I'm not in this movie, I'm not in this song.

Montreal boasts an all-vegan Thai joint that, were it not for its stroke-inducing prices, would easily put Seattle's Araya to shame. Specializing in mock meats, they do an absolutely stellar job at replicating traditional, authentic Thai dishes that steer clear of being overly-fatty and greasy (a nice change of pace in terms of Asian food). Of course, what the food offers in the way of health is just as quickly cancelled out by what one's body suffers upon gandering at the bill. Jesus.

I met Helen a year ago at Renewing the Anarchist Tradition, where she gave a talk on growing older within movements, and considerations for building communities that both enable and support that project. It turned out to be one of the talks I most appreciated, and it spurred several hours of subsequent conversations with other attendees. Having cut my teeth with anarchism in the District, where youth is the discursive boundary that circumscribes what passes for self-idenitified anarchist politics, it was almost surreal hearing folks even have such conversations at an explicitly anarchist gathering, much less conversations that did not hinge on reaffirming one's loyalty to a specific set of aesthetics.

When my body dragged me across that frontier (admittedly, with an albeit clumsy willingness on my part), I took up spiritual residence among those I'd worked with around Palestine; a rabble of vibrantly diverse constitution (especially in age), far less inclined to police each other's lifestyles or force each other's increasingly square bodies through the round hole of perpetual adolescence. Certainly, there was a liberatory quality to that. But there were also moments in which I felt the chasm between myself and my own reconstructive vision inching wider; to the point that when several local infoshop characters were facing potential legal troubles over something typically stupid and irrelevant, I openly contested any obligation to them, dismissing the contention that they were somehow "my people" as fully lacking in evidence or coherence.

Being in Montreal, it seemed simply given that I'd catch up with IAS folks where possible, and despite our mutual scheduling conflicts, Helen was insistent that we at least grab dinner Friday night. I'd holed up in a cafe on Mont-Royal most of the day, futilely attempting to export an IAS database query that seemed to have been corrupted in a few recent updates. But by 7:30pm, I'd given up and we were strolling down Saint-Denis toward ChuChai. On the way, it struck me that I didn't really know her well. Beyond her presentation a year ago, the only time I'd spent with her was in the IAS board meeting in Boston, where I don't even recall us talking outside of the meeting itself. My subconscious kinda peeked out, reminding me that her nursing student schedule wasn't likely to afford time beyond dinner, a block I could easily fill up with banter specific to our work.

Helen had other ideas. Between dinner and the first fifteen minutes of the following day, we must've walked nearly the entire eastern half of the city, not to mention climbing the mountain at the center (in the dark), and finding our way back down. I don't recall any particular gaps in our conversation. What's more, I felt challenged in much of it; in both reflections on adjusting to dramatic disjunctures in day to day life, and reflections on the reincription of colonialist discourses undergirding certain threads of "queer" solidarity in Iran. Oddly enough, a certain part of me felt like an impostor at times, though mostly in that "Hold on a sec, I need to pinch myself real quick" sort of way.

Ultimately, I caught myself (here and there) giving way to the idea that it is, in fact, possible for me to be this person I wake up to each day; that there's hope he might begin to make some sort of sense in the reasonably near future.