It’s 2021 and the pandemic is bad. So bad that when a recipe calls for garlic, I skip ahead because garlic’s not an essential ingredient.
Félix will spend an hour making pesto. More, if he puts on a Beach House album. He uses a garlic mincing device that makes our kitchen smell spicy and warm.
Félix loves to decorate his morning egg. He sighs when he bites into it. I like cereal for its sweetness, simplicity and speed. I’m semi-unemployed and under Montréal’s 8pm covid curfew. And I’m in a rush.
Félix – a classmate turned close friend, creative partner and roommate – is not in a rush. He’s the type of person to spend days researching hammocks. To get one for free via an elaborate loophole where you get things shipped to you and promise to rate them on eBay or Amazon or wherever. Then, he’ll take a whole Sunday to morph into a secret and perfect Félix cocoon.
I’m the type of person to walk to our balcony, sit in the hammock and mutter "frick" when I see the tomatoes I’ve forgotten to feed while Félix is away. (Félix writes “feed” instead of “water” on his instruction Post-Its. I like to imagine his plants stretching from sleep with their tiny empty stomachs.)
We live together for a year. Most mornings, my heart races too fast and harsh voices swirl. My appetite disappears and I often leave my plate to go cry.
Then, it’s summer and I read about Salt. I apply, get in, give Félix a month’s notice. Tensions are high. When I’m stressed, I want to leave. When he’s stressed, he wants to nest with a classmate turned close friend, creative partner and roommate. We don’t talk much, once I leave.
My only reference for the whole state of Maine is Félix. Félix, who grew up in Farmington and doesn’t proclaim it from the Mile-End rooftops.
I come to understand why Maine is too small for Félix. I also come to understand that the best parts of Maine live in Félix. In his complicated toolbox, in his lamps which are collages of other lamps, in his DIY potato shooting gun. In his eye for light, in his ear for detail.
In the cicada embroidery Félix made that time we took shrooms and I panicked because it was cloudy and a pandemic outside. And because that morning, Dr. Syd had called just wondering why the TikTok he paid me to make hadn’t gotten more views. And because I never got to meet my sister as a seventeen or eighteen year old. That because of the travel ban, I missed two whole years of her life.
In the cicada Félix stopped embroidering to lend me an AirPod and an umbrella. And to walk with me to Parc Jarry where it was possible to dance with the willows to the beat of the worms.
On my first day ever in Maine, Félix’s mum fixes me lunch. A tomato salad just like my mum makes. As I eat, I think how weird that my mum is also called Nathalie and how weird to be without covid curfew. And to be without Félix as I sit on his childhood couch. I look at Nathalie’s bird feeders in the window and chew on basil and mozzarella and olive oil and fresh bread until it's time for seconds.
When I move back to Montréal, I text Félix and he is kind and busy. Working and leisuring in adult ways. Brunch and new coworkers' birthdays.
Months later, Félix and I say hi and he’s wearing jewelry I don’t recognize and we’re talking a little and then a lot. My throat is heavy and we are suspended, kind of by accident. We stand separate from the party and though the party is made only of people I love, I only see Félix. Later, Isa tells me: “You two fused together. Like magnets or siblings.”
At Système, Félix and I dance in the way we have always done and some guy with a tuque comes between us. He is likely trying to flirt with Félix because I forgot to say Félix is the most beautiful person you will ever meet and I think, aw tuque guy, if only you knew how the best thing about Félix isn’t his jawline. It's how he steals lightness.
I know. Because when Félix and I are together, we steal lightness as much as we can. Like people who’ve never cried or maybe like people who've cried a lot. We share looks and throw things off balconies and indulge each other's elaborate pranks and parodies and grin when strangers do funny things like when toddlers scream. And what if adult people screamed like that in the middle of the street when they'd just had enough. And also, we dance like this.
After that dancing night, Félix and I struggle to find a time to hang. As I try to wriggle into his Google Cal, a part of me is ego-bruised and wants to wriggle less. Let Félix come to me.
Another part of me finds it all pretty reassuring. All that time I was in Maine — busy and wondering if I'd let down my Montréal found family — my friends kept going.
Me pursuing what I need doesn’t slow down those that I need. And differences in breakfasts and schedules and self-soothing techniques and fuck ups don’t take away the love.
These days, I take more time to chop non-essential ingredients. Chives. Sun dried tomatoes. Ginger. Dates. Spring onions. Yess, and garlic, tooo.
Words, pictures and tweet (below) shared with Félix’s blessing.
In the past weeks: I played my first song on the guitar and ate $40 fancy mushroom hummus to celebrate Haley’s birthday.
I read my new friend Gabi’s beautiful essay, In Defence of Garlic in a Jar, which explores the shame people with disabilities are made to feel in kitchens. (And which got me thinking about my relationship to garlic for this piece.)
At Fred’s workshop, we braided plastic strips to this episode of How To Survive The End of the World. On decolonizing survival skills. On disrupting the ways we think about the so-called wilderness as something to completely control.
Warmth to you, and please keep sending me the sounds and words on your mind!
— zozo