Unrecoverables
On Monday, my friend Nula drove to my old apartment in Montréal to fill a box with things I’d left behind. They were sentimental things, but not quite sentimental enough to make the original cut. When I took off at the end of June, I’d loaded most of my life into two Canadian Tire bins and carted those alone back across the country. When the new tenant takes over my old apartment, whatever’s left will end up on the curb.
As I added to the list of items I wanted boxed for me, Nula texted condolences for the fact that so much of what I’d used to live – to achieve livelihood – would be tossed away. “It is what it is,” I texted back, but neither of us seemed convinced by the adage.
Nula had been living in Edmonton prior to the pandemic – when she went home to Ontario to hole up through the worst of it, she’d left her own apartment’s-worth of belongings behind. In a text, she reminded me that she could identify with what I was feeling. “The things we don’t recover,” I replied, and then sat down to write this.
I will be back in Montréal within a year, if only to fight a parking ticket I’d been given just weeks before leaving. Seeing it there on my windshield, I remembered that when I first moved in, my car had been broken into via a smashed window – glass littered the curb outside my new home, an irrefutable bad omen. Eight months later, on a misty, mid-April morning, I signed the lease for a different place. “A good omen!” the landlord said about the rain.
But that place, too, was not home for very long. And on Saturday, I carted boxes full of keepsakes from my childhood home to a townhouse my parents purchased on the other side of the city. I was not there, in my childhood home, when my parents handed their keys over to the next family. I don’t know if my mom cried, or if my dad held her, or if they did one final walk-through, nineteen years post-purchase, remembering what it felt like the last time they’d strolled through the place and it was empty.
In the townhouse, I don’t have a room, I have a basement. I share an office desk with my dad, who is retired but still keeps on the desk a blue placard that says, “It’s not easy pretending to work this hard.” (My dad is one of the hardest workers I know.)
Nula tells me I’m one of the hardest workers she knows. I buck at the assertion, remembering in high school when my dad accused me not of hating my job at the Sobeys deli, but of hating work in general. Well, it was easy to hate work when work was mindless meat-slicing, when work was chunks of headcheese force-fed to new employees as part of their “initiation.” Instagram reels speak of a “new” workplace movement dubbed “quiet quitting” – a millennial-led initiative to improve “work-life balance” by just, I don’t know, sticking to the written terms of a job? Years ago, when I was teaching on a temporary contract, an older colleague asked me how I expected to secure a permanent position if I wasn’t coaching or leading a club. Why did it take so long for us to realize those unpaid hours are unrecoverable?
Mortgages are for married people, capitalism tells me. I will put a divider up behind the desk I share with my dad, thereby creating a room. Nevermind Woolf’s assertion that in order for me to get anywhere with my writing, the room should be my own. This quasi-room is good enough for now. Most of the boxes brought over from the old house are full of nothing, are full of trinkets that elicit memories but have no practical purpose.
On Monday, Nula took some of my plants, but she couldn’t spare all of them. Most are five times the size they were when I bought them last September. Even if I’d known then that money would be the reason I couldn’t stay in Montréal, I’d still have bought the plants – I am, after all, a millennial. Now, I can’t parse or quell this need for everything – every thing – to have a home. Perhaps it’s just a symptom of my flightiness, my failure to touch down in any place longer than a year.
There is a new key on my keychain, plain and silver. It unlocks the door to a place my dog already defends with barks and growls as though all four walls are his and counting on him. I can only hope to one day feel the way he does.