There is a peculiar sensation in moving to a foreign city that is, geographically, just across the water from where you were. The names are familiar, the climate unchanged. The trees don’t bother to introduce themselves—they presume you already know their language.
But something else shifts. And that something is enough to start writing again.
I left Vancouver for Vancouver Island, trading the grind of familiarity for the elegant dissonance of partial reinvention. It was not an escape, nor was it quite a pilgrimage. More like a tilt—a small recalibration of presence. Not distance, but depth.
I arrived with no community, no anchors, no one waiting on the other side. And precisely because of that, I began writing as if my life depended on it. Not in the grand, romantic sense, but literally — to fill the hours between dusk and insomnia. To stave off the pull of nothingness. To keep language moving faster than regret.
Twenty hours a day, I write.
Without permission, without pacing myself.
Because some days, I am entirely alone—
and on those days, writing is how I answer back.
What emerged, in that isolation, was something dangerous: happiness.
Not comfort. Not security. But that sharper, more volatile kind of happiness that arrives when clarity breaches the surface. When the fog lifts and the city goes silent just long enough for you to hear your own pulse in the drywall.
These moments feel sacred. And they are.
But I know better than to believe in their permanence.
They’re anomalies. Windows.
Not signs of healing—but of acceleration.
Still, I write them. Because even illusions deserve an archive.
I write them knowing the happiness is unsustainable—
that it burns too hot and too clean—
but it’s mine. And for now, it keeps the dark at a polite distance.