I wake up. I’m lying on my stomach, in bedsheets that would feel like clouds if they weren’t grimy with remorse. I turn over. Victor is still snoring, one arm draped over his eyes against the early-morning sun. A rivulet of spittle begins its descent down his chin, and the sight of it traces a smile on my face. I stand up, a little shaky, still drunk from the night before. I’ve never really liked staying over. I don’t sleep well. I try to fit my night-mind to theirs, but they don’t match, and my dreams end up all disjointed. 

His cat patters down the hall. He knows somebody’s awake. He looks at me strangely, wondering who Victor turned into overnight. He paces around his food bowl. 

I was like a cannonball in the messy apartment, the floor littered with empty bottles. I pressed my mouth to every glass I was given. And against that other mouth that wanted me. 

There’s my mother, tumbling off the couch and waking with a start.

Another night of searching for myself in the bottom of a bottle. I never answer my best friend’s texts when this happens. I’m not used to people worrying about me. If anything I find it irritating, though it frustrates me to not be the kind of person who’s glad to mean something to somebody. 

There’s my father, heading back to the hill to cry.

I open the window onto the street and the sound of birds singing fills the room. We’ll hide your silence, darling. You just let us sing. There’s one perched on a branch. I can’t tell whether it’s judging me, and that’s okay. The twittering reminds me of the countryside I left. 

I thought I’d managed to leave the war behind, but the war was in me. Sometimes I hear the rumble of gunfire, and I recoil. I sit on the edge of the bed in my underwear. Long night. My small breasts shiver. 

Montreal is large as all the world’s disorder, 

somewhere in the shadows you are sitting and your heart

your gaze lights up the sleep of doves, 

Miron would tell me.

When I’m hungover, my mental filters vanish. My mind is racing. I don’t usually stay over, but Victor’s girlfriend—they’re in an open relationship—is away for the weekend, which never happens. Hochelaga’s eyes are still sealed shut by the grit of sleep. I stagger to the bedside table. I light a cigarette. Wherever I go I feel like I’m in a movie—standing fragile in a washed-out landscape, my lips chapped from kissing people who don’t love me back. My life is a watercolour left out on the balcony in the rain, and I can’t catch the memory of what lingers, of my father, of everyone who’s left me. 

Victor said something that’s seeping into me like a disease. Turn around, I like seeing you from behind when I’m coming. Somehow I forgot that he says it every single time. If it’s so hurtful, how can I forget that you just don’t say shit like that? Why do I put up with it? I do what I’m told, good puppet. Except this time, I decided to turn back at the last second. Defiance. He looked at me quizzically. 

Is it because I’m a trans woman, because people think of me as half-man and half-woman, that I’m only half-worthy of love? Half-suicidal, half-neurotic. No matter how I put those halves together, I don’t feel whole. I may be all of it, all the fractions—but I am utterly a woman. That is not open to discussion. 

I could just leave. But there’s something about Victor that makes me want to cook him sweet things. 

I drag myself over to the mirror. There’s a girl with tired blue eyes, almost grey. I don’t feel like talking about the colour of my eyes anymore. 

What colour are your eyes? he asked me. 

The colour of sadness. 

I don’t know why, but I can’t resist Victor when he finally turns his velvet gaze on me. Maybe because he’s so adamant that I’m beautiful. I forget that I can be other things, too. 

Gavel on wood.

It always goes to the highest bidder.

When we make love, I realize our friendship is crumbling. Did I turn the stove off, I worry, or am I going to get home to smouldering ashes? 

I turn on the tap and splash water on my face. It’s freezing. The shock reminds me of going swimming in the river with my brother, a lifetime ago. I’m beginning to ease my way into the day. If I focus I can hear the gulls’ splintering call. 

I come back to the cigarette I left burning on the windowsill. I put on a sweater that was snoozing on a chair. Victor. I like him better when he’s sitting on the stairs to my apartment telling me he doesn’t get why no one wants a long-term relationship with me. I like him better when he’s cooking, opening a bottle of cheap champagne, when he stares at me all evening like I’m a feast.

Victor turns over. He yawns. That’s my cue to get out of here before things get awkward. Does he ever think stuff like, What’s she doing in my life? I’d like to tell him that it makes me happy to know that we exist together at the same time, but you have to save that for the right person. We never say I love you. We do it the porn way. 

I smoke the rest of my cigarette quickly. Finish getting dressed. I think about what I almost said, that I’m the kind of girl who knits scarves out of soft words for mediocre people. I do it because I know everyone’s neck gets cold sometimes. 

Victor wakes up just as I’m walking out of the bedroom. Hey, beautiful. Those words are going to last me at least a week. 

We live in the same neighbourhood, so I don’t bother with a cab and just let myself roam along in the humid, stirring city. My eyes are half-open. I put on my headphones. Y’a des matins, Marjo croons; there are mornings like that. I walk along, sifting through spring’s new colours. A bus whirs past me. 

Y’a des matins, l’air est si tiède

Tu dors en marchant

Y’a des matins, oh l’âme en voyage 

I’m heading back to bed, it’s still early. My cat will tuck me in. He always seems to understand where I’ve been. A homeless woman is begging on the street, hands cupped, her back hunched from a night spent outside. I stop at the dep and buy some sour candies, to get the taste of Victor off my tongue. I’d rather wince from something other than disappointment.

Outside, the woman is still there, fidgeting. I can’t just walk past without asking her name. Nathalie. I give her a bag of nuts I got from the store. She smiles. 

Merci, madame, Nathalie says. 

My heart wells up full. I smile at having been recognized as a woman. 

I can feel life getting back to normal. My limbs are moving again. The nice thing about this time of year is that every spring carries the feeling of my father coming home from work. Spring makes me believe again that my fingers might graze a face that loves me. But Victor is a glacier, I can’t get inside his feelings. I won’t text him until our bodies ask for it. Two weeks. Two months. You never know. 

One more block and I’ll be home. Someone is watching me, as if I’m an object of interest. I brace myself like a porcupine. I still don’t know why people look at me. I haven’t been living a full-time woman’s life for very long. I’m still wary. 

I’m looking for love in a wasteland of futile encounters. So why does it still feel like every time and every person is leading in the right direction? 

I climb up the stairs to my place, to the heart of myself. Lying on my bed, I think of an eye, of a pupil catching the light and opening wide to take in a person whole. ⁂

Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay is a writer, poet and actress. Her first collection of poems, Les secrets de l’origami, was published in 2018. La voix de la nature, for young readers, was a finalist for the Prix du livre jeunesse des Bibliothèques de Montréal. Her first novel, the bestseller La fille d’elle-même, won the Prix des librairies du Québec, and Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch’s translation, Dandelion Daughter, was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. She lives in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke, and advocates for trans rights as a spokesperson for the LGBTQ+ organization Interligne.