The Lilacs Again
When the buttery scent of lilacs clouds Lani’s dream, they are transported back to the river. They haven’t been there since last spring. They have shied away from thinking about that night, about that self: hunched protectively, eyes sore from random bouts of crying, mind like a pinwheel. The water closing like a cold fist around them, the screaming sound inside it.
Stella says it’s impossible to smell in dreams. Stella only dreams visually, and because it is that way for her, it must be so for others. “You’re just making things difficult for yourself,” she says to Lani. “You’re letting your subconscious drag you backwards. Dreams aren’t omens.” Even though she is an artist, Stella’s life is governed by schedules, by linear time and logical decisions, client orders and timelines and invoices. Everything must be well-aligned, at regular angles. People in relationships should fit into each other’s notches, the way a newly made shelf slides onto the waiting wall brackets. “Listen, sweet pea, don’t think about the river,” Stella says. “It won’t do you any good.”
Stella loves Lani and doesn’t want them to hurt. She isn’t the only one to warn Lani away from disorder; their friends are careful with them now too, tentative. Only if you’re up for it, bb, they text in the group chat, proffering the most mundane invitations—an outdoor coffee, a socially distanced walk. Lani remembers the old chaos of queer city life like a far-off country. Eruptive anarchist collective meetings, all-night raves in condemned buildings, neverending polyamory drama, madcap dawn bike rides that ended with ten people sprawled on the floor in someone’s living room, dazzled by the sun’s fresh rays. Recently, most people have begun moving again after a long period of staying still, if they have made it through at all. Lani has made it through, but just barely, thanks to Stella. They stay cocooned in their apartment—or more often in Stella’s apartment, in Stella’s embrace, Stella’s wool sweaters. The trellis that is Stella.
The technique of extracting the scent of the flowers by delicately forcing an encounter with fat is called enfleurage. Lani likes to say the word; it fills their mouth with a silky burst.
Lilacs bloom briefly and riotously every year in early May, their pink and purple and white blooms foaming up from dark green bushes. They must have entered Lani’s dreams through the open window. The flowers can be made into perfume. The technique of extracting the scent of the flowers by delicately forcing an encounter with fat is called enfleurage. Lani likes to say the word; it fills their mouth with a silky burst.
Stella disapproves of Lani’s perfume obsession. The scents Lani enjoys reek of smoke, dripping fruit, carnivorous flowers, and animal musk. They are overwhelming and out of control, Stella says. She implements a rule: Lani can’t wear fragrances when the two of them hang out, which is all the time. If kept in their vials, or dripped judiciously on paper, the perfumes remain acceptably archival, like curiosities in a museum. A record of the world, dispensed in controlled bursts.
After seven nights of lilac-crowded dreams, Lani is afraid that they won’t be able to contain their inner disorder much longer. What do the lilacs want? Sitting at the breakfast table, Lani tries to knead their desires into precise language. Stella has just poured boiling water into the percolator and is setting the Swiss kitchen timer, a metallic egg kept in the cupboard with all the other morning beverage items. Efficient as always, she pivots gracefully from the counter to the kitchen island and begins chopping spinach and shallots for an omelette. Lani lets the sharp, comforting food smells embolden them.
“What if later this week I took a bike ride to the north shore?” They frame it as a question—Stella deserves to be included in the decision after all the support she has given them. They tell themself that if she thinks it’s a bad idea, they won’t do it. “For closure, maybe? Like a healing thing.”
Stella, without modulating the rhythm of her chopping, lifts her gaze to stare at them, bright-eyed.
“I’ll be careful,” they add, reflexively.
“Are you being serious?” Stella says, finally. The shallots are in the pan now, sizzling in olive oil. She is the only person Lani knows who can cook wearing a cream-coloured t-shirt without ever incurring a stain. “After all the progress you’ve made, you want to go backward? What does Dr. Séguin think? You know you aren’t supposed to make major decisions without consulting her.”
On that May night, one year ago, Lani had been panicking alone in their apartment. The citywide nighttime curfew had finally been lifted, but they felt no relief. They couldn’t smell anything. They hadn’t been able to for weeks, maybe months. There was an impenetrable wall between them and the world. Since evening had fallen, they had been pacing their kitchen, opening jars and huffing them frantically. Not even the most potent cardamom pods gave off any odour. Smelling had been their last point of access to the world and now it had deserted them. In desperation, they poured a thick line of white pepper onto the counter. They contemplated it, straw in hand, imagining a satisfying sneeze that would clear out the debris from their nasal passages, from their brain, which was obviously malfunctioning and had been for many months, probably longer. They hunched over and snorted. The sneeze that came was painful. In its wake, Lani huffed at the air, desperately, but the longed-for riot of odours did not come. Instead, a numbness spread through their sinuses, white pepper tears dribbling from their eyes.
The fridge clattered and cleared its throat; Lani jumped, desperately hoping to have disturbed someone with their hacking and sniffling. But their roommate Raph, who played online poker to supplement his unemployment insurance, rarely left his room and never made a sound. Lani was pretty sure he peed in a water bottle most days; they had no idea if or what he ate.
If Fan had been there, they both would have collapsed in laughter at Lani’s stupidity— huffing pepper like a teenager trying to get high. Fan and Lani used to hang out at least twice a week, sometimes one-on-one, other times with mutual friends. Now, Lani couldn’t remember the last time they had laughed in a room with another person. All of Lani’s friends had formed their own pods, as was required, and couldn’t let them in. It would mess up the whole carefully negotiated system and therefore everyone’s wellbeing. If Lani hadn’t been frozen and was more responsive to texts at the time of pod formation, then maybe things would be different now. But we couldn’t wait for you forever, Malika had explained in the chat, with a purple heart and tidal wave emoji combo. The group, like the tides, had moved on out, leaving Lani behind. The pod formation had been urgent, for everyone’s mental health, Nat had added (defensively, Lani thought). Fan couldn’t pod with anyone because they were responsible for their grandfather, who was in a nursing home and high-risk. I miss youuuuu, they had texted Lani on multiple occasions. But Lani had struggled to answer. It was ludicrous to try to express in written form how bad they were feeling.
Maybe when the risk was lower, and the weather less brutal, they could all meet up in a park, maybe they could even hug each other, Fan had suggested to the group at one point, in the lightless depths of mid-February. Lani imagined hugging, how their friends would still feel the wrong shape of their chest, which should have been corrected by now. Surgeries had been put on pause indefinitely; their own surgery date had come and gone, and they felt sure that they would never be allowed to get it now—the promise of transformation revoked at the last moment. They did not want hugs, they wanted escapist delight: they wanted unruliness; they wanted salacious gossip; they wanted their friends to be feral again, to help them forget the increasingly hideous world.
Lani finally left their apartment at the tail end of night, lugging their bike down the narrow stairwell. They were soon cutting a wake through the cool pre-dawn, thrust into the dark by a new kinetic energy. The energy said that it was time to feel something, anything, so long as it was potent and left a mark. Their nose was still numb, their breath swallowed by the wet spring wind. With each pedal their heart thudded more urgently; soon, they thought, it would be beating as fast as the hearts of everyone else, soon their pulse would catch up to the world. Their blood had been sleeping for months and months, their veins like man-made canals, dutifully transporting goods as required, sedated, without the risk of rapids, floods, or waterfalls.
The streetlights were neon-bright, ringed with strobes of green from the new leaves that were finally sprouting. In between the patches of light, the edges of the road and the buildings on either side were fuzzy black. Peering into these shadows as they pumped by, Lani felt unsettled, almost queasy, but, as with the onset of euphoric drugs, they knew that dread came before elation. Something was coming, they felt, or they themself were about to arrive at a solution. The further they went the more they sensed that the city had completely rearranged itself, that without their sense of smell, they would not be able to get back home. Here was the river now, swollen from the early spring downpours. If they could just sit down on its bank and rest for a while, if they could only smell the tangy new smells of thaw, they would remember what it was like to be themself. But when they got to the edge of the river, having ditched their bike on the grass by the bike path, they still couldn’t smell anything.
Lilac bushes bloomed, displaying their foamy pastels in the faint dawn light. Lani plunged their face into the soft bursts, heaved air into their lungs, but there was no odour. Their heart quaked. Their instincts had brought them here, to the edge, just to abandon them again. Tears of humiliation clouded their view. The wet rocks in the mud, the lights washing over the waves from the suburb on the other shore—nothing stirred Lani, nothing meant anything to them. They longed to shriek, to tear their hair out, to stomp their way back into life, ugly feelings and all.
If Fan were here, they would each have been emboldened by the other’s presence, they would have bellowed together into the wind and interrupted the leaden stillness with new dance moves; they would have delighted in freaking out all the people who lived in the fancy houses nearby. But instead, Lani could barely muster a faint, whimpering syllable: “Ohh.” They crouched down at the water’s edge and stayed there, unmoved and unmoving, as the sun rose. They might as well have been lying in their small bedroom with the door and window closed and the curtains shut, as they had been doing every day and night for what felt like years now.
Lani was barely surprised to find themself waist-deep in the freezing water. In the hazy morning light, it was a creamy brown, laden with twigs and branches. It sluiced around their hips. They swayed. The water clasped their body through their flimsy clothing; it inundated the thicker material of their binder, which tightened its hold on their chest. Lani’s skin was suddenly alive with pain, as though hundreds of blades were slicing away at their flesh. Yes, they felt themself say, their voice carried away by the waves. Yes, yes, yes.
When they tried to explain it to Stella, in mid-summer soon after they met, Lani was unable to justify why they had walked into the river. In the bright humidity, squirrels chittering in the trees, they couldn’t access the cold lucidity they had felt as they submerged, the way everything had seemed more intelligible than ever before or ever since. Eventually, when they had talked themself to exhaustion, they realized that Stella was holding them close, saying nothing, and that this holding felt solid. Then they were kissing, and Stella’s hands were firm and assured. Stella was touching them, as if Lani were a piece of wood she was shaping, Stella knew where not to touch them, where to apply pressure, and where to withdraw it, and there was no longer a need to explain, just a drop down into the body, into odour and texture, where Lani felt something like peace.
Lani doesn’t remember it, but an early morning jogger pulled them from the water soon after they submerged, before the current could take them. “T’es ben chanceuse,” the nurse kept saying to them once they had woken up in the emergency room, the feminine adjective landing like lead in Lani’s ears. They were treated for hypothermia and assigned a psychiatrist for follow-up, mercifully covered by provincial health insurance. In a fit of self-pity, they told the group chat what had happened in vague terms. Fan had come to pick them up, had tried to keep them company afterwards, tried to stick around and make them drink tea and take a bath, but Lani had been too humiliated to accept their offer.
Alone, they slept in a grey haze, still feeling the churn of the water around them. Days later, they woke up properly, shuffled to the kitchen to see whether there was any food, and instinctively checked their email. There it was, sandwiched between a payment reminder for their credit card and a queer listserv notice about a proposed rent strike: their top surgery had been set for a new date, four months away. Lani doubled over, sobbing in relief—so hard that Raph actually came out of his room this time to ask them if they were okay.
In the fall of that year, when Lani’s chest was wrapped in bandages and they could only move their arms like a weak T-rex and they were clobbered by a round of the nefarious infection everyone was trying to avoid, Stella took care of them. She didn’t care that she might catch the sickness as well, though in the end she didn’t. “My family’s constitution is notoriously strong,” she had smiled, sponging soap onto Lani’s back as they sat awkwardly in the tub. Lani imagined Stella’s family—rows of tall, blonde Swedes immune to illness. Stella made sure they took their pain medication on schedule, helped them change their nipple dressings, and drove them to the clinic when they needed their drains removed. She fed them and comforted them when they cried out of the frustration of not being able to move, to breathe properly, to smell.
Under Stella’s care, Lani’s sense of smell returned fully, along with their range of shoulder motion. They slowly learned to unhunch their torso. Stella helped them to do their stretches in the morning, to massage their scars in the evenings, with working hours in between. She introduced a grid of perfectly interlocking scheduled activities—a handbook on how to live. Now, while Stella is at her woodworking studio, building cabinets and side tables and credenzas, Lani proceeds through their days, trying to emulate the grid. They track forward from the bed to the kitchen, they engage appliances with ON/OFF buttons, and START/STOP levers. Begin a task in the kitchen, finish a task in the kitchen. Move on to another room, another task. Do one thing, and then complete it, and then do another. Their body is finally aligned, and now their mind can be as well.
Stella’s apartment is tastefully decorated in geometric beiges and creams, and furnished with a stylish combination of vintage mid-century modern finds and curved Scandinavian-inspired pieces she built herself. Stella’s apartment has wainscoting and sconces. There are no roommates. Nothing seems to enter or exit without Stella’s express approval. She’s never had mice or moths. Her landlord is a pleasant, older Italian woman who brings Stella juice-swollen tomatoes from her pantry garden.
Lani’s landlord is a shadowy developer that sends a small angry man as its emissary to threaten unreasonable rent increases. After encounters with the angry emissary, Lani tends to lose the rest of the day to frantic projects that Stella deems useless, like beginning to repot their plants without checking if they have enough soil, or trying to bake bread without a recipe, or rearranging all the furniture in their bedroom without any overarching plan, so that the bed ends up blocking the closet and the bookshelf is wedged behind the chest of drawers. Eventually Stella will text them to come over, Stella will make them dinner, Stella will tease them lightly about their lack of foresight, and they won’t be able to begin a response. They don’t know how to explain to her that the point of these projects is not their result. “You’re so scatter-brained,” Stella will say affectionately, if in a good mood. “One unexpected thing, and you’re totally derailed.” If she’s in a bad mood, usually because something has gone wrong at the studio or with a client, there’s less affection, more strategizing. How can Lani be more productive and more aware? Have they been massaging their scars like they are supposed to? Have they been keeping track of their work invoices? The end of the conversation is always the same: Lani should move in with Stella, and all their remaining disorder will clear out.
There was no longer a need to explain, just a drop down into the body, into odour and texture, where Lani felt something like peace.
Small thickets of perfume samples used to crowd the surfaces of Lani’s apartment—tipped over on their sides with their white plastic heads resting on wood, Formica, plastic, cotton, metal. They used to gather in small cloth bags, disorganized—the aromatic greens with the chypre florals with the amber fougères. Leaking sometimes, pooling and staining. When Lani used to wear these scents, they felt a little closer to the way they wanted to be perceived. Not a woman, not a man. Something in between—vegetal undergrowth, sheathed in leather. The vials are now labelled and lined up in a tiny shelving unit that Stella built for Lani’s birthday a few months ago. Lani sent a photo of the shelf to the group chat, which responded with a level of support that bothered them slightly. Stella seems so good for you, bb! Seems like she really has it together, and really loves u, typed Malika, and a blip-blip of little hearts from the others immediately emphasized the statement. So happy that you have such a caring partner, Nat chimed in, You deserve all the support after last year. Clearly, they were all feeling a potent mixture of guilt and relief. Absolved of responsibility, the group chat has been suspiciously quiet since then. Lani wonders whether they’ve been culled. Now and then, Fan texts Lani, asking if they want to catch up properly, hang out. My gung gung is pretty chill tbh but I am so tired of only talking to him haha. What if we just ate sandwiches on a bench or something? If you just test before, it’s fine! But Lani always finds a way to decline. They think they detect an undertone of obligation in Fan’s texts. Fan has better things to do: they are trying to move their grandfather to a different, less neglectful facility. They have started doing mutual aid deliveries for elders and low-income people in Chinatown. They probably don’t want to see Lani, and are just feeling guilty, because of last spring.
“Your friends really dropped the ball,” Stella sometimes remarks. Chosen family is a beautiful idea, she tells Lani, but when it comes down to it, a lot of people’s friends drift once they hit their thirties. Especially now, when resources have become so tight, when trust is so low. The more time they spend with Stella, the more Lani feels their mind untangling, stretching out and showing its full breadth, like a knotted string or a curled hair, straightened under a helpful iron. The furniture Stella builds is beautiful—sturdy and confident. Lani imagines themself as one of Stella’s pieces: a cherrywood credenza, a walnut side table. Any imperfections they have will be sanded down to a comforting smoothness, once they are cohabiting officially.
One evening, as the lilacs and magnolias radiate their fragrances outside Stella’s windows, Stella lets Lani top, which barely ever happens. They’ve been drinking wine on the balcony, and they’re both loosened up and dreamy in the soft air. With Lani’s fingers inside her, Stella opens and opens. “Just a little more,” she’s saying, and Lani is wriggling their slippery hand in further than they had thought possible. It’s new for Lani to be asked for pleasure in their new form, finally able to be fully naked, their chest and ribs unencumbered at last. It is unusual for Stella to ask for something like this in the moment, instead of planning it out beforehand. Lani can smell what their hand is doing, the spicy, sour muskiness, the almost citrus-like top note, a hint of metal, a hint of earth and manure. Stella is touching herself, urgently, and Lani’s fingers are deep inside of her, the two of them groaning together, the normally stable bedframe creaking to their rhythm. “You’re so good,” Stella is saying, and she’s shuddering and her whole body is clenching onto Lani’s moving hand. Lani gazes at her, how beautiful she is, and how good she smells, open beneath them, panting.
“That was so hot, right?” Lani says afterwards, splayed on Stella’s firm mattress, which is damp now from the two of them. Stella doesn’t respond, and Lani imagines it’s from shared elation. But the next day, she startles them by saying that it felt weird for Lani to be the “active one.”
“It’s just, it doesn’t fit our dynamic, really,” she says, as if this concludes the conversation.
“What do you mean? I want to do stuff to you.” Lani’s still glowing from the high of it. “I’m normally more of a switch, remember? I just think we’ve gotten into a routine together, because for a while after we met, I couldn’t really move my arms.”
“I don’t know,” Stella says. She’s in her favourite silk robe, brushing her thick hair. “It’s just funny for me to be the bottom, sexually, when I’m so much the top in our relationship. It just doesn’t feel right to me. I couldn’t really relax into it.”
“I like doing that for you, if that’s what you’re worried about? It seriously turns me on.”
“I don’t think you get what I’m saying,” Stella keeps brushing, slightly more violently. “Let’s forget it.”
That weekend, there is a party to celebrate spring and the recently relaxed regulations in a newly renovated loft belonging to a couple for whom Stella sometimes builds bespoke pieces. A thick rug muffles the sound of dozens of feet. Everyone has taken precautionary tests beforehand; inside the loft, people seem relieved not to have to mention the successive waves or mounting deaths. “Ça Va Bien Aller” says a rainbow sign in the window. Lani is one of the only non-white guests in attendance. They imagine relaying this to the group chat later, but they shake off the thought. As the party wears on, everyone tipsy from the biodynamic wine, Lani leaves Stella and the knot of linen-clad people she’s been talking to about whether it’s a good time to look into buying property in the Laurentians, about whether Portugal is overplayed as a vacation destination. They wander the space, sliding books out of shelves, thumbing through vintage literary reviews. They lock themself in the bathroom to evaluate the array of natural soaps and mists. Pleasant but generic—that sandalwood scent that everyone is into, a cedar and fig hand-poured candle. Through the bathroom door, they catch the familiar tones of Stella’s voice. She says something about ‘my partner.’ Lani tenses. It’s too late to stop listening.
“I am actually so exhausted by them sometimes,” Stella was saying, “But I’ve always been a caregiver, ever since I was young. You know. They have no idea how much it takes out of me, I try not to let them see it. Because, honestly, if it weren’t for me, I don’t even know what they would do.” The other person is making sympathetic noises. “Like, would they even be able to live by themself? One difficult thing could happen to them, and they could end up trying to drown themself again, it’s so fucked up. I feel so bad saying that.” The sympathetic noises continue. “You are the most caring person I know,” the other person says. “But you have to stop martyring yourself for all these lost queers you date. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but—”
Quivering, Lani forces themself to flush, to slide the door open into the conversation.
Stella starts, and quickly collects herself. “Oh, sweet pea, I was looking for you. This is Gaëlle,” she says, one capable hand on Gaëlle’s lower back, the other reaching up to smooth her own hair, which has rumpled slightly. “She’s into perfumery as well.” She pauses. “You two should talk about that.” Stella is suave, always the host, even when it isn’t her apartment or her party. Lani can detect a slight tremble to her frame, though, as if a light wind is rattling her.
“I’m too drunk, I think,” Lani manages. “Can we go home? Or, maybe I’ll go home. To my own apartment. I don’t want to be a burden. To you. As you say.”
Gaëlle quickly heads off down the tastefully lit hallway.
“You’ve misunderstood,” Stella begins. Lani can feel her shoring up her certainty, her assurance.
“I think I got it,” Lani says. “It sounded like you were saying that I’ve been taking advantage of you, or something. Which—I don’t know. I was having a hard time when I met you.”
“Well, you have to admit, you haven’t been doing the most amazing job of taking care of yourself.” Stella’s back is so straight, her posture always irreproachable. Like a tree, always growing in the right direction towards the light. “And I’m not faulting you for that, but you do expect me to care for you—No, you do. You expect me to help you with everything, and you honestly never acknowledge it. It’s actually kind of sexist, I’ve been realizing, which I would normally never bring up to you, but I feel like you’re forcing me to. Right now.”
“I’m sorry,” Lani says, with a grinding feeling, like a mechanism is catching inside them, over and over. “I’m sorry? I mean, I don’t feel like I’ve asked you for any of this. You just kind of took over, you’ve had really specific ideas about how I, or how we should be.”
“No, of course you didn’t ask me for any of this, of course you’re just a weak little guy with no will of your own, right?”
“But you’re always—Why do you keep pushing me to move in with you, then?” Lani’s breath is coming in gulps now, like they can’t get their words out fast enough. They sense that time is running out.
“Oh, get over yourself,” Stella says, and Lani can see that she’s making up her mind even as the words leave her mouth. She’s always one step ahead, even when drunk. “I’ve been pushing you? Well, go ahead and try it alone. Or go find someone else to be your mommy.”
She’s taller than ever, framed by the arched ceiling. Down the hallway, Lani can see the guests have thinned out. It’s a long, dim tunnel to an empty room. Suddenly frantic, they grab for Stella, catching the delicate material of her dress. Stella grabs back, with a ripping sound. “Grow up, Lani,” Stella says, as she turns and walks away, torn garment trailing regally, leaving Lani crouched against the lightly embossed wallpaper.
They find themself straining for Stella’s scent, longing for her wake of sawdust, teak oil, and wool, but they can’t smell anything except the faux-cedar candle in the bathroom, and the lingering smell of gardenia-scented hand soap, which is suddenly vile to their nose.
Lani needs to smell something living, something immediate, anything. Mulch, leaves, dog shit, river weeds.
When they arrive at the river, it’s under the slate grey sky of an overcast predawn. They never came back for their bike last year, and never replaced it. What had felt like a short journey on wheels has taken them something like two hours of walking, one foot in front of the other, first almost jogging, and then slowing to a trudge. They approach the shoreline tentatively, caught in a surge of panic, of morbid recognition. Here it is, they are sure that this is the spot, where the bank descends to the water, where the reeds part just enough for a person to slip through.
There—they can see the outline of themself, the self of last spring, swaying there in the half light, waist-deep in the rushing water, that defeated former self, before surgery, before Stella, before the oblivion of submersion. Returning here has been a dangerous mistake, after all. Stella was right.
It tastes of brevity, of loss, of another season on Earth, just begun.
They imagine walking into the water again, reaching out and touching their own shoulder, embracing themself, sinking down again, not coming back up this time. Encircling themself in their own arms would be self-sufficient. It would ask nothing of anyone else. There’s no one around today, no kind strangers to pull them out, to be traumatized by their display of suffering.
They step off the path, into the gap between the reeds. They sink to their knees in the mud. Feeling the pull of the figure in the river, they crawl forward with clammy hands and soaked shoes, but it isn’t like last year. There is no kinetic energy pulling them forward this time, just dread.
They are interrupted by the buttery scent of lilacs.
These are the lilacs from their dreams, but more pungent, more fragrant, much more real. Overhanging the reedy shore is the same flowering bush. It is blooming again uproariously, it is heavy with dense petals, it stands there foaming with nectar. This time, Lani realizes they can smell it, its headiness, its creamy pastel waft. They crawl back up the bank and into its bulk. They bury their face in its floral froth. On their knees in the spring dirt, they reach forward and pinch a bloom from its branch and cram it into their mouth. It seems to expand exponentially, swelling against their tongue, and then melting into their palate. It tastes of brevity, of loss, of another season on Earth, just begun.
As Lani slowly walks back down the island towards home, their wet shoes squeaking, they take out their phone. There are no calls from Stella, there are no calls from anyone. Nobody knows where they are, or what they’ve been doing. They flick down to a recent message from Fan, an invitation to an outdoor dance party that Lani had initially read as yet another sympathetic offer, but in which they now detect a hint of longing. Fan, who has been lonely too, who has maybe needed more friend support than they’ve been getting for these past long months.
Hey, Lani texts, I’m sorry I’ve been so MIA for the past while. I know I’m texting you way too early in the morning haha, but I think I finally have some energy again.
They reread the message, wondering if it’s too forward or too vulnerable—then they shake their head to banish the dull insecurities and keep typing. I miss you. I’d love to visit your grandpa with you, anytime! Just let me know when, and I’ll be there.
Their thumbs leave smears of dirt on the screen. Their hands smell of damp soil. Lani pockets their phone and continues to walk through the morning haze, as the sidewalk begins to bake in the eager sun.
H Felix Chau Bradley is a writer and editor living in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). They are the author of Personal Attention Roleplay (Metonymy Press, 2021), which was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Kobo Rakuten Emerging Writer Prize in 2022. They are the fiction editor at This Magazine, an associate editor at Metonymy Press, and a book review columnist at Xtra. They write a monthly newsletter about books and perfume: filletchaubradley.substack.com.