sometimes being above it all isn’t about distance. it’s about breath.
the snow kept everything quiet. even the city below. as if the cold had pressed pause.
i wasn’t looking for anything. just letting the light reflect off the ice and the railing hold my weight for a minute longer than usual.
a counter.
a cortado.
a book that doesn’t let you look away.
the sugar on the pastry barely held. like the light outside—thin, unsure.
i wasn’t reading to learn. not exactly. more like remembering with someone who already knew.
there are days when survival is this: coffee warm, pages open, grief in the margins.
the sun was generous. the grass didn’t mind. but the quiet felt too practiced.
i spoke because not speaking would have been a kind of surrender. not to correct. not to clarify. but to stay present, even when presence felt like exposure.
this is where the wealth came in. sugar. cotton. tobacco. extraction and enclosure made into ornament.
the names are still here— merchant, plantation, st. vincent— not by accident. this city remembers through what it refuses to rename.
i walk this route not to map it, but to feel where the archive ends.
this dérive isn’t about finding answers. it’s about tracking the infrastructure of forgetting. what the buildings obscure. what the street names naturalize. what passes for neutral.
these façades aren’t just stone. they’re policy. they’re inheritance. they’re proof that the empire never left— just rebranded.
i wasn’t here for this. just passing through— a few hours between panels across town, a few steps off schedule.
but the building held something. not promise exactly. just presence. age without apology. history without invitation.
i looked up and thought: maybe.
found in glasgow. a plaque for john a. macdonald. not torn down, not defaced— just waiting. quiet. official.
the story is familiar. lawyer. prime minister. nation-builder. but here, the stones don’t pretend neutrality. they know what they financed.
this isn’t a canadian monument. it’s an imperial one. because macdonald didn’t just build a country— he extended a project. settler logic made portable.
the plaques change languages, but the story stays the same.
the empire loops. it doesn’t end. it reappears in bronze and sandstone, across oceans, still naming itself as legacy instead of violence.
spotted in a museum across the ocean. a totem pole far from the coast from which it came.
the plaque talked about artistry. not land. not theft. not how many hands it passed through before arriving here, under spotlights.
i didn’t read the full description. didn’t want to. the object already said more than the label ever could.
some things don’t lose power just because they’ve been displaced.
kjipuktuk. winter sun. i spoke in french, and this time, it felt right.
not a defence. not a performance. just a moment of saying it like i meant it.
the symmetry felt like a question no one was answering.
no one else on the platform. just the hum of something approaching but not yet here.
sometimes the wait stretches longer than the journey. sometimes the quiet is what stays with you.
i sat and cried. not loudly. just enough to feel it leave my body a little at a time.
an older woman beside me was crying too. i passed her a tissue. we didn’t speak.
above us: the water fell, the light held. a circle that didn’t ask anything from us.
grief moved between strangers. not for explanation. not for closure. just to be felt together.
#washingtondc #drift #holdings #blackness #fragments #surfaces