I hate it here. Not here, here, as in this hangar of a grocery store, but here as in this city where I grew up feeling like an outsider, where I could not imagine a future. It unsettles me, how this city does not let you forget who you were, how it blames you for who you try to become.
I resent Ottawa and its people, their stubborn mediocrity, their smallness.
I cut through the produce section of the store, curving with the bloated basin of fuzzy Ontario peaches, rushing towards the freezer aisles, ravenous for ice cream. Spending time in this city makes me violently crave sugar.
A teenage employee replenishes the deep fridges with one hand, scrolls on his phone with the other. I’m at least a decade older than him, but still I worry he is someone from high school, or worse, a family friend who will ask me where I have been and what I have been up to and whether I miss the access to green spaces now that I’m living in Toronto.
Ottawa’s oppressive humidity has swelled my hands, and my engagement ring isn’t loose around my finger anymore. I press my thumb hard into the fat diamond.
I’ve been engaged for over a year and still haven’t gotten the ring resized. Last week, my fiancé accused me of wanting to lose it.
I drop my gaze and adjust my hijab to cover more of my cheeks and chest. After three years away, being back, even for a short visit, regresses me into self-conscious adolescence.
With a pint of Ben & Jerry’s clutched in my hand, I hurry towards the checkout, but just as soon as I turn the corner – I see him.
He stands in contrapposto facing a display of batteries.
I tell myself it isn’t him. The fluorescent lights must be playing tricks on me. It can’t be the same man I once walked these very aisles with, preparing for a potluck on campus, imagining the possibilities on our student budgets.
But when I see his tattered Birkenstocks, it confirms I haven’t imagined him.
He doesn’t have particularly nice feet or anything, but in all that time we spent together – rambling, gardening, drinking up the sun – I remember his feet in sandals like those.
I want two contradictory things: the chance to take him all in and the luck not to be noticed. Just before I moved to Toronto, I stopped picking up his calls, and now, I am greedy to see everything I’ve missed.
He examines the batteries intently, considering each kind, tracing the cardboard packages with his slender fingers. He is as concentrated as he used to be when writing code. I loved that look on his face, of singular focus, the one I can now only see in profile.
I am almost past him when he spins around and we collide. Face to face, inches apart, three years later. His eyes pin me in place.
‘Sabrine.’
My name sputters out of his mouth like water sprinkled on hot oil. A dormant desire ripples through me, heating me from the inside out. I stand taller, pinch my shoulder blades together, pretend he doesn’t have a melting effect on me.
Tilting his head to the side, he inspects me, trying to understand why I am here in this city he knows I dislike so much. I am the one who ran away; he is the one who stayed.
‘You’re here,’ he asks.
‘Visiting my parents,’ I reply. ‘It’s been good.’
This is a lie. Another lie? That I thought of Cory as just a friend.
His eyes fill with concern. ‘Everything okay with them?’
‘There is always something,’ I shrug away his worry. I almost say you know how it is. But Cory doesn’t know how it is: his family is perfect.
Cory is unshy about eye contact and considers me, reading my face line by line, deciphering the zeroes and ones. What does he see written on my face? Can he tell what I am thinking about?
If things had worked out differently three years ago, if I were braver, if I dared imagine a future in this city, if I believed I could be loved like that, Cory could be my husband.
He interrupts my complicated thoughts with an uncomplicated question: ‘Any plans for the rest of the evening?’
I hold up the pint of ice cream, its cardboard soggy and wet in my hand. Cory lets out a laugh but holds my gaze steady. I want to turn around and run away, from him, from this grocery store, from this city. But Cory’s pull is still powerful, an undertow swirling at my ankles.
I can’t help but notice his hair has thinned. But the rest of his face is as I remember it: very pink lips, a soft chin, a nose crooked out of place by a volleyball.
As I study him, he goes on talking, saying something about the beach, how if we leave the store now, we can still catch the sunset, how we can talk, if I want, catch up, if I want, or sit in silence, whatever I want, how it’s been so long since…
I am nodding, agreeing to go to the beach with him, returning the pint to the freezer, picking out an ice cream bar from another freezer near the cash registers.
What would come from us ‘catching up’? How readily I’ve agreed to spend time with him when the man I am meant to marry – a good man – is eating takeout alone in another city.
My fiancé has never invited me to the beach, to stroll the Lakeshore boardwalk, to ride bikes around Centre Island. I haven’t suggested it either, afraid I would discover he is something other than a sensible choice, that some affection would lodge itself inside me and I would find myself once again vulnerable.
I never told Cory I fell in love with him in undergrad.
Many immutable truths kept us apart, kept us dancing the line between friendship and something more.
I am Muslim and he is not.
He does not believe in marriage and marriage is the only way I can be with a man.
Most irreconcilable of all, he wanted something I refused to conceive of back then: kids, as many of them as possible, hanging from branches and arms and porch swings.
The conveyor belt at the checkout advances my chocolate-almond ice cream bar and Cory’s blue Freezie into the cashier’s hands. He pays with a tap of his phone and wishes her a good night with an endearing smile. Her wilted expression is revived as she smiles back at him. Cory is that kind of man. He makes things better.
It presses into my chest like a revelation: I imagine a life where Cory and I walk out of this very grocery store together on Sunday afternoons, a life where he is holding my hand proudly, where I don’t know it yet, but my belly is swelling with his child, a child who will grow up wearing sandals, or be perpetually barefoot, a child who will climb trees and get muddy in the planters, a child who will love me because he loves everything Cory loves.
I indulge this fantasy where I don’t hate my hometown, where I want children, where I know how to be in love in a big, happy family – where Cory is Muslim and we can be married. I let myself imagine how I might bask in Ottawa’s winter sun, how I might find warmth in the cooler months.
Is this what it means to love a place? Is this what it means for a place to love you back?
We step out of the store onto Richmond Street and start towards Westboro Beach. The lick of July’s humidity coats us. I remember where I am and who I am actually with and all the ways I don’t have such a life.
I bite pieces of the chocolate-almond shell, detaching it from the vanilla ice cream in satisfying morsels. The ice cream isn’t anything special, but walking the main street of my old Ottawa neighbourhood next to Cory thrills me. I feel fourteen years old. I feel very grown up.
We pass the kitchen goods store, the flower shop, the yoga studio, places I recognize from when I lived here. I think: maybe I am still young, maybe I fit into this place more than I thought, maybe all the doors have not yet closed for me, maybe I still have a chance at getting what I want.
Cory and I met in university through his sister when I was an English major and he was an engineering Master’s student. Even before he graduated, he was flush with Silicon Valley job offers. But unlike me, he decided to stay in Ottawa, near his parents, growing his successful tech startup until he sold it a month ago for nearly twenty million dollars. I saw the news on a push notification and stopped halfway down a flight of stairs, rereading the article. He had always wanted this kind of success, had hoped that his parents’ financial sacrifices would mean something one day. The news of the sale had made me happy and sad. Happy because he got what he wanted; sad because I wasn’t there to share his joy.
Now, we take the bridge over the light-rail tracks and wind through the neighborhood’s side streets with mid-century bungalows, their gabled roofs drenched in a near-sunset orange.
The beach finally appears into view ahead of us. The grey river ripples in the evening breeze. Beachgoers laugh and seagulls caw into the cloudless sky above.
Cory has started talking again but all I can think about is how the blue Freezie has tinted his lips purple, the colour of a healing bruise.
‘Have you been here since you’ve been back?’ Cory asks.
I shake my head no.
‘They put that in this summer,’ he points to the new riverside restaurant perched behind the brutalist hexagonal pavilions. The graffiti on the structures has been wiped clean, replaced with carvings of crows and ravens in the concrete.
‘It looks so different,’ I say, vaguely remembering the crumbling canteen and dank changerooms. On the patio, couples and families share pizzas the size of steering wheels.
The last time I came to the beach I was eighteen, nineteen maybe. I hadn’t yet met Cory.
‘You should bring your fiancé out here,’ he says, shooting me a look.
I keep my expression as neutral as I can, but inside, I flinch at the word fiancé, at Cory’s intonation. He must have noticed the ring, or maybe his sister showed him my engagement photo on Instagram.
We follow the boardwalk behind the restaurant, pass the uncovered ruins of a historic sawmill, wrap behind the new volleyball courts, then climb up the sandy hillside of the beach and sit side by side, facing the river. There are still a few people wading in the shallow waters, grasping at those moments just before dusk.
I am hit with a sudden urge to run into the river, to let the fresh water splash up my legs, my torso, my cheeks, to let the water wake me up.
The river is wide, deceptively wide. From where we sit, it looks as expansive as a lake, though not as scary as the mouth of an ocean. Across the water on the other shore, pines stand like shadow puppets in the looming twilight.
All this calms me: noticing the water and the trees, watching happy families pack up their unfinished picnics, shake out sand from their towels. The weight of my anxiety has lightened.
I don’t run into the water. Instead, I stretch out my legs, kick off my clogs.
My mother’s voice in my head reprimands my unmanicured toes, my cracked heels. I ignore it, pointing and flexing my bare toes. I let the tufts of grass tickle the skin at my ankles.
I am twenty-seven and I have never been to the beach with a man before. I am unnerved by this realization. I denied myself experiences I now have to forfeit to the passing of time. Not because I did not want love or a life of beautiful things, but because the life I taught myself to live is one without risks, without distractions. What have I stolen from myself, choosing what seemed to be the easier path?
Lying back, I press my feet flat into the ground, root myself into the earth, and look up at the blue-grey sky. I am both in my hometown and not in it. It is small still but it feels big. It is the same as it always was, and yet, it is wholly different. It does not matter how old I am, or how much time has passed. Around Cory – and it was always like this – I let the world come to me as it is.
The man I have chosen to marry does not have this effect on me. He is proper, the kind of man my grandmother describes as from a good family, the kind of man who would never ever wear sandals, not even to the beach. He is too right, too perfect, too much of an accountant.
Around him, my dreams of being an artist seem ridiculous – abstract and frivolous. He is suitable only for the good daughter I think I should be. What would he think of me sitting like this now, feet buried in the sand, next to a man who knows me better than he ever will?
My fiancé and I have agreed to a marriage that works. A Muslim husband keeps my family’s money flowing, and in return, I perform the duties of an executive’s fiancée, appearing at his side at galas and client dinners. The rest of my days, I fill with ebru and pottery and reading through my collection of vintage books – what my fiancé calls my hobbies. At one point, I contemplated a Master’s in Fine Arts, but after our engagement, I dissuaded myself that such a dream is of another life, a futile ambition for somebody’s wife.
I crane my head to look at Cory. He seems hypnotized by the river’s flow. I would be too, if he himself weren’t so interesting to me.
‘How are your parents?’ I ask.
‘I’m not living with them right now,’ he responds without looking back at me.
‘What happened?’ The last time I saw Cory, it was in the home he’d bought for his family so they could all live together.
‘They’re not thrilled I sold it all, gave up control entirely,’ he says like it’s a confession.
I sit up on my elbows. ‘So, what, you just moved out?’
‘I wanted to give them space,’ he turns to look at me. ‘You know what that’s like.’
I’m not sure if this is an insinuation about my disappearance or about my unhappy family, but either way, I ignore it.
‘You’ve done a lot for your parents,’ I assure him.
He shrugs like this does not mean anything to him. ‘They’re the ones who have done a lot for me,’ he says.
‘Well, it has to mean something to them,’ I say. My chest swells with a feeling of protectiveness. ‘23 million dollars…’
He winces at the number then looks away. ‘It got too much.’
‘Living with them?’ I ask.
‘The business,’ he responds. He wraps his hands around his shoulders like he’s giving himself a hug. I am an arm’s length away, yet he does not reach for me. ‘It made me feel dirty, all the things we had to do to grow it,’ he admits.
Why is he telling me all this? Because I was there at the beginning, before the money? Because he has no one else to talk to?
‘You’ve always worked so hard,’ I try to reassure him.
‘My parents gave me a lot, everything they had to start the company,’ he starts. ‘I just did what I had to.’
Cory made his parents proud but at what cost to himself?
‘I don’t know, maybe they’re right. Maybe I could have worked harder.’
Sadness leaks out of him. I want to wipe it up, make it better for him. I want to reach out and rub his back, crush him into my chest. I want to run my fingers over his calloused, rock-climbing palms. I want to take care of him. I’ve never had this feeling towards anyone before; it scares me, pricks the backs of my eyes.
Cory pushes his hair back with his hand, holds it there, then lets it go. His messy curls flop back. I smile at this. I have to restrain myself from reaching out for the curl at the nape of his neck, restrain myself from twirling it around my finger.
I am up against those immutable truths again. I am stranded between who we both are and what we could be to each other.
All I say – all I can think to say – is: ‘You are too good, Cory. For all of it.’
He turns to face me, his arms still wrapped around his bent knees, and smiles weakly. The wonder in his eyes is gone. I wonder if he sees the same absence in me.
With the evening breeze, the heat breaks, my hands are no longer swollen, and the engagement ring dislodges from my damp skin. I rotate its smooth band, turning it round and round the dowel of my finger.
Cory must notice the subtle movement, must notice how the stone catches the light from the street lamps behind us, because when I look up at him, he is staring right at the diamond, saying, under his breath, like I wasn’t really supposed to hear him: ‘Big ring.’
I stop playing with the ring, crush my hands together, hide it from his sight and mine. I accepted my fiancé’s ostentatious ring choice unceremoniously one evening between the cheese and dessert courses of a tasting menu dinner. The women who have noticed it are loudly impressed, like its shine and size mean I am the kind of woman who deserves nice things.
Cory fixes his gaze on me, looks at me like he looked at the batteries earlier, with singular concentration. He is trying to figure something out.
‘Your eyes are so green, you know that?’ He says this with so much confidence that I feel I am learning something new about myself. It embarrasses me, this casual noticing. My chest warms as if he’s whispered the words straight into my skin.
I look away, tightening my hijab under my chin. The fabric digs into the sides of my cheeks. In my peripheral vision, I see that he hasn’t stopped staring at me.
‘Are you happy?’ he finally asks.
‘Did you know your tongue is still so blue from the Freezie?’ I say, half-teasing.
He scoffs at my poor attempt at deflection and tries again. ‘I’m being serious, Sab. Is this what you want?’
‘You just don’t get to ask that,’ I say. My words are serrated. He is searching for a truth I am not sure I want to give him.
‘Why him?’ Cory persists in his line of questioning. ‘You don’t seem… you seem resigned. You were never resigned before.’
‘Only because I was young and naïve before.’
‘Come on, you were never naïve. You wanted so much for yourself. You were chosen for that show, remember? You were really excited about going somewhere.’ He looks at me so intently. I give in and meet his gaze, but only for a short moment.
I remember the show he’s referring to, the way you recall an irrelevant fact someone once told you. I had been invited to exhibit one of my pieces as an emerging artist at the local gallery. He’d come to the opening reception with me. It was the only time I’d seen him in a suit.
‘Sometimes the world makes choices for us. Maybe I am just meant to be from a small place and all I deserve is a small life,’ I say.
‘There is something you’re not telling me.’
‘Why can’t you just let it go?’ I ask.
Cory doesn’t answer but I can tell by the way he sighs loudly that he hasn’t let it go. I pick at a hang nail on the side of my finger until it detaches from my skin with a prick of pain.
A memory flashes behind my eyes.
Three years ago. The last time we were together. Cory and I in the kitchen making tea for his family. He’s leaning against a pastel yellow kitchen counter and I am reaching for the cupboard behind him, his face so close to mine I could feel his breath on my cheek. I was so sure then, in that moment, he was finally going to kiss me. But he didn’t.
Now, he won’t even look at me.
The sun has melted into the horizon; the surface of the water is unsettled with the disappearance of the light. Hurt hangs in the air between us. We don’t say anything but neither of us tries to leave either.
Cory grabs a handful of sand, spreads out his fingers so the grains fall through. The muscles in his forearm tense and contract with the movement.
A few meters away from where we are seated, teenagers stalk past, towards the forested area, conspiring in hushed tones, hooting, hollering, angling for an evening of adventure. Beards and broad shoulders tell me they are seventeen, eighteen, indulging in the summer evenings before university. They are on the cusp of a reckoning and I am not sure if I miss their innocence or resent it.
‘I keep thinking about all the mistakes I made,’ Cory says, his fingers kneading the back of his neck now. ‘For a long time, everything made sense to me, like I knew what I was doing, then suddenly, it didn’t.’
‘I think that’s mostly how it is.’ I say, not sure if he’s talking about our lapsed friendship or about his family or the sale of his company.
‘So, what, that is just it then? You give up at the ripe age of… twenty-seven?’
I hear the frustration, in his voice, the accusation. I’ve heard it in my own before, asking my mother this very question about how I am expected to live my life.
‘I don’t think you can change very much about the world. I think mostly it changes you,’ I say, not sure if I am soothing him or myself with these words. I like telling myself that it is the world that has limited my choices, not my narrow imagination, not my fears.
Cory doesn’t say anything more on the matter, and I am about to self-edit, say something more optimistic, when he says, to my surprise: ‘You should come to my sister’s wedding next month.’
A laugh escapes me. ‘That’s a terrible idea,’ I say.
‘She asks about you all the time. My parents too,’ Cory says. He looks serious. The water laps against the driftwood at the river’s edge.
‘Your parents were always too sweet to me.’
‘Well, you know, you disappeared on all of us,’ he whispers.
From the fallen look on his face, I realize this is the mistake he is talking about. He has been living with the anger of my sudden disappearance for all these years. It wasn’t his fault. Not exactly.
‘Remember that day you invited me over to meet your grandmother?’ I ask.
He nods, ‘I remember.’ He shifts his body so he is sitting closer to me.
‘That day all I kept thinking was, how…’ I pause. There is a pulsing in my ears that makes it hard to concentrate on what I want to say. ‘I didn’t know families could be that happy.’
‘Your family loves you,’ he objects.
‘What you have is more than love. It’s easy.’
‘Then why did you leave after that?’ His voice is fragile. I can tell he is still searching for answers.
I prayed for clarity many times during those years of our friendship until a feeling took hold in my chest I could no longer ignore. I left because I couldn’t handle being so close to something so good, so full of love, knowing it would never be mine.
But I don’t say this. I let his question hang alongside our hurt.
My chest feels tender. Seeing Cory has brought me back to a time in my early twenties when everything still felt possible. It’s embarrassing, how easily Cory’s questions – his mere presence – are unwinding the story I have been telling myself about this engagement, about the kind of life I deserve.
‘You know,’ I say. I’m marrying a decent guy.’
He considers me. ‘There are a lot of decent men. You don’t have to marry them.’
‘He’s my only option,’ I say on an exhale.
‘You could have had any guy,’ he mutters.
I stare at Cory until I am sure he knows exactly what I am thinking. I did not want this very confrontation three years ago, but now, bitterness is replacing the sweet aftertaste of ice cream and it’s too late to run.
More than that, I don’t want to.
‘What?’ Cory asks.
‘You know exactly—’
‘It was different between us.’ He says simply as if it were a simple thing.
‘In that you were the exception. The guy I couldn’t—’
‘Stop that!’ He says.
Cory is angry and I am too. I am shaking my head, my eyes shut, refusing to look at him.
‘No. You don’t get to do this,’ I say, anger ripping through me. ‘Why did you bring me here to this stupid beach and ask all these stupid questions like it was still fine between us. It was never fine.’ I start to push myself off the ground but he holds my forearm firmly, keeping me in place.
‘Sabrine.’ He says my name like a pained breath. ‘I didn’t mean—’
‘Because you never mean anything, right? You can’t possibly do anything wrong. You are just happy and free. But the rest of us, God forbid we are resigned to the lives we’ve been given and then have to pretend to be happy around you.’ My throat burns with rage.
‘Don’t say that.’ Cory recoils, pulls his hand back from me.
I turn to him now, look directly into his eyes as I say: ‘Do you know what the worst thing is? Knowing even now you could have had me in a heartbeat.’
I expect him to reach out again to try to touch me, try to steady me in the way his presence always has, but instead he fires back: ‘Don’t you want to know what it was like for me? All of it was at risk. The stuff you said about my family, being all together, that was the price. It would have come apart.’
‘For being with me?’ I ask.
‘For becoming Muslim,’ he confesses. His head hangs between his shoulders like it’s too heavy for his neck.
‘What?’ I ask, my suspicions, my hopes from those years confirmed. The ringing in my ears grows louder, making it harder to understand what Cory is really telling me. ‘What are you talking about?’
He explains that, three years ago, he had been considering conversion, that his Muslim friends had taken him to the mosque many times to pray, and that he was about to take his Shahada.
‘My parents said all sorts of horrible things. My mother stopped talking to me.’ He looks exhausted just remembering all this. ‘I couldn’t follow through. I was a coward.’
Is this what he’s been carrying? Is this really what he thinks of himself?
‘You never said anything to me,’ my voice comes out a whisper.
‘All I wanted was you. To have you,’ he whispers back.’ Then more sharply, ‘but I couldn’t.’
‘Being so close to you and not being with you was killing me,’ I say.
‘Then just like that you left?’ he asks.
‘I thought it would be easier like that.’
‘Nothing about you leaving was easy.’ His voice is the sound of a crackling, dying fire.
I tilt my chin up to the sky. The moon is a milky smear in a sea of navy. I sense Cory’s eyes on my face.
‘I used to think, I want to know everything about her,’ he says.
I know now what I have to say to him, the only correct response to everything he has just told me. I will have to say it slowly, carefully.
‘Cory,’ I say. Saying his name out loud silences the ringing in my ears, brings upon my body a sense of calm. ‘I stopped picking up your calls because all I could think about when I was with you was how much I wanted us to be together, to be married.’
He stares at me until I turn to face him. His eyes are dark and sweet like buckwheat honey.
‘Do you still feel that way?’ he asks.
The silence between us is fragile. My heartbeat is in my throat.
‘It’s… it’s just that it was so long ago,’ I finally whisper, hoping, praying, he knows it’s a lie. I let him see me; I let him read me: zeroes and ones, zeroes and ones.
‘Right, yeah. You’re right,’ he nods slowly like he is trying to agree with me, trying to believe the lie, but behind his eyes I am so sure I see another thought forming. His eyes are replenishing with wonder, his lips curving into his usual stubborn half-smile as he says: ‘But also, it’s not that much time, three years, if you really think about it.’
I let him see me smile.
It occurs to me then, without shame or hesitation, that perhaps I could love it here, that perhaps it would be tolerable, this place that repulsed me, this place I despised vehemently just hours ago. That this city, this hometown I fled, could be beautiful – that all I was missing was the right person, the right words, the right kind of family. That coming here, to this beach, with this man who likes to be barefoot, could be so commonplace, so heartbreakingly routine. That it would be our laughter rising from the newly renovated patio as we share a plate of bruschetta.
I breathe in. The air is crisper than before. The night has cleared up the heaviness of the day.
We start down the hill. My sandals kick sand up against my calves as I’m gaining momentum, being pulled downwards, nearly breaking into a jog as we leave the beach.
‘Sabrine,’ Cory calls after me. I turn to look at him.
He is not the man in my fantasy. He is better. He is here, walking towards me. Behind him, the water is as still and black as oil.
‘Don’t run away,’ he says when he reaches me.
His voice is so low and soft, it could be mistaken for the rustle of the nearby trees. He smiles again and I realize I was wrong before. It is not the same smile he’s always had.
It is a different kind of smile. It’s a smile that has waxed, waned, and crested again.
