Simon Black was watching the news on television with his one-month-old daughter on his lap. A report came on—a bombing of a school bus in Yemen by coalition forces led by Saudi Arabia, which killed dozens of children and injured dozens more.

Black had one of those moments that sometimes happen to new parents, a sort of breath-snatching awareness of the harm that the world holds. “Just by luck, it’s not my daughter who’s been born into a conflict zone, a war zone,” he said. This was swiftly followed by a conviction that he had to do something.

As a long-time trade unionist and a labour studies scholar at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, it was only natural for Black to start thinking about how to do this in a way that puts workers at the centre. It is a piece of labour movement wisdom, after all, that workers make the world and so it is they who ultimately have the power to change it.

But what could he and other workers do?

The bombing that so grabbed Black’s attention in August 2018 was just one moment in a long and devastating conflict in Yemen that continues to this day. Shireen Al-Adeimi is a Yemeni-Canadian academic who currently lives and works in the United States; she has been a vocal opponent of Canadian and U.S. support for the war. She describes the impacts of the Saudi-led military intervention into Yemen as “highly devastating” and the death tolls as “horrifying.” When she names it as the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” she is echoing language that the United Nations and international aid agencies have been using for several years. According to UN reports, the war had caused more than 230,000 deaths as of 2019, and relief organizations have said that 80 percent of the Yemeni population, or around 24 million people, require humanitarian assistance.

Though the lead role played by Saudi Arabia on the ground in this intervention is often emphasized, a number of Western countries are actively complicit, including the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. “We’re part of the problem in that sense,” Al-Adeimi says. “We’re not innocent bystanders. All of these countries have blood on their hands.”

In Canada’s case, complicity with the Saudi regime happens most prominently through supplying Saudi Arabia with military equipment. In 2014, the Canadian government, under then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper, signed a deal to sell them approximately $15 billion of light armoured vehicles (LAVs). After the deal was approved the next year, by the newly elected Liberals under Justin Trudeau, Canada became the second biggest arms exporter to the Middle East. The LAVs were to be manufactured by General Dynamics Land Systems-Canada (GDLS) in London, Ontario.

According to Anthony Fenton, a PhD candidate at York University in Toronto whose work focuses on the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Canada, it is really only the size of the deal that is new. Major Canadian business interests have had lucrative relationships with Saudi Arabia for a long time, and the kingdom has purchased military equipment made in Canada, including LAVs, since at least the 1990s.

Despite this long relationship, the period since this deal was signed has been a relatively rocky one between the two countries—including human rights criticisms and a recently ended hold on new export permits by Canada, and delayed payments and an expelled Canadian ambassador by the Saudis. But the commitment of both sides to the massive LAV deal
has remained unshaken.

As soon as this deal became public knowledge, human rights organizations in Canada started to campaign against it. In 2016, an open letter from Amnesty International, Project Ploughshares, and many other organizations expressed “profound concerns” about the deal and argued that “to provide such a large supply of lethal weapons to a regime with such an appalling record of human rights abuses is immoral and unethical.”

As far as Black is concerned, “it doesn’t matter” whether these new LAVs have themselves appeared yet in Yemen—given what Saudi Arabia is doing in that conflict, and given its overall human rights record, he sees arming the country to be a problem. As a trade unionist, he is particularly concerned that Saudi Arabia has been named as one of the 10 worst countries in the world for workers’ rights by the International Trade Union Confederation. He describes the deal as “morally repugnant” and says there is a “moral imperative” to cancel it.

Early on, Black was inspired by reports that dock workers in a few European ports had declared arms destined for Saudi Arabia to be “hot cargo” and had refused to load them onto ships. At the time, the LAVs manufactured in London were being shipped through Saint John, New Brunswick, and in December 2018 members of the International Longshoremen’s Association Local 273 respected a picket by peace activists at the port, delaying delivery of a shipment of LAVs by one day.

Black reached out to other trade unionists and to peace activists that he knew and in mid-2019, they released an open letter aimed at the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and its president, Hassan Yussuff, calling on them
“to demand Prime Minister Trudeau immediately cancel the Government of Canada’s arms deal with Saudi Arabia” and “to declare military goods destined for Saudi Arabia as ‘hot cargo’ and use its considerable resources to coordinate labour movement opposition to this arms deal.” Eventual signatories included a number of labour councils, a couple of public sector unions, and some NDP MPs and MPPs. Out of that letter, this collection of unionists and activists founded a group called Labour Against the Arms Trade.

As of May 2020, the CLC had not acted on these demands. Both the CLC and Unifor, the union that represents the workers at the GDLS plant in London, declined to comment on the demands of Labour Against the Arms Trade for this article, though just as it went to press Labour Against the Arms Trade announced that the CLC had endorsed a day of action organized by multiple groups to oppose the deal.

Jim Reid is the president of Unifor Local 27, which represents the GDLS workers. His comments in a 2018 report from the Canadian Press may help explain why the CLC and Unifor have been relatively quiet on the issue, despite their long histories of concern for human rights. Reid expressed support for Canadian government criticisms of the Saudi human rights record. However, he also hoped the deal would not be threatened by those criticisms, and identified it as the basis for 500 jobs at GDLS and more than 7,000 spin-off jobs in the community. Given other factory closures in recent years, like the shut-down of Caterpillar’s Electo-Motive Canada plant in 2012, he said it is “now the largest employer in the London region…. It’s basically the last big show we’ve got.”

Black agrees that “there’s no way that you can ask workers to support a cause like this … if you cannot first guarantee that workers are going to not lose their livelihoods.” So, from the very start, the goal of Labour Against the Arms Trade has been not just an end to the deal but “conversion”—that is, intervention by the government to shift the GDLS plant, and eventually other factories in Canada, away from making arms and towards making other things.

“Those same skills … could be put to use and applied to the production of socially useful products like renewable energy sources,” Black said.

It is, moreover, a demand with a long history. Black says he takes great inspiration from U.K. workers and trade unionists at a company called Lucas Aerospace who, in the 1970s, used their intimate knowledge of their own skills and the production processes to develop a detailed plan to reorient production to avoid job losses and move from making arms to making products that they felt would benefit society. The plan was ultimately rejected, in part because of the election of a Conservative government, but its vision of worker-driven conversion has remained an inspiration for activists.

It was not an unfamiliar demand in Canada, either, though it has more often come from peace activists than workers themselves. Conversion was the focus of one of the most visible peace campaigns in the country in the 1980s, in which the Cruise Missile Conversion Project and other groups demanded that a Litton Industries plant in Toronto shift away from manufacturing components for the cruise missile.

Richard Sanders got involved in the peace movement in 1983, and published the grassroots magazine Press for Conversion, which still occasionally publishes today. It now has a broader peace focus, but in the 1990s it was focused exclusively on questions of conversion. The impetus, Sanders says, was the hope that after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Western countries would divert money from military budgets to other purposes. He says, “you’re not going to need all these weapons industries anymore, so start converting them.”

Those hopes were dashed, and Sanders says that in the last 20 years or so, conversion has not seemed like a winnable demand. It also doesn’t help that in the 1970s, labour movements were at the peak of their power and at least some mainstream political parties were open to talk of public ownership, while those kinds of interventions into the economy have largely fallen out of favour in mainstream circles in the decades since.

And yet, demands that bear a striking resemblance to conversion have been gaining momentum in recent years, just from a different source and using different language. These days, it has most often been groups responding to the climate crisis that have been leading the charge. They have looked at the stark science around the impacts of climate change and at the role of how we produce things in creating that crisis, and have called for a “just transition” in which governments act to shift production away from fossil fuels and towards greener alternatives in a way that prioritizes the wellbeing of the most impacted communities and workers.

Perhaps the most concrete expression of the push for a just transition in a Canadian context has come from Oshawa, Ontario. In the wake of the devastating announcement that General Motors would be closing its automobile assembly
plant in the city at the end of 2019, a group called Green Jobs Oshawa emerged. It is a joint labour and community campaign that is demanding that the plant be nationalized and retooled for environmentally sustainable and socially conscious production.

Tiffany Balducci, president of the Durham Region Labour Council and member of Green Jobs Oshawa, admits that
“it hasn’t gained traction with people who can actually make this happen.” And Rebecca Keetch, who is also a member of the group and who worked at the plant, attributes this to a general “lack of urgency” about the climate crisis as well as “resistance to the idea of public ownership.”

And yet tireless organizing on the ground and a favourable feasibility study have resulted in a solid base of support in their local community, as well as a positive reception in at least some spaces within the broader labour movement, and considerable interest in the campaign beyond Oshawa. While it has not yet been enough, there seems to have been more support than these kinds of demands have received in Canada for a long time.

As with so much else, the COVID-19 pandemic has upended the plans that Labour Against the Arms Trade had for taking action in 2020, and they are hard at work figuring out how they can move forward under the new circumstances.

One glimmer of hope is that the urgent needs created by the pandemic have opened space for governments to act in ways that seemed impossible just a couple of months ago. Black sees a “little window of opportunity” to press demands “that would involve government investment in arms conversion.” Both Labour Against the Arms Trade and Green Jobs Oshawa have been arguing that the respective plants could be used to manufacture goods that would be “socially useful” in the current context, whether that is personal protective equipment, ventilator components, or other things. And in late April 2020, GM announced the Oshawa plant would be employing about 50 workers to manufacture a million masks per month for the Canadian government.

However they decide to proceed, Black thinks that winning a better world for workers, for people in Yemen, and for his daughter requires being bold. We are in “the context of a labour movement that’s been on the back foot, in which a neoliberal capitalism has really weakened the capacity … of the labour movement to organize and mobilize around big projects, around big ideas about transformative solutions,” he says. “But really, those are the only solutions that are going to save our movement, are going to save working people right now. So we need to think big.”

In Margaret Atwood’s novel The Year of the Flood, an outcast religious group called God’s Gardeners prepares for a pandemic by following a belief system based on pared-down consumerism coupled with kindness toward both human and non-human life. “They view us as twisted fanatics who combine food extremism with bad fashion sense and a puritanical attitude toward shopping,” their leader tells a newcomer.

A utopian response to impending doom is not so strange; choices forced upon us by extreme situations might be bolder than what we’d consider in calmer times.

Of course, these are not calmer times. The start of our own pandemic, COVID-19, forced us to curtail consumerism, travel, work, and socializing in ways we’d never imagined. Some of us had more free time than usual to spend with family and on passion projects, even as we mourned the loss of time spent with friends, neighbours, and people we’ve yet to meet. Closed factories and work-from-home imperatives led to cleaner skies and braver wildlife, even as essential workers sacrificed their own health to keep us fed and comfortable.

The pandemic lockdown has taught us about the parts of our society we’d give up willingly and the parts that are more difficult to have taken away. The confused urgency of it has been more catastrophic than Eden. It’s certainly not what the advocates of degrowth have in mind, though many degrowthers have seen our current crisis as an ideal time to start the conversation about what exactly we can live without.

The degrowth movement, which has been picking up steam over the past decade, is based on the belief that the earth cannot support infinite growth, no matter how clever humans show themselves to be. Though it’s been around since the 1970s as a concept, and since the 2000s as a movement, it’s still a bit ragtag and abstract. Its most compelling trait might be its knack for seeing, beyond our efforts to prevent environmental collapse, a way to reinvent civilization as healthier, more inclusive, and more pleasant. Examine the stick in the right way and you can see a carrot.

An English translation of the French word décroissance, “degrowth” isn’t an ideal brand for a progressive social movement; it seems to emphasize loss. That’s why some proponents will talk about “post-growth,” “frugal abundance,” and “voluntary simplicity.” Sometimes, it’s called “convivial degrowth” to add a sense of joy and affirmation. Indeed, proponents of the movement—a wide range of academics, environmentalists, feminists, and social justice advocates—describe how degrowth could bring us more leisure time, less stress, greater equality, a closer connection with nature, and stronger bonds with family and community. For some, degrowth is a personal decision about consuming less and more thoughtfully.

Yet degrowth has a sharp edge. Most degrowthers reject mainstream notions of sustainable development, where increased efficiency, better regulations and a transition to green energy can mitigate human impact on the environment. It can be decidedly anti-capitalist, sometimes sounding a little communist, or a little anarchist, depending on who’s doing
the talking.

“It’s about dethroning the idea of growth as the main societal objective, which has been missing in the debates around sustainability,” says Bengi Akbulut, an assistant professor in geography, planning and environment at Concordia University. Originally from Istanbul, Akbulut spent summers studying at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (while she was completing a PhD at University of Massachusetts Amherst), which is considered to be the epicentre of the degrowth movement. “Degrowth is often set against sustainable development, because degrowthers would say that no development can be sustainable.”

While mainstream climate-change activists have for years been stuck with the task of explaining why humans need to shrink our carbon footprint, arguing over and over again with nitpickers about how we can have tough winters as the earth gets warmer, the degrowth conversation takes their “why” as a given. In the words of Vaclav Smil, professor emeritus in the faculty of environment at the University of Manitoba and one of the leading thinkers on degrowth, “Nothing this civilization does is sustainable, that is kindergarten physics.” If you have to ask why degrowth is necessary, you’re not paying attention. The movement’s biggest challenge, then, is figuring out how to degrow, and how to make it speak to our craving for joy. And how to do it before nature gives up on us.

Though there have been growth skeptics dating back centuries, the term décroissance was coined in 1972 by André Gorz, a French-Austrian social philosopher and writer. But the first international degrowth conference wasn’t held until 2008 in Paris. That first Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity issued a declaration calling for a “right-sizing” of the human footprint. That means reducing the footprint in richer countries and, in poorer countries, increasing consumption “to a level adequate for a decent life.” Once right-sizing has been achieved, “the aim should be to maintain a ‘steady state economy’ with a relatively stable, mildly fluctuating level of consumption.” Since that first conference there has been an increasing focus on quality of consumption over quantity of consumption, just as advocates have shifted emphasis from degrowth’s sacrifices to its potential benefits.

Bob Thomson was one of the Canadian volunteers at the inaugural conference. A former born-again Christian
and founder of TransFair Canada (now FairTrade Canada, a fair-trade certification system), Thomson was eager to apply his organizational and evangelical skills to the cause. He helped organize a Montreal Degrowth in the America conference in 2012 and established the not-for-profit group Degrowth Canada.

“Degrowth in some ways is a political suicide term. The idea of growth is so inculcated into economics and everything else that nobody even questions it,” says Thomson, who lives in a condo on the edge of the Ottawa River.

On the simplest level, degrowthers reject the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a useful measure of human happiness, and certainly not an indicator of the health of the planet. GDP fails to capture how wealth is unequally distributed across a society, and prioritizes the production and consumption of material goods, while ignoring unpaid work and the importance of leisure and the environment. Also untenable is the mainstream economic belief that a country in the global north should, ideally, be aiming for annual GDP growth of two to three percent, doubling the size of the economy every 25 years or so.

“Our economy needs to give priority to climate change and the loss of biodiversity,” says Peter Victor, professor emeritus at the faculty of environmental studies at York University and author of the book Managing Without Growth. Although Victor doesn’t call himself a degrowther, his work also challenges our GDP-obsessed way of looking at things. “If we focus on what contributes to well-being—health, education, security—and then put viable limits on material and energy throughput, and limits on land conversion, then GDP growth becomes of secondary significance. It shouldn’t be there as an objective.”

In the global north, we’d have to learn to live with less than we have now. Though there are many different visions of what degrowth would look like, most large-scale infrastructure and resource-extraction projects would not likely make the cut, says Akbulut. Smartphones and other tech may not disappear entirely, but many degrowthers envision disincentives to building things with planned obsolescence—products would have to last and justify the resource and energy extraction needed to produce them. There would have to be increased consensus and planning about what’s essential and what’s a frill. Both supply side and demand side would see controls to limit production and consumption; our economy would be less driven by market demands.

“Determining biophysical limits, the ‘right size’ of the biophysical footprint, is not a technocratic decision, it’s not something that will be decided for us by a bureaucratic institution. It needs to be decided democratically,” says Akbulut.

Addressing income equality would be an essential part of the degrowth recipe, not only on its own merits, but because it would discourage wasteful consumption driven by social status, says Akbulut. The lure of fast fashion and fast cars, for example, would be pointless if we all had the same clothing and transportation budget. We might find ourselves signalling status by other means, like artistic creativity or generosity.

National fiscal policies would have to fundamentally change: taxation, of course, and our social programs. Thomson says many products and services currently supplied by the global marketplace could be provided by local and regional co-ops or through peer-to-peer networks. “How do we take capital from transnational corporations and turn them into co-ops?
As you can well imagine, there’s a certain amount of resistance,” says Thomson with a chuckle. “You have to have examples on the ground of people working together at a smaller scale, along with people linked in at a more macro policy level.”

Degrowth’s emphasis on shared resources, rather than private wealth, could challenge the laws we have around intellectual property (IP) and how IP drives our economy by constantly emphasizing “newer is better.” The IP that has made so many global corporations rich could become part of the collective commons. “The private sector is always trying to find ways of excluding people from things that should be free so they can make money out of it,” says Victor. “But information ought to be a public good.”

Degrowth does offer something more than martyrdom. Greater income equality, and restricted availability of material goods and the energy needed to make and consume them, would diminish the stress of “keeping up with the Joneses.” Without the growth imperative, people would spend less time at paid work, freeing up time to be more connected to home and community.

“Most people aren’t really that happy under the current system…. Most workers are not necessarily that happy in their jobs. There’s a huge drug problem, depression problem,” says Leah Temper. An ecological economist, scholar, activist, and filmmaker based at McGill University, Temper encountered the idea of degrowth while studying economic history at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and eventually co-organized the second world conference on degrowth there. One of her goals has been to bring a feminist perspective to a school of thought that’s been traditionally dominated by European male scholars. “We have to look at what types of work people value, what are the outputs we value and what are the jobs that people enjoy doing and ask how do we restructure the system so we have more of what we enjoy.”

While many degrowth advocates propose a complete upheaval of capitalism and market-driven economies, skepticism of GDP and growth has become increasingly common among non-revolutionaries. Last year New Zealand, for example, introduced its first well-being national budget. Deemphasizing short-term outputs—growth numbers—the country created a system to evaluate success according to five priorities, including, among other goals, transitioning to a sustainable and low-emissions economy and reducing child poverty. Scotland and Iceland have also begun to include measures of well-being in their budgeting processes to counterbalance the traditional emphasis on growth. In Canada, the University of Waterloo has established the Canadian Index of Wellbeing to complement the GDP for measuring quality of life. In one of its studies, for example, researchers found that while Canada’s GDP did gradually bounce back after the 2008 recession, people’s living standards did not recover as quickly because there had been a shift to precarious and part-time work.

“The perpetual linear upward growth in economic productivity isn’t necessarily resulting in a higher quality of life,” says Bryan Smale, director of the index and professor in Waterloo’s department of recreation and leisure studies. When Smale was getting his undergraduate degree back in the 1970s, he learned that academics were predicting, as far back as the 1960s, the coming of a leisure age: shorter work weeks and a better quality of life though technology and increased industrial productivity. It never happened. “There’s been a growing acknowledgement about the degree to which the marketplace and the economy have been dominating the narrative,” he says.

Mainstream environmental organizations like the David Suzuki Foundation tend to have a higher tolerance than degrowthers for, say, large-scale green energy projects that could feed our craving for more and more energy. But even here, there is growth skepticism. Yannick Beaudoin, the foundation’s director general for Ontario and Northern Canada, says the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a disruption on such a scale that people are more willing to question their assumptions about what our economy is for. “If you have to pause the system to deliver well-being, isn’t that a bit of a problem? There’s something there that’s not working right. You have to ask:
What does it take to deliver well-being for people and planet, what does it take to thrive, what is essential and meaningful, and how do you shift the purpose of the Canadian economy from its old purpose?” Beaudoin says.

Our livelihoods and mindsets have been shaped by the global growth-oriented economy. People measure their lives in how much materially better off they are this year than last. Neither employees nor corporations want to be told that no cheque will ever be bigger than the one they have now. Governments, which spend based on expected increases in future revenue in a growing national economy, will be reluctant to give up their grand promises.

Yet because degrowth is still mostly an idea-in-progress, it has the advantage of being able to tuck itself into other movements and institutions. Even if it fails to vanquish capitalism, it can infiltrate it. “One of the weaknesses of degrowth thinking is that there is no grand vision, no blueprint,” says Akbulut. “That’s also its strength.”

That may set it apart from other revolutionary ideas. It has an ability, as God’s Gardeners in The Year of the Flood might say, to “use what’s to hand.”

Illustration By Christine Wei

I always knew Elliott would leave. I was never under the impression I got to keep him forever. And besides—I’m not that kind of selfish. Sometimes, it almost felt like I should have chased him away early. Kept him from wasting his time on me.

“But what do you get out of this,” I’d ask sometimes, smiling so he wouldn’t think it mattered.

“That’s not what this is about,” he’d say.

And I would almost, somehow, fall in love with him.

But not quite, because that’s not what it was about either.

By the time I hit Ossington, the storm is a blizzard. Cars crawl beside me. I wrinkle my nose at their tires and picture how things will work when cars will fly. Surely, with so much space in the sky, people will get where they need to go.

I haven’t walked this part of the city in a long time. I don’t know the shops—too cool and too expensive for me—and the restaurants have shifted, some closed, some new, some that seem a block or two off where they should be. Most of it is probably me. Everything is changing, year after year, and the city disorients me these days.

We can’t choose when people leave us, but I thought Elliott would leave when I met Mack.

Mack was some kind of fairy creature. She worked a bar in the Junction at night, and volunteered by day. Her leftover time was poured into painting. Canvases on canvases choked our hallway and spilled through our rooms and never, never got put away.

Sometimes I’d come home in the evening, and Elliott would be sitting quietly, watching Mack work; her hair tied up, a glorious halo of matted chestnut. I would join them, watching the way her shoulders worked as she moved colours across canvas. Always making something. What there was was never enough for Mack.

When she left, she left the paintings, too.

The wind bites my cheeks when I hit Bloor. I feel smaller in the snow, like a Christmas village figurine. I peer east, wonder what this stretch of street will look like in ten years. Mack once called Toronto a city of ghosts, full with memories of beautiful buildings that were deemed worthless.

Elliott wasn’t interested in things like buildings and developments. Too real for him, bogged down in circular conversations. When we walked, it was rarely together. He would run ahead, lag behind, or dip into some strange shortcut he thought he knew. But I never held his absence against him. Not like I did with Mack when she turned her voice off or rushed ahead so she wouldn’t have to fight with me anymore. Walking with Elliott was like walking with myself. As we drifted through neighbourhoods, sometimes I thought of him and sometimes I didn’t.

Today, loneliness pinches my shoulders. It winds down my back and through my spine, jumbling my stomach into nausea.

I met Elliott at a birthday party. One of those horrible ones where the whole class was invited and no one wanted you there. I retreated to the corner of the basement, gaping at the birthday girl’s endless Barbie collection, strewn over her Barbie mansion—wondering how none of them had purple hair or buzzcuts, what kind of bizarre self-control she had.

When I turned around, Elliott was there, beaming widely.

“Do you like them?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“But you like them better than the other kids.”

I nodded.

He laughed, and our bonds of friendship were forged in the fires of exclusion.

When I sidle into my apartment, a stack of Mack’s paintings crash down in a crowd of canvas and dust from where they were gingerly leaning against the wall in my too-small hallway.

“Shit.”

I take care not to step them and close the door behind me. Hang up my keys. Take off my boots.

Taking off my coat, I knock into the biggest canvas, hanging awkwardly on the wall. Too big for the space. It’s an abstract one, blues and reds and angry lines, and I don’t even know what it’s supposed to mean. With my tired, numb fingers, I try to straighten it. The floor and ceiling tilt in different directions. There is no even.

My parents decided Elliott was imaginary early on. After that, they rarely used Elliot’s name, preferring the parentally approved “your imaginary friend,” or when they were feeling peppy, “imagination boy,” like he was a superhero. When they did use his name, it was with a not-so-sly raised eyebrow at the other parent over the dinner table.

“How was Elliott today?” They’d ask, the sound of it wide and foolish.

Later, when I was “old enough,” it became: “Remember Elliott, your make believe friend? That was so fun, wasn’t it? You had such a great imagination.”

Their laughter would roll, because anything that wasn’t their sort of real was a joke.

“I remember,” I would say, grinning. They would think it was for them, a part of their mirth. But it was for Elliott, sitting there all along.

After my parents, I didn’t tell anyone about Elliott until Elena. We were home alone, after two weeks of every so often deciding we should kiss—busily, we flipped through magazines and acted like we’d never been more than friends.

Elena knew things about feminism and politics, and I was so sure I loved her. So I told her. And she stopped kissing me.

She stopped everything with me.

I bought Mack a ring on our two-year anniversary. Just a slim band of gold. When I gave it to her, she cried, and wouldn’t let me promise that I’d eventually get her a better one. She put it on and didn’t take it off until the day she left, and I found it on our kitchen table with a note that said Thank you.

No “we drifted apart” or “it’s just not working.” No follow up email or calls, just a text that asked me to not get in touch. To let us mourn apart.

My first real relationship and my first real breakup. Neither went the way people say they should. You don’t want to marry your first. You don’t leave without a word. I felt, at the time, that I deserved more: a screaming match, a thrown plate.

But I hadn’t listened when we were together. So I listened when she was gone. I gave her silence, hoarded her paintings, and retreated to baths where I ducked underwater and surrendered myself to a world where every sound was distorted.

Elliott came often then, and I treated him poorly. Some days I curled around his arm and wept into his shoulder. Others, I ignored him, playing video games, pretending I was alone—and then covertly glancing over my shoulder to make sure he was still there. Of course he was.

Until then, I’d spent all my time dreaming up beautiful futures, where Mack and I bought a house deep in Ontario farm country. We were supposed to have two dogs. Fancy appliances. Visits from parents who told us how proud they were, how good we were. We spent long nights skin to skin, where I murmured those stories to her.

But futures weren’t enough, while I held the present hostage.

Mack knew. She couldn’t see or hear Elliott. I’d never spoken a word about him. But she felt him in our home and conversations and dreams. She used words to describe me like “distant” and “silent” and I disdained her for it. She couldn’t control me, or the relationship she never knew I had. No one deserved that much power.

It wasn’t until after Elliott was gone, and I let myself be lonely instead of angry or scared, that I realized it was never about control. At least, not for her.

Home is musty and frigid. I fumble with my
extra heater. It’s huge, half the length of my galley kitchen. I kneel on the crumbling tiles of the floor, turning the knobs futilely. It took five years to accept that “utilities included” meant “you will freeze” and Elliott finally convinced me to buy the damned thing.

I figure out which knob is the fan and which is the temperature, and that just because the light is on doesn’t mean it’s running. The heater sputters to life, feeding putrid plastic warmth into the air. I sit at the table, my coat still wrapped around me, and let the heat seep into my socks.

Elliott came and went through doors, but not like the rest of us. You’d get the sense of a passage opening and then a sudden thereness. He lived somewhere between two states: unthere and there.

Elliott was in every moment of my life. When he wasn’t there, I was waiting for him to be there. And waiting was horrible. Suddenly, I was a child again, peering down the street to watch for their friend’s family’s car.

Without him, my life paused, and I spent my time hiding in corners with books and Gameboys. With him, I flew through neighbourhoods, collecting memories of whole worlds excavated in backyards and schoolyards. Unpredictable was the word thrown around by my guidance counsellors and teachers, and adopted by my parents.

I never knew where he went when he was unthere. I spent long hours asking him if there were other children he took care of, and if I could have him to myself. But even when questioned, he only smiled that Elliott smile. Changed the topic with such ease that I wouldn’t notice until hours or months or even years later. When I showed concern, he guided me away from my worries, and into a sense of comfort that lasted as long as he was there.

For a while, around thirteen, I tried tailing him when he left. I was certain that if I could follow him to unthere, I’d prove that I was important enough to stay for. But the way he moved through space wasn’t available to me, and halfway down a street he would be gone and I would be standing alone, absent-minded and disoriented.

A tempestuous murrrr sounds from the
floor, and the blunt force of a cat’s head hits my shin.

“Okay, okay,” I say, like the cat is a person. I dig through the cupboards where I never put anything away right until I find the scoop and food.

Mack left the cat like she left the paintings. We adopted him together, one year in. She thought I needed the company, working from home. He’s eight, and feisty, and loves me probably more than anything ever has before. At first, I thought her leaving the cat was irresponsible. It was her choice to get it in the first place, I told Elliott often. What could she have been thinking? What if I gave the cat up? What if I forgot about it, and it died? How would she feel then?

But at night, it curls up on my chest, and purrs into the quiet dark. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I nestle my fingers in its fur until I do.

I don’t resent Elliott. My whole body aches over it, of course. For the magic I miss, without him there to wield it.

It was soon after Mack left, but not too soon. After I had used up all my tears, but before I could stem the upset.

“Why are you even here,” I asked one day, rephrasing my favourite question. But it was sharp, and real, and full of mourning for something he couldn’t fix.

It sliced through some invisible line between us.

Suddenly, I couldn’t feel the flutter of his heart when he was in the same room. His voice echoed, filled with static. I hadn’t known that I carried both of us inside my chest. Pushing him out had taken so little effort, but without him my ribs felt empty.

“I’m not sure,” he said, smiling, but a smile that we both knew couldn’t fix what I’d done. Not like the usual smile. “I’m never sure why, or how, I’m ever here. I’m just here when I can help, Ver.”

He gave my arm a squeeze.

That night, he left through his mysterious door. I lay in bed watching the shadows eat the light on my ceiling, and his absence filled my room.

I haven’t tried to find him since. I know better now.

His door is one of many that will not open for me.

I brew some tea to the sound of the wind hitting my weak little windows. Cup my mug in my palms, pull it close for the heat, and go perch on the couch.

Through the evening, I’ve stacked Mack’s paintings across the floor of the living room. There’s something adult about the loneliness that sweeps across them, etching itself in my hands as I picked each one up. Like the first time you clean your own skinned knee.

The paintings become two stacks: mail and throw out. Some of them, Mack left too quickly to take, but I know she loved them. Those go to her—no note, no call, nothing of me. Just what’s hers.

I wrap the others that need to be mailed. Ones meant for nieces, parents, friends. I have their addresses. The wedding list will come in handy now. It’ll cost a fortune, but the space is worth it. They’ll go tomorrow.

The others, she hated. Some have wild slashes of dark paint across them, made into something they were never meant to be, cursed by disappointment. These, I take downstairs in armfuls. One gives me a splinter that I have to tug out with my teeth. I suck on the wound, where it wells with blood, and I notice one of the smaller paintings—splotched with a mark of failure, but edged in with beauty. I run my good fingers over it, feel the texture, the way the colours meld. It almost means something. So when I’m done, I take it upstairs with me. The snowflakes that landed on it melt, and it glistens in the yellow light of the apartment’s stairwell. I’ll put it up, amongst the rows of empty nails, one small thing. And it will be beautiful.

In bed, I imagine building an ice castle. Just
me in a wide open valley, carving bricks and placing them one on top of the other, until there are gleaming walls and turrets and ceilings and doors. When it is done, I shiver. Nearly frozen, cheeks pink, fingers numb. Nonetheless in awe of what I’ve made.

And, though my trembling hands can barely shape the ice, I start to form a handle.

KERRY C. BYRNE is an autistic, queer and nonbinary writer/cat lover living in Toronto. Their other work is forthcoming and/or published in Kaleidotrope, Monstering, The Temz Review, and others. The rest of the time, they can be found working on Augur Magazine as publisher—or maybe reliving their glory days as an award-winning collegiate a cappella singer in their bathroom. Find them on Twitter as @kercoby.

Images courtesy of Walter Scott

Wendy is far too high. She’s discussing her next steps in life with a semi-nude couple in a club in Berlin. If all goes well, she says, she’ll be attending an MFA program that fall. And she does end up attending the program—though in true Wendy form, she’s hungover and late for class on her first day.