Why don’t we remember being born

2025/04/10

Diary excerpts from March.

Rainy Sunday 

I’m listening to Peanut Butter Sunday. How fitting, because it’s Sunday and I had my homemade peanut butter granola for breakfast. It sounds better than it tastes because the oils of the peanut butter char and leave a roasted, almost burnt flavor. 

I’m typing this with one hand because the other is holding the umbrella Paku left behind when moving out of his sharehouse last summer. I’m on my way to put on my waitressing face for 11 hours straight. At least tomorrow is my day off. I will sleep until noon in the arms of my boyfriend who has the heart and the charm of a kitten. My sleeves are cold from being wet, elbows in the rain. 

Life is good. I have friends that spend my monthly paycheck in a week. I’m busting my ass trying not to get discouraged. I love them all the same. 

I’m far from being a mess. I've been bouldering, reading, baking, and stretching recently. Sobriety is saving me so much money, but alcohol was never the issue. When I smell a hint of weed here outside, my heart starts to race. Some days, I wish I could clock in baked, but that would upset my coworkers so much. 

My fav ghibli character

I feel like L’Amérique Pleure. I cried for the first time in a while this morning because I was upset with myself. Lately I find that I’m too busy, too distracted to be disappointed in a significant way.   

I’ve bit my nails down to the skin. It’s awful and it hurts so much. I revert to my 18 year old self, minus the clinical paranoia. I feel sorry for myself. 

I read some news that the STM (public transport system of Montreal) is banning “loitering” in metro stations, AKA creating the excuse to butt homeless people out of the dry and warm and into the wet and cold. The STM news breaks my heart. Homelessness is not loitering. Canada you are digging your grave. The best of your beauty should not belong to the government. 

At work, I arrive earlier than my boss. Today, I only want to listen to Queb and Chiac accents. I love talking in Japanese to customers and coworkers, but when I have the rare occasion to do small talk in French or English, I have a rush of adrenaline, like a shot of euphoria straight into the bin of my brain. I get a full body chill just by asking if they need help with the menu, and my face gets hot and red.

Later, I go to the back and do beer keg lifts, just to feel something. Sometimes, when we’re busy, I pretend to go to the back to look for something, when really I’m standing there, hands on my waist, to let out a big sigh or a fart, or to talk to the cat upstairs, the one that looks like a cow. 

My boyfriend came back home hammered around 1 AM last night. He was spouting some existential nonsense, about how the cosmos holds so much and that our happiness together is so frail, so small, and finite. It made me laugh. He was curled up, horizontal on the bed, nauseous and whining. I could only hold his feet from the bottom of the bed, as I was sitting on the floor, and laugh. He looked so sad and concerned, like a puppy left behind a locked door. He’s been reading too much GANTZ, and I have been reading too much, well, into it all. 

My motto lately is “keep it simple”. The momentum from the new year gave away into a long feeling, a feeling of in between. I mostly want to eat tortilla chips and play Sims 4. I don’t think of the fig tree. I work but I cannot feast on acclaim. I cannot eat success if I find it. I can only eat oats. Maybe, if I become successful I can eat something else, but I believe I’d stick to oats, in any case. My heart is hungry and I feel stupid, like I’m lacking something, while everybody is in the know. 

Sunny Saturday 

It feels like an afternoon this morning. 

The light is dusty, the air is warm. The sun is shining for park lawn naps only. 

New postcards!

I went to the nearest 7/11 hurriedly while my coworker was using the bathroom. I just wanted a Coolish so bad, because they were meant for days like this. Breezy and bright work shifts call for icy vanilla crystals melting into your mouth through a plastic teat. When I returned, I could only laugh and tell her that I just wanted ice cream really badly. I finished my Coolish while doing the dishes. Then, I cleaned out sulphuric boiled chicken carcasses for broth; soft serve does contrast with dead animal fart water. 

Tomorrow is March 23rd. I like March 23rds. They are warm sunny days, usually, exceptionally. 

One year, on March 23rd, I was playing hide and seek or tag with my dad outside. I was probably 9 or 10. The air wasn’t cold at all, and particularly comfortable, a lucky day for a Quebecois spring day. I was dashing around in a t-shirt and sneakers in the backyard. The snow was melting in crispy clumps near the roads and shady areas, sooted and blackened from dirt and car emissions. I was running from my dad when I approached a tree to hide behind, when I screamed, startled from the still corpse of a hare. It laid on its flank and had its paws extended, its beady eyes looking up to the leaves. The game was paused, and papa cleaned it up with a trash bag. My mother told me later that it must’ve been old or sick. It was thrown in the trash, not buried. 

At a nightly cherry blossom viewing festival

There was a grove behind our house, and a tall, dying tree that hid the backyard neighbour’s house. The grove was partially shaved to create habitable lots, and the tree was cut. After it was taken down into rotting logs, my mom let some seemingly invincible weeds grow up into a tall shrub (her garden, her rules), and it stood there like a small tree. One early spring, we saw a buzzard perch on its leafless body. We see a couple of common, smaller birds in that area, but a bird of prey, even of the smaller kind, was never seen. It stood a few moments, looking at the brick houses, then flew to never be seen again. 

The other night, I had a sudden flashback of a playground my mom used to take me to on special occasions. It’s the kind of indoor playground you go to when a kid is having a birthday party, with plastic tubular slides and protective foam mattresses on the floor. I thought of how little I must remember of my childhood compared to my mom. She can probably recall the smallest of details, the most mundane days, when I meagrely remember a few routines and rules. That broke my heart a bit. I told my brother about it on WhatsApp, that it’s like “if your friend forgot”. 

We don’t remember being born either. For the longest time in my life I have been telling people that I was born at St-Justine hospital, when it actually was at Royal Victoria (it doesn’t exist anymore). 

Sunday Shift

Today is March 23rd. It feels like it, too, with a high of 23 degrees C. Another dusty morning and the sun climbing in an arch. The light is a perfect translucent white. But I was never very fond of Sundays. 

Thank you for reading <3

Mimi