Thursday, November 6, 2025

My favourite part of being home, other than the silence, the snacks, and the freedom to decide when to sleep or use my phone, is Stella Mia pressed against my side, reminding me what peace actually feels like.

I picked her up this afternoon from my stepfather’s in Terrebonne, over an hour and twenty minutes from the Montreal General Hospital. He’d been taking excellent care of her while I was locked up for seven weeks. It still feels surreal to say that — seven weeks.

I got my first injection on Tuesday, and the shrink had said maybe I could go home before the weekend, but I didn’t believe her until she actually said the words today, just before lunch: “You’re free to go.”

It’s the kind of institutional captivity that rearranges your sense of time. So here I am — first night home. Ate a store-bought gourmet pizza, had a bunch of snacks (including edamame pods with coarse sea salt — yum, and worth mentioning since salt is a rare commodity at the MGH) just because I could. The sink was full of dishes — the same ones that were there when police took me away with excessive force in mid-September. Doing dishes is weirdly satisfying when you haven’t been allowed to do anything ordinary for weeks.

My Uber driver today turned out to be a theologian and an art teacher disguised as a chauffeur. We spent over two hours talking about God, creation, and freedom — and he told me, gently but firmly, that I should leave this country, that Canada had stopped deserving me. Maybe he’s right. Maybe home isn’t a place you return to, but something you rebuild — somewhere that allows you to be yourself and doesn’t demand that you strip away your vitality to be accepted by society.

The conversation started when he asked if I believed in God, and I said I’m agnostic — which means I’m always questioning the existence of an organizing force behind the universe. From there, we spoke about truth, morality, and how people like me — truth-tellers, intellectuals, anyone unwilling to conform — have always been punished by society. He nodded and said, “Exactly. Have you read 1984?”

This made me smile because of course I have — more than once, starting as a high school assignment in… 1984. I asked a couple of people at the hospital these last two months if they knew about this book and the movie version and they hadn’t, which had surprised me because Orwell certainly saw this world coming, and here was a man who was agreeing with me on that score.

We both agreed that fascism doesn’t always wear a uniform. It can speak softly, smile professionally, and still crush dissent under the weight of bureaucracy. That’s when he said I should go somewhere freer, where life and expression are still allowed to coexist. He’s from the Ivory Coast and urged me to consider moving to Africa — especially Burkina Faso, Mali, or Nigeria. The Ivory Coast itself, he said, might be worth considering after the current regime is replaced by something more democratic.

For now, though, home is here: books and artwork everywhere, warm fur, a pink blanket, a rack overflowing with clean dishes, and the quiet rhythm of life on my own terms — more or less. Quietly, though. Because Canada is not a place that tolerates its inhabitants raising their voices in protest. Appearances must be saved, after all — and nobody wants reminding of how intolerable the status quo really is. Change — even change for the better — is apparently too frightening to consider.