – always and not always reasonably. A woman who is also a flood.

*

I am rested and I want to remember good and beautiful things. This, so that when I look back a decade from now, when the grooves of my life are even deeper, when a different river – or maybe Seville’s river once again – allows me the gift time travel, I don’t regret all that I left out. All the memories I didn’t visit enough.

*

There is still grief. In the cold feeling of water, whether submerged or not, there is the reprieve of feeling numb.

*

The days contain some bliss. At night, I dream of my father.

Notes:

1. It is soon a friend’s birthday. For gifts, they have asked people help to ease the plight in the Congo through donations. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider donating. Here are three fundraisers they shared: https://gofund.me/03444f74; https://gofund.me/ebd28352; https://gofund.me/0e5f8f96.

2. The residency I did in Germany with friends resulted in a zine called this too is a glistening. It also resulted in this poem, which is my first poetry publication in 2025. I love that it’s published in Tupelo Quarterly, which has recently taken a firm and public stance against the appalling new guidelines for the National Endowment for the Arts. These guidelines are anti-EDI and violent toward marginalised groups/the Global Majority. If you have the means, I recommend also supporting and donating to TQ.

3. On 9^th March, I’m running a workshop inspired by Quiet by Victoria Adukwei Bulley called “Quiet Experiments” with the87press, which you can sign up for at this page.

4. At StAnza, I’ll be performing a collaboration I wrote with Hannah Copley, one of the best people I know. The collaboration will be printed as a plantable zine, available soon through Dialect Press.

5. So many poetry pamphlets by writers with connections to Scotland have just been announced, and I’m so excited for these authors: Glass Knot Sun by Patrick Romero McCafferty, What She Said by Ilisha Thiru Purcell, Rustlings by Gabrielle Tse, Nitpicking by Eilidh Akilade, Burntisland by Ian Farnes, and one whose title is not yet revealed by Eloise Birtwhistle – to name just a few. The scene is thriving and we love to see it.