In Touch - Medium Magazine (Winter 2022)

In Touch

MEDIUM MAGAZINE

“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”

— William James

Masthead Editor-in Chief

ELIZABETH PROVOST

Managing Editor ELISA NGUYEN

Director of Design MANJOT PABLA

Head of Photography

Writers

MANJOT PABLA ELIZABETH PROVOST ELISA NGUYEN ARONI SARKAR SIMRAH SIDDIQUI JULIA SKOCZYPIEC JULIANA STACEY DALAINEY GERVAIS PAIGE FRANCE

HAYDEN MAK

Head of Videography Copy Editors

Published by Medium II Publications 3359 Mississauga Rd. N., Student Center, Room 200 Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6

MIGUEL DASILVA

WWW.THEMEDIUM.CA

NIKOLAS TOWSEY

JULIANA STACEY

All content printed in Medium Magazine is the sole property of its creators and cannot be used without consent. Opinions expressed in this publication are exclusively of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Medium Magazine.

Printing by Master Web Inc.

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Table of Contents 9

Etch

MANJOT PABLA

Art is Water

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The Dinner Table

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My Name is Aroni

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Monotoned Me

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Our World Through Rhythm

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Seventy Years of First Dates

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Soundless Vibrations

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Skin Against Our Fingertips

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ELIZABETH PROVOST

ELISA NGUYEN

ARONI SARKAR

SIMRAH SIDDIQUI

JULIA SKOCZYPIEC

JULIANA STACEY

DALAINEY GERVAIS

PAIGE FRANCE

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Editor's Note When life rushes by, it’s easy to feel a looming sense of disconnect— between our families, with ourselves, and with the world around us.

Sometimes, all we need is a reminder that connections exist everywhere. Whether it is the bond between two atoms, a kiss between two lovers, a story passed down through art, or a smile between strangers—even the smallest interactions bring people together.

At the start of Volume 48, the themes for our two magazines came simultaneously, like a set of complementary equals. The ‘Moving Still’ magazine, published in November 2021, explored how people perceive, experience, and thrive in isolation. It was clear that we all had different relationships with isolation, and that isolation was neither good nor bad. As the antithesis to our first edition, we now invite you to the ‘In Touch’ magazine, which untangles the invisible threads of connection coursing through our everyday lives.

One example of disconnect can be viewed in those who experience dissociation and struggle to make sense of reality, as read in Manjot Pabla’s story, which utilizes printmaking as an analogy for healing.

Sometimes, the disconnect is experienced between oneself and society, as illustrated by Aroni Sarkar, who tells a tale about growing up amongst diverse cultural identities. Other times, speech disorders make communication with our loved ones difficult, which Dalainey Gervais explores in a personal essay reflecting on the experiences of her cousin and brother.

One of the only constants in life is change, which Juliana Stacey distinguishes through two romances sparked 70 years apart, transformed through technology. In her poem, Paige France calls us to embrace our differences and realize that we cannot move forward without each other. Julia Skoczypiec turns down the volume of distractions and encourages us to listen to the rhythms of life. And finally, in our pieces, we explore the tension within immigrant families, and how art can be the power that unites us all.

We hope that this collection of fiction, essays, poetry, and art will help you stay ‘in touch’ with the soil from which you grow, knowing fully that our differences and disconnects are part of what connects us all.

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Etch Manjot Pabla

And there it is. A cold piece of bone staring at her. So soft and small—she doesn’t know it is a child’s bone when she retrieves it from underneath her bed. Her muscles tense. She doesn’t know what to do; her hands itch to drop the decaying bone back to the ground and forget she ever saw it in the first place. But she can’t. How long has it been there? Horror and disgust boil inside her as she tries to ignore the numbness in her heart. Whose bone is it? A question she doesn’t want to answer, but an answer she already knows.

A wave of distress crashes into her, applying a rhythmic pressure inside her head. She’s drowning. Releasing the grip of her right hand from the bone, she squeezes the bridge of her nose, seeking relief from her immediate headache. She caresses the striations scattered across the bone with her left thumb as she tries to refocus her thoughts. Her mind settles on the various marks engraved on its exterior. Jagged cracks—large and small, deep and shallow—embellish its frail shape. As a printmaker, she knows how to read marks, to retrace an artist’s hand and their emotions within each swipe.

Most of the lines that scar the bone are sharp. As if assaulted by a blade, thin lines lightly kiss the surface, and deep, irregular cuts tear into the bone, leaving it vulnerable. She can feel it all—the spontaneity of the lines, the carelessness of the assaulter, and the desire to hurt. She can almost feel an absence in her body, dully pounding like a heartbeat in a papercut. Fighting the sudden need to sit down, wrap her arms around her legs, and cry. She isn’t ready.

Soon, the night sky engulfs the room, leaving the small square window at the end of her bed as her only source of light. She can’t see the entirety of the bone anymore; the moonlight shows only the contours of its form. The window is open, and the winter night pulls in cold air inside, making her shiver. Her sore feet beg her to sit down—she has been standing for hours. She lies on her bed, wrapped in a blanket, still holding onto the small bone. The cuts peek from underneath her fingertips as she traces them like the needle of a record player, a familiar song hums at the back of her mind.

A gnawing feeling that she tries to suppress opens the void once more. Bottled up feelings fill the silence in the room, suffocating her. Escaping onto her fingers are stories and memories lost deep inside the crevasses of the bone marks. As she traces the scars on the bone one

last time, she wishes to forget. She curls to the side like a fetus. Her arms cradling her body, prayed that her hard squeeze would turn the bone to dust. Nothing is real.

Sleep escapes her. Left awake and shivering under her blanket, the cold air tightens her skin, making it sensitive to the bone’s touch as it remains bound to her hands. The crevices try to indent her palms, but the lines aren’t strong enough, not deep enough to leave an impression on her rigid flesh. She can only feel a fragment of her memories from the surface touching her hands. The bone exposes an absence within her, mental and physical, that she can no longer ignore. A familiar pounding presence invades every thought and breath she takes. Her gritted teeth failing to force down the scream that licks her throat. There is no escape—even if she claws and tears her way out of her own skin.

The cold cartilage awakens frustration within her restless body. All she wants is sleep. She stumbles over to her desk at the corner of her room, its surface lined with pencil, paper, and plenty of inks. She grabs a pair of gloves, safety goggles, and a bandana hidden behind a pile of scrap paper and puts them on. The frosty air is much more piercing now that she stands in front of the window, but her face and hands are safe from the harsh winds blowing inside the room. She reaches underneath her desk for a bucket filled with a solution of diluted corrosive acid and removes the lid. She drops the bone into the acid, finally loosening the tension in her unfurling hand. The acid bites into the marks of the bone. The lines set deeper and deeper. All she can to do is wait—soon, there will be nothing.

Slow: the acid is slow, but time moves slower. She watches the window. Her quick, heavy breathing fogs up the goggles as the burning colours of red, orange, and yellow light up and devour the navy-blue sky. The chirping of birds accompanies the rising sun until no remnants of night is left. She should feel calm as the golden rays enter her room, but the warmth doesn’t penetrate her thoughts. She can’t stop thinking about the bone. Will she forget it existed once it fully disintegrates? Or will its absence create a hole in her mind of painful emptiness, forgotten but felt? Guilt bubbling in her stomach, she realizes she can’t destroy the bone; it is a piece of her that will forever consume her. Carefully, she removes the dissolving bone from the bucket. She walks over to the bathroom and toward the shower,

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“She can almost feel an absence in her body, dully pounding like a heartbeat in a papercut.” avoding her reflection in the mirror as she moves. She takes off her goggles. The showerhead rinses the excess acid off the bone’s surface. Under the bright white fluorescent lights, she can see the damage she has caused. She gets rid of her gloves, eager to feel the bone on her skin again.

Lines previously invisible become clear, and a threaded network of chaos with no beginning or end reveals itself on the surface.

Overwhelmed by the number of marks left on the bone, she gently traces the lines as she did before.

This time, they feel different. The acid has sharpened the edges of the crevices, creating cuts in her fingertips, deep enough to bleed. Her blood fills the voids, quickly trickling over the entire exterior. A sudden thought fills her mind—a beacon of freedom.

Back in her bedroom, she unravels an enormous roll of white paper onto the floor and sits on top of it. Wiping the excess blood off the bone, she lifts it over her head, gaining momentum to strike. Using

all her bodily pressure to hold the paper still beneath her knees, she slams the bone into the ground to leave a mark, indenting the paper’s cotton fibers. She quickly lifts the bone away from the paper and observes the bright red web of lines imprinted. Finally, it has no power.

She is in control.

She’s done this before.

Submerge the bone in acid, wait, bleed, print. Over, and over, and over again. Until the crimson red doesn’t wash away, sinking into her skin. Years have passed since she found the bone, yet it remains in one piece. Abused through years of stress, beginning to deteriorate. It erodes, the lines blurring the more she prints. As she pushes it into the paper, she exerts more pressure, chipping away at the bone, adding more cracks and lines into its fading surface each time.

As she grazes her fingers over the battered cartilage, distorted voices flood her mind. Their sharp tongues

echo a prophecy behind their teeth, tremors reaching her soul without them even uttering the words. Each syllable whips into her, breaking her and what she could become.

Memories of their acidic words continue to bite into her as their voices become her own. The bone’s score is stuck in her head; she doesn’t know anything else.

Submerge the bone in acid, wait, bleed, print. Until everything makes sense. She is trapped by a past made of fading memories. Her past, present, and future blend into nothingness. Dragging her with it.

Again!

She clenches the bone until her knuckles go white, then slams it into the paper. Countless times, she has used her body as a printing press, using all her weight to push the bone into the paper, for it to absorb all her blood. Her body is breaking.

Submerge the bone in acid, wait, bleed, print. Until the bleeding stops. But she can barely stop the bleeding. She doesn’t have enough

paper lining her bedroom floor, so she keeps layering the bone’s imprints one on top of the other. The small lamp on her nightstand provides enough light to see each additional print coat the dried brown blood into a glistening ruby. The lines she recorded years ago disappear into a sea of red.

She stops—there is nowhere else to print. Every inch of paper is drenched in blood. Her previous prints are gone, leaving only a bloody mess. All the time she lost to end up with nothing, alone with her thoughts. There is nothing more to add, nothing more to think. Her artwork is complete.

She hangs the paper on her white walls to see all the work she has put in through the years. Blood drips from the soaking wet paper onto the ground.

For the first time, she sees what she’s done.

She is sticky all over from layers of blood and sweat. Her body heat dries up all the moisture and fuses it into her skin. She can’t move, the dried blood stiffens her flesh and traps her body. Fresh blood continues to drip down, trickling her left thigh and pooling around her feet. The floor, wet with slithering mahogany substance, waits to greet her when she falls. The metallic air burns through her nose, clawing into her mouth. Her blood is everywhere—an endless void swallowing her whole.

Moving erratically inch-by-inch, the blood pulls and nips at her skin. But she continues to move forward. Soon, her blood-layered skin starts to flake by the friction caused from her repeated movements, exposing her pale tan flesh buried under all that sangria red. She steadily walks closer to the paper to inspect it; there must be a dry white spot somewhere. Hope simmering in her chest, she turns the lamp on to see every detail clearly.

The glow bounces off the wet blood, making the surface shine on the wall. She stares into a reflection. It stares right back, looking blankly at her through dark brown eyes tinted in red, eyes that look like hers but are not her own.

How long has it been there? A presence she can’t recognize. “Who is she,” she thinks.

“No, who am I?”

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LARA PROVOST, FRIDA DREAMS, 2021

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Art is Water Elizabeth Provost

Sargy Mann, a British painter of portraits and landscapes, began to lose his eyesight in 1973. Mann saw spectral haloes and suffered from oedema of the cornea—corneal swelling that causes a buildup of fluid in the eye. Undeterred by his failing vision, he devised alternative methods to experience his surroundings. Mann assembled pictures through a telescope and used collages of enlarged images and audio descriptions, as though he was piecing together a puzzle.

Using a tiny magnifying monocular, he was able to read bus signs and identify common forms.

To temporarily reduce the oedema during his visits to the National Gallery and the Tate, Mann would dry his soggy eyes with a hairdryer. After each half-hour of sight, the artist would discreetly plug his hair dryer into the public galleries’ sockets, affording him a few additional moments of constructive looking.

Inevitably, his sight deteriorated completely. As a blind man, he couldn’t paint from direct observation, so he decided to paint subjects from memory. Mann chose the biggest canvases he could find, pinned them to the walls of his living room, and painted from shortterm memory. He had prepared for this moment. Leading up to the retinal detachment of both eyes, Mann would make rhythmical passes through spaces he wanted to paint while recording what he understood of his subject through a dictaphone.

As a child, I spent a lot of time in museums. Of course, with a lack of context, the Monets, Da Vincis, and Titans I saw were nothing more than pretty pictures with strange

men and women, flora and fauna, familiar and strange forms. But as I grew up, read books, took art history classes, was guided and misguided by Wikipedia, and became more curious, I gained a deep appreciation for the fine arts. Soon, the stories painted on canvas, or cast in bronze, or drawn on paper, evoked emotional responses.

I visited the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. recently. I stood in front of Rembrandt Workshop’s The Philosopher. I watched. The darkness of the piece was overwhelming, yet specks of light illuminated the man’s engaged facial musculature—a vein protruding from his forehead and his taunt jaw.

The bearded man gazed to the left of the canvas’ extremity. I took a step to the side, meeting his penetrating glare. My lips parted open, similar to his. I realized a few moments turned into minutes when someone nudged me out of the way to take a picture. I exhaled; I’d been holding my breath. In all honesty, I would also dry my eye sockets with a hairdryer to be able to see Rembrandt’s work.

An artist expresses himself through his art—his voice becomes the brushstrokes on a canvas, the notes on a score, the forms in clay, marble, or metal. An image can transcend time, outliving its creator and speaking on their behalf when they no longer can.

My mother grew up in a small town in Soviet Russia. Kirov’s low-hanging clouds made it hard to dream big. Her mother had one expectation of her daughter: that she obtains a university degree.

With this expectation, my mother

silenced her inner artist, putting away her drawing pencils and suppressing her imagination. She excelled in her classes and was one of the only students in her high school to gain admission to Saint Petersburg State University, granting my grandmother her one wish.

With a degree in hydraulic engineering from the Saint Petersburg State University, my mother did what many her age living in post-Soviet ’90s did—she emigrated. Two years later, in Canada, I was born, and raising a child became a full-time job for my mother.

As a child, I attended Russian school in Montréal. Classes ran four days a week. We learned Russian and mathematics; took dancing, drawing, acting, and singing classes; organized recitals; and fostered a Russia of our own within the four walls of an old estate at the city’s core.

My mother spent most of those years waiting for me in the car. I’m sure part of her yearned for the creative outlet Russian school offered me in spades. In time, she did end up finding it. An artist in Montréal—a fellow Russian—was offering art classes in her home studio, and my mother signed up. She took it as opportunity to reclaim her inner artist, and in doing so, reconcile her artistic sensibility with her everyday life.

Today, I live in a home filled with art—not only my mother’s, but also pieces she’s collected from friends, auctions, flea markets, and famous artists. Art provides us with a medium to think and communicate with others, connecting us all in a web of creative ideas, experiences,

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and emotions while making sense of our inner lives. Art is the product of human imagination and curiosity coming together to tell a story—a story of our existence.

Art is stubborn.

I remember standing in front of Frida Kahlo’s SelfPortrait with Cropped Hair at the MoMA in New York City and feeling completely in tune with Kahlo’s state of enervation, despite having felt nothing like it myself. In the self-portrait, Kahlo sits in a wooden chair, stripped of her femininity. Strands of her hair cover part of the floor. She is dressed in a man’s suit, too large for her body. Kahlo’s penetrating gaze escapes the canvas.

On the upper margins of the canvas, the lyrics of a popular Mexican song read: “Look, if I loved you, it was because of your hair. Now that you are without hair, I don’t love you anymore.” Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair emulates the violence of her recent separation from her cheating husband, the artist Diego Rivera, and the acknowledgement and acceptance of her new autonomous, androgynous persona. As I stared into her eyes at the MoMA, I saw a fearless woman, one to admire.

“I saw a fearless woman, one to admire.”

In 1925, before she painted Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, Kahlo was confined to her bed after suffering an injury from a debilitating bus accident. Attaching an easel to her bed and incorporating a mirror into the canopy above, she taught herself to paint lying down. She painted her own reality to ease her pain. Kahlo once said, “I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.”

Art enhances our reality, making it rich. Creating art has the same effect.

American artist Carrie Mae Weems’s project The Kitchen Table Series includes 20 photographs and 14 text panels. In 1989, Weems placed a

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“It is both mirror and window.

It allows us to integrate ourselves into the lives of others, illuminating the varied experiences of human life.” camera in her kitchen every day.

The camera stood in front of a simple wooden table illuminated by a single overhead lantern. With Weems playing the lead role, she took numerous shots of an unfolding fictional life, one where the main character eats, cries, talks, argues, and comforts—showing us the intense depth of the human experience. As the series progressed, and others joined her in the room, Weems’s role changed—playing herself, then lover, then friend, then mother.

Her series of black-and-white photographs serve as a mirror, reflecting collective experiences, such as how time changes selfhood, how relationships evolve, the role of a woman in the world, and self-transcendence. Weems is

a Black woman, but she notes that the series is not limited to a particular experience. In 2016, Weems told W magazine, “I think [the series is] important in relationship to Black experience, but it’s not about race.”

By saying so, Weems rejects the narrative that art by Black artists is only about Blackness. Art allows us to explore and address social issues through self-expression.

Weems’s series resonates with her audience because it provides representation to those who rarely witness their identity in art.

Art helps us engage with history, personal or otherwise. It is both mirror and window. It allows us to integrate ourselves into the lives of others, illuminating the varied experiences of human life. Over 30 years later, Weems’s The Kitchen

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Table Series remains contemporary, echoing our experiences and emotions, especially those relevant to women. In many ways, akin to moments lived, art can be fleeting, yet it captures something eternal and universal—melodies of forms, ideas, and acts that compose our lives.

When Vincent Van Gogh began painting, he used the world around him as his subject. Van Gogh wrote 800 letters in his lifetime. Most were to Theo, his brother and closest confidant. Van Gogh struggled with poverty—he only sold one painting when he was alive. He also battled mental illness, which caused him to leave his unsympathetic family and live in homelessness.

Theo took care of him, sending him money and supporting him emotionally. Van Gogh used up most of his monthly allowances on painting supplies, leaving little for food and drink. Painting was his way of numbing the pain of living, anaesthetizing the turbulence of his mind.

Art is like a drug. Sometimes it makes life easier to live—other times it’s an unquenchable addiction.

Michelangelo Buonarroti believed that the human body

was the pinnacle of beauty and harmony—God’s most perfect creation. He said that to imitate the human body perfectly meant to create art nearest to God. This master of Italian Renaissance, akin to his counterpart Leonardo Da Vinci, learned to create realistic, elegant human forms through the study of human anatomy, sometimes relying on corpses. Thirsty for the perfect effigy of the human body, Michelangelo traded his works for cadavers and even snuck into morgues at night to espy knowledge of the human form. A desire for perfection plagues the process of many artists—dissecting corpses was Michelangelo’s way of getting his fix.

When I discover a new musician, I explore their entire discography. The music lessons from Russian school turned me into a musician of my own. I continue to sing, write music, and play the piano in my free time.

They’re a part of me—music and creativity. Being able to think not only critically but imaginatively. I can never get enough of art, no matter what form it comes in.

I asked my mother what she remembers of her father during her childhood. “Music, the accordion, playing

“Sometimes it makes life easier to live, other times it’s an unquenchable addiction.”

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the same passages again and again, for few hours a day, every day,” she told me. He was always busy, immersed in his songs, finding little time to talk to his daughter.

He was happy in his own musical world, running from one rehearsal to the next.

My grandfather was born just before the Second World War. In the first year of the German invasion of Russia in 1941, my grandfather lost his father—leaving his mother to raise him and his brother, who also passed away a few years later, on her own. Poverty-stricken, living off food stamps, and eating mostly potatoes, my great-grandmother saved every penny she could to buy her son an accordion.

When he was in the fourth grade, she’d discovered him playing a wooden stool like it was an accordion. With his small hands, my grandfather would strum the wooden spindles, waving his arms in and out as if expanding and contracting the accordion’s bellows. By the eighth grade, she had saved up enough money to finally buy him a harmonica, then an accordion.

He taught himself music, playing known melodies, hitting bass buttons while strutting the keyboard.

My grandfather then completed extensive conservatory training to become a distinguished accordionist.

As one of only a few in Russia, he travelled to 25 countries with the Russian dance group Dymka, played at the Olympics in 1980, and won countless international accordion competitions, all the while teaching music to young pupils. He dedicated 60 years to music. He retired at 80 years old, and every time I’m back in Russia, the accordion welcomes us at the table, no matter the occasion.

Consciously or not, we dedicate our lives to art.

Art is more than Monets, Da Vincis, and Titans. It is everything around us, from a sprouting flower to a trending tune, from a familiar dish

to a paint-bynumbers filled in by a toddler. Creativity is an attempt by humans to adapt to their environment. In 2018, my mother dragged me to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York to distract me from the disappointment of not being able to fly to Russia as my passport had expired. “It’s the next best thing to the Hermitage,” she joked.

It wasn’t.

After being underwhelmed by the permanent collection, I was surprised with a special exhibit—a room filled with colourful cut-andpaste art. I wasn’t familiar with the artist. My curiosity piqued. I walked over to the info card and found that these works were from Henri Matisse’s late period, a collection of art crafted prior to his death in 1954. The Cut-Outs series was a ground-breaking shift in the artist’s work—creating art by “drawing with scissors,” as he described.

Matisse would cut sheets of paper that had been previously painted with gouache by his assistants into various shapes and sizes. These colourful compositional collages, often abstract, dominated the final decade of his life.

In 1941, Matisse underwent surgery that left him in a wheelchair, bed ridden, and physically unable to paint or sculpt. Eventually, his cut-outs covered walls, then rooms. Even after losing most of his vision, bearing permanently swollen hands, and suffocating with pain day and night, Matisse continued to cut into colours for 14 years, recklessly birthing his own world as he stood at death’s door.

Matisse was like a child drawing random lines and shapes with coloured crayons, somehow creating something worthy of being pinned to the refrigerator. Standing in that room at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, I saw just that—a child’s work, oblivious to the extremities of the world, simply existing. The Cut-Out series reminds me of the ephemeral, unstable, and frail nature of art, one that mirrors all life.

Art is inescapable. When Sargy Mann went blind, he questioned what he would do for the rest of his life. Sculpt, he thought. But following that meager suggestion, he was flooded with subjects from his trip to Cadaques, Spain a few years prior. He took his canvas, painting trolley, and a plastic chair into his garden and began painting. He had a percept of the colour ultramarine as he applied it onto the canvas, painting the blue sea escarpment of the small fishing town. It was the kind of percept we experience when dreaming in colour.

An hour into painting, Mann asked his daughter what she saw.

She said, “It looks like a little table, bottom left, with Peter sitting on the other side of it in front of a large window, with sky, distant hills and dark blue sea. And then on the right, an open doorway with low sun flooding towards you, reflecting off the sea.”

That was exactly what he’d intended.

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The Dinner Table Elisa Nguyen

Cloaked in a quiet suburbia, survivors slice into medium-rare steaks and sip red wine at the dinner table.

Mothers swoop back and forth like trained servers, fathers make a parody out of politics, and the young swipe across tiny screens, slouching behind handheld barriers. With flushed cheeks and gruff voices, the grandfathers, seated at the end of the table, commence a ceremonious impartation of war recollections. A hush fills the house. Food tastes better when the mouths have not been fed. If the children have not experienced suffering, at least they should hear it.

The children don’t care. It’s the twenty-first century in the land of the glorious and free. No communist soldiers pound on their doors, ransacking the young and the old, only mailmen delivering purchased goods. Screams are sacred thrills for soccer games, not daily rituals of another mother mourning her child. Fortune wafts through lecture halls, not gunpowder blowing through bustling streets, where a man with worn clothes begs for money to feed his family. After nine years at a re-education camp, freedom in a tarnished town is as untasteful as the whispers of those lost at sea.

“You have it so much better than we did,” the survivors say, their voice roughened by anger and sadness.

They hold their calloused hands, unknowingly tracing scars from more difficult days. Gratitude rooted in guilt festers like an untreated wound.

The children of survivors have not tasted the tenderness portrayed in film and foreign culture, or at the next-door neighbour’s house. With laced-up sneakers, they are prepared to run from threats they haven’t seen.

But still, they thrive in powerful places, despite the seed that is planted at a young age: that they will never be enough.

It was an ordinary evening—local news played on the television and fog and forest obscured the moonlight, causing time to feel later than it was. Mary finished wiping the counters and drying the dishes, completed her usual rounds from cabinet to drawer, then rested at a kitchen chair. I sat beside her, gazing out the window where blankets of snow covered our yard and glassy icicles dripped off our roof, creating the epitome of a winter wonderland.

Mary, our live-in caregiver—a thin, energetic woman

with a cropped bob and bangs—was hired after my paternal grandmother, a stubborn and independent woman, suffered a stroke and could no longer care for herself. Babysitting Lucas and me was part of the package-deal, at least until my parents came home from work. Our bungalow sat on land protected by the Oak Ridges Conservation Act, which neighboured one of the fastest-growing municipalities in Canada—also known as the city of Vaughan. This made it difficult for me to reconcile whether I preferred city-chic or country-charm—yet another identity crisis for me to eventually overcome.

“Your parents want to spend time with you,” Mary said, motioning for me to sit beside my dad on the couch. She gazed down at me with kind eyes and a grim pout, which she wore throughout the day, like she was enduring an unseen burden that had simultaneously softened and strengthened her. Mary waved her hands in a gentle ‘shoo’ motion. I stayed by her side, so she repeated herself with her usual sing-song voice and a touch of suppressed fatigue that I was too young to observe.

After further urging from Mary, I grudgingly sat next to Dad on the sofa, both of us stiff and unspeaking while the TV droned on in the background. Shortly after, a banging at our door indicated that Mom had arrived home from work. I made an excuse to get up and greet her, moving toward the door. Dad let me go.

Mom worked as a piano teacher in Etobicoke, a thirty-minute drive down Highway 400 and off the Finch exit. At the front of the rented unit was a small room with a piano and a cozy foyer with mismatched furnishings. At the back of the unit was Dad’s headquarters for his start-up company, Philix Technologies. As a child surrounded by humming machines, tangled wires, and energetic employees—intermingled with the sounds of classical music and Mom’s corrections—I often felt like I was in the world’s leading innovation centre. The flimsy plastic window blinds, the disappearing kitchen tucked behind squeaky rolling doors, and the creaky staircase that led to Dad’s cluttered office only added to its allure.

“Did you eat yet?” Mom said as I greeted her.

I shook my head. “No.” “You mean, ‘not yet,’” Mom corrected.

“Sorry. I mean, ‘not yet.’”

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“But still, they thrive in powerful places, despite the seed that is planted at a young age: that they will never be enough.”

Mom dropped her bags by the hallway table, rambling about work while rushing to the kitchen. I waited for her to ask me how my day was.

Earlier that day, I stood at the front of my class, hands shaking as twenty deadpan faces stared back at me. With more ‘uhhs’ and ‘umms’ than I could count, I finished my presentation then took my seat as the next student stood, a dazzling picture of confidence. He smiled at the front of the class, his friends at the back hooting and hollering as he bantered his way through the presentation. I clapped with the class, then the bell rang to go home.

“Why don’t you hire someone to take care of scheduling for you?

That will save time and stress,” I suggested. That was my poor attempt to mention that I wanted to talk to Mom about something, but instead my confession came out as an accusation.

“It’s not that easy, you know,” Mom replied. “I don’t have anyone that I can trust to do it. It’s a lot of work. And they’ll have access to all my information. I can’t just give the job to anyone.”

“You just worry too much,” I replied.

Mom paused. “You know, when I was your age, I had to sweep the floor every day.

And Grand Aunt would slap me if I didn’t put things back where they came from. You are so lucky I’m easy on you.” She reorganized the mugs in our cabinet to her liking.

“Why does it even matter where the mugs are? They’re all the same.”

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“Because you need to have good habits. When you go to someone’s house, they’re going to talk about our family and say nobody ever taught you.”

I stormed off, silently. Mom followed shortly after to tuck me into bed, like she did every night. We said our usual prayers, asking for health and happiness. Mom kissed me on the forehead and shut the door behind her until I could only see a sliver of light and hear the faint mumble of Mom and Dad’s banter. I hugged the blanket tighter to my chest. If Mom and Dad wanted to spend more time with me, why didn’t they?

The next morning, Mom woke me up for school and prepared my lunch.

“Don’t forget to dress warm.”

“I’m fine,” I replied, already halfway out the door.

“I won’t be home until 10 p.m. today,” Mom said.

I already knew that. It was the same almost every night.

I offered a half-hearted wave, back-facing, and caught the bus for another day of school.

A glance out the window will show that seasons passed quickly. Over the course of 10 years, Mom and Dad’s schedule stayed busy, and I floated down the school system’s stream with only a few minor scratches, a hamster wheel we ran on relentlessly. Through a creative writing course in university, I was tasked to write about my family history. For the first time, I listened to

my parents’ story with a journalist’s curiosity, suddenly appreciative of the tales I heard around the dinner table.

Both my parents escaped Vietnam as pre-teens. Around the same age I was assimilating into Canadian schools, they were arriving in an entirely different world with only the valuables they could carry. Most escaped by boat, eating whatever they found on the ground—rotten food, plants, or feces—and were often raped or killed on the journey. My parents were lucky to escape through sponsorship and arrive in Canada on a plane.

In 1962, Dad was born in a hospital in Gia Định, a province surrounding the capital city of Southern Vietnam.

Gia Định province—not to be confused with gia đình, which translates to “family”—was known for its industrial cen-

tres. Dad grew up in the middle of the Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, and recalls playing with gun shells found on the ground.

On January 30, 1968, Gia Định was alive with the excitement of Lunar New Year festivities. Tết is one of the most important celebrations in Vietnamese culture. Based on the lunar calendar, it marks the arrival of spring, the forgetting of troubles, and the blessings for a new year. Families visit each other, dressed in traditional áo dài—a long dress worn with silk pants—and hand out red envelopes with lucky money to obedient children. Families decorate their homes with chrysanthemums or orchids, cook foods such as bánh chưng—sticky rice, seasoned pork, and mung bean wrapped around banana leaves—and

visit family altars to pay respects.

The belief is that good occurrences on the first day of Lunar New Year foretells a good year ahead.

Dad climbed up a bamboo ladder to see festivities at every corner; the turbulent sounds and sights of troops approaching, cities falling, and forces retreating almost forgotten. Without warning, bomber planes flew overhead, bombing cities and scattering people. The attack was an attempt to stir up rebellion in the south of Vietnam and convince the American allies to give up their defence. Dad recalls his family hiding at a church for shelter until the noise died down.

On April 25, 1975, five days before the war was over, a C5A military transport brought Dad and his family to Guam, a military base in the Pacific Ocean. From there, they were flown to Camp Pendleton, a military base located near downtown San Diego, before being sponsored by an uncle who had already settled in Canada. In a brick townhouse with a rickety door, situated in a low-income area in Toronto, Dad became an outsider who didn’t look or speak like those around him. He carried vivid memories of suffering that no one could see, especially the neighbours his age who decided to call him ‘ching.’

A year earlier, in 1974, Mom was born to a literature teacher who was working and waiting for her husband to be released from re-education camp.

Forced to serve for nine years under the pretense of being a rebel, he survived off meager rice portions and salt, worked free labour, and missed most of his daughter’s childhood. Mom recalls the first time her dad returned home. She wondered why her mom burst to tears at the sight of a stranger.

In 1989, Mom was finally sponsored to come to Canada by her aunt and uncle, who escaped by boat years earlier. Before she left,

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“Her memory of my birth reminded me of how much I mattered, just like Mary’s words on that random night.”

Mom’s school friends wrote messages and memories in a journal alongside photos of themselves, so that they wouldn’t be forgotten after Mom’s one-way trip to the land they all dreamed of. In a coloured photo of Mom’s last day in Vietnam, she played a song on the piano for her classmates, her hair in two braids with a pastel pink string tied at the ends, her classmates crowded around her, mesmerized.

Canada was nothing like what Mom had imagined. It was cold and lonely. She couldn’t communicate in English to her older siblings who had immigrated years before.

She wore tanner skin and mismatched hand-me-down clothes, making it hard for her to fit in. Mom spent hours on long bus rides from Scarborough to Spadina for work at the family restaurant, where the whole family helped. At night, she slept in the corner of the room facing the wall while she cried silently so no one would wake up. A kind woman named Mrs. Dorland

offered free piano lessons until Mom’s mother received a better paying job where she stayed until retirement.

When I was born, Mom continued to work, taking only one month for maternity leave. She was self-employed as a piano teacher, which meant she had the flexibility to take time off, but work was essential for survival. A seven-dollar parking pass was a souvenir from the hospital Mom kept on the first page of my photo album, which held photos of baby me meeting the family, cocooned in a blanket, two-thirds of my face flushed pink, as if my skin had been burned alive. Mom said she loved me so much that when Dad asked for a second child, she

couldn’t imagine having more love to spare. Her memory of my birth reminded me of how much I mattered, just like Mary’s words on that random night.

It’s 10 p.m., I’m in my pajamas, and the food is cold. Mom asks me if I ate dinner the minute she walks through the door, and I reply “yes,” a routine response to a routine question. On the crook of her arm hangs her black leather purse filled with ‘just in case’ items, weighing her down and rarely used. In her other hand are bags filled with music books.

Mom speeds into the kitchen, then rambles about the piano lessons she needs to reschedule. She glances at her reflection in the hallway mirror for a split second before turning away. I feel her nervousness, and like an itch at the back of my throat, I tell Mom the words I feel she needs to hear, the words I need to say, because I’m overwhelmed with the feeling that if I don’t, it’ll be too late.

“I love you, Mom.” “Aww, I love you too, hunny.”

“You’re beautiful, Mom. My beautiful momma,” I add, knowing it will make her cringe.

“I always tell my students that only you say that to me.”

“Because it’s true.”

“Well, no one else ever says that to me,” Mom replies.

I don’t reply because I don’t know what to say. Putting my phone down, I glance at Mom while she heats up the leftovers. Peppered grey hair blends into bleached brown, and she wears the same thing she wore yesterday. Not everyone has the inclination to express love through words, because they don’t know how, or they don’t want to. I don’t say much else, though, because a soft smile lingers on her face, and I feel the itch subside.

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My Name is Aroni Aroni Sarkar

“अरोिन” is what I wrote as my name on the top of my third grade Hindi test paper. It was a bold choice. You see, a few months before this test, my Hindi teacher taught everyone in the class how to write our names in the Hindi alphabet. My name, Aroni, is not a Hindi word. It is Sanskrit, an ancient Indo-Aryan language that is the basis of Hindi, and my mother tongue, Bengali. Even though I could have been taught to write my name in a phonetically-correct manner using Hindi characters, my teacher refused. She said my name can only be written as “अरूनी,” pronounced Ar-oo-nee. I told her that this wasn’t my name, but she refused to let me write it any other way. Now, imagine a third grader being told her name isn’t her name.

I went home and asked my parents why they gave me a name that wasn’t a name. Why did they give me a name so complicated that it couldn’t be written in Hindi? My parents, a pair of proud Bengalis, looked at me, speechless. After all the weeks they spent agonizing about what to name me, flipping through books of history, mythology, and philosophy to find the perfect match, I come home saying my teacher won’t let me write my name.

They wiped my teary face and told me to write my name however I wanted to write it—to not let some teacher diminish the significance of what they gifted me. And so, I did.

But I lost two points on the test paper for ‘incorrect spelling.’

This is one of many memories that contribute to my complicated sense of identity. But before we get into that, let me introduce myself a bit better.

I was born in Kolkata, India, the heart of West Bengal. Formerly called Calcutta, the city was a trading post that served as the capital city for the British colonial monopoly, East India Company. Bengal’s architecture, culture, and art became central to the creative spirit of the nation. If you ask anyone from India what Kolkata or Bengalis are known for, they’ll probably give you one of three answers: arts and literature, Rosogolla (a spongy white dessert), or fish. A few knowledgeable ones might say the glorious five-day Durga Puja festival.

My parents are both Bengalis, but they are also from Assam, a state in the Northeast of India known for its one-of-a-kind wildlife, historical archaeological locations, and most famously, its tea. My mother studied Economics and my father Mechanical Engineering. My father works in the shipping industry, which means that my family has sailed across the globe. In fact, I sailed with my parents for about a year before my sister was born.

We hit ports around the world, visiting Egypt, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Malaysia, the U.S., Trinidad and Tobago, and many more. But my parents made it a point that no matter where we were, both my sister and I would be born in Kolkata, surrounded by uncles and aunties, winter mist mixed with pollution, and of course, the never-ending honking cars to accompany our wails.

Eventually, we permanently moved to Singapore and became citizens. I began pre-school in Kolkata, and I dreaded going to school every day for the most trivial of reasons—like not wanting to

wake up early or wear an itchy uniform. Eventually, we moved to Kuala Lampur (KL), Malaysia, a temporary stop on our way to citizenship in Singapore. I finished my year of preschool there, but most of my memories involve feeling out of place.

I saw that everyone in the school looked and spoke differently, and I realized those trivial reasons weren’t that important.

One school day in KL, I got lost and found myself in an empty, dark classroom. When the teacher came to get me, I screamed at the top of my lungs out of fear because I was so out of place—mentally and physically. As she opened the door, the light behind the teacher turned her entrance into that of a classic Disney villain. I look at the class picture today and see myself confused and disconnected from everyone.

After that experience, my parents realised that the transition into a new country, its social systems, and culture should be a little slower. They wanted to make sure that I interacted with Singaporeans while also staying connected to my Indian roots. And so, they did what most Indian expats did: they enrolled me in an Indian international school in Singapore.

The school environment was not the best. Unlike most of the students at this school, I hadn’t spent a significant chunk of my life in India. I hadn’t really build the colloquialisms and mannerisms that most of them possessed. In our blue and grey school uniforms, everyone spoke English, but everyone also had to know Hindi, because it was the only way we could bond over Bollywood movies and music. We marched

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up and down the concrete steps in single file with our hands behind our backs as we hummed the latest Vishal-Shekhar hit.

My parents always spoke to my sister and me in Bengali at home. We watched Hindi movies together before dinner. We read English books before bed.

When I spoke to my friends, I jumbled Bengali and Hindi words together, believing that everyone knew Bengali as well as I did. Instead of saying gravy, I would say the Bengali word “jhol.” Or, instead of the Hindi “kichdi,” I would say “kichuri” to refer to a classic comfort food. The difference is ever so slight, but it was always made into a huge deal by my friends.

My confusion deepened when I realized that Hindi and Bengali had the same translations for certain English words, like “chaabi” for “key.” I couldn’t differentiate as quickly or as easily which were only Bengali words that no one else knew, and which were Hindi words that everyone knew. Although I was an Indian among Indians, I always felt otherized.

“Although I was an Indian among Indians, I always felt otherized.”

Even when my family returned to India to visit our relatives, my sister and I would be out in the market with my cousins wearing the same type of t-shirts or kurtas, yet, without even uttering a word, the shopkeepers knew we were outsiders. When our entire extended family gathered for dinner, whenever we said “joodi,” they would laugh because we were supposed pronounce it as “jodi.” Because of the heat, I used to tie my long, thick hair in a bun, but they would smile at me because that is a hairstyle grandmothers wear—not young girls. I understand why those shopkeepers marked us as outsiders. An insider wouldn’t

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look around at every stall and item, or use solely their fingertips while eating with our hands rather than their whole hands, or call the shopkeeper “uncle” instead of “brother.”

My parents are very progressive, considering the conservative environment in India where they grew up.

Their thoughts on how we should be raised, the values we should embody, and the culture and environment we grew up in were not aligned with many other Indian expats we knew. My parents never imposed views of what an Indian “sanskari” girl should be like, never made us feel ashamed of pursuing our interests, and always encouraged us to be independent in our decision-making.

A lot of my Indian expat friends had parents that were afraid their children would forget their Indian roots. My parents, on the other hand, wanted us to actively engage with local Singaporean culture, enrolling us in community events, projects, and classes. My mother is still a Grassroots Leader in Singapore, and is heavily involved with local events and community gatherings.

So not only did my parents encourage us to be active with the community, but they also led by example. My perception of what it meant to live in Singapore was very different than my other expat friends who stayed isolated within their cultural and ethnic groups.

Singapore embodies a mix of traditional conservative East-Asian and Western liberal practices and beliefs. If you walk down any street and sit at a corner to observe, you can immediately see the interaction between these cultural systems. Language, clothing, conversations, food, architecture, and technology are just a few markers of cultural identity within communities.

The flip flops or open-toed shoes on everyone’s feet, the “lahs” and “alamaks” in passing conversations, the squeaky-clean roads and pavement, the rough sand on the beaches, and the tissues falling apart from the sweat I wiped off my face are just a few elements that make up my Singaporean experience.

Knowing what the Indian education system was like (both within India and in Indian schools outside of India), and the style used to teach children, my parents didn’t want my sister and me to continue in that direction. So, they transferred us to a global international school that had campuses across the world. We went to the Singapore campus, of course. All of a sudden, instead of my friends being just Indians or Singaporeans, my friends were from Thailand, Australia, Sri Lanka, Denmark, England, Myanmar, Philippines, China, Japan, and everywhere else.

I felt comfortable in this school rather than alienated, no longer like the odd one out. All the typical high school experiences happened here, the same tropes of exploring myself and exhausting my immaturities continued. My social life was average—not the best, not

the worst. But I felt more comfortable because of one fundamental difference: I was taught to appreciate my individuality rather than to be ashamed of it.

Subtle differences in cultural experiences drove every conversation between my peers and me. Our individual linguistic, cultural, societal, and familial diversities made for unique perspectives in the way we critiqued and learned our academic material. When we enacted Shakespeare, I was able to compare it to Rabindranath Tagore or Satyajit Ray. When we talked about British culture in a Jane Austen novel, we were also able to consider its legacy in India and Singapore, both postcolonial nations. When we read James Baldwin, we were able to discuss our own experiences with racism and feelings of otherness.

In this school, I ran a student club that produced an Indian dance showcase to raise funds for a non-governmental organisation in Kolkata called Voice of World. I was encouraged, through this experience, to share my Bengali heritage with Indians and non-Indians alike. Every lunch leading up to the show, we would blast Bollywood music in the plaza, incorporating mainstream Indian culture as well. It warmed my heart to see everyone sing along to Hindi and Bengali songs, rather than just English songs. We learnt to share our individual cultural backgrounds instead of locking out our different values and mindsets for the sake of cohesion.

After immense reflection, I began to better understand how I, over the years, started to embody elements of Bengali culture, mainstream Indian culture, Singaporean culture, and Western liberal culture. The instinctual pull toward the arts and humanities common among Bengalis, the whole-hearted dedication to watching Bollywood movies and listening to its music, calling taxi drivers and shopkeepers uncles and aunties, and speaking English as my first language have influenced my perspective and geared how I interact with the world around me. The lens through which I view my loved ones, my surroundings, my work, and my

passions is fuelled by 22 years of accumulating bits and pieces of different languages, cultures, and values.

Today, I go beyond writing “अरोिन” or “अरूनी.” I wear a necklace that my parents made soon after I was born with my name engraved in the Bengali script, “অরিন.”

Pronounced Au-ro-ni, this name is unfamiliar to me because no one ever called me that, nor did I feel comfortable encouraging this pronunciation because I thought it wasn’t a name. However, I like to think about the metamorphosis my name has gone through every time I introduce myself to people. The significance of my name for me has gone beyond its pronunciation or spelling; it has become a vessel for the four cultural systems that have created a home within me. Now, I would like to re-introduce myself to you without fear of judgement or losing two exam points.

Hi, my name is Aroni.

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Monotoned Me Simrah Siddiqui

I waited two years to go back in person because I was going crazy at home. I was tired of my everyday routine; wake up, eat, sit at my computer for twelve hours (maybe more), study and sleep—only to repeat it all over again the next day, and the next, and the next.

The first few days of in person classes were fun, seeing the friends

I hadn’t seen in two years, meeting people for the first time after talking to them online. But then the assessments started creeping up.

Now it’s just midterm after midterm, assignment after assignment, and it’s overwhelming.

Then I realized—I am not a robot. Yes, school is important. Yes, I can’t fail that class again. Yes,

my parents will be disappointed if I don’t do well. But I need a break.

I turned off my laptop, and reflected on my life. I painted my feelings, got lost in a book, pampered my skin, and Facetimed friends.

Suddenly, everything fell into place, because I could see that I am more than my achievements, and I am worthy of self-care.

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Our World Through Rhythm Julia Skoczypiec

I never paid attention to the sound of footsteps. The rhythmic thuds of feet patting against dry concrete, crunching through heaps of snow, or gliding between blades of fresh cut grass. These sounds are often mundane, muddled and missing within the noise of everyday life. In between the crowds of students rushing through my university campus, the lineups in front of Starbucks, and the cycle of city buses weaving around and past institutional buildings, many sounds become muted. Back in my first year, three years ago, sound had no meaning.

Henri Lefebvre, a French philosopher who critiques humanity’s connection to city life, writes about sound in motion. “To grasp a rhythm, it is necessary to have been grasped by it; one must let oneself go, give oneself over, abandon oneself in its duration,” reads a quote from Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis. From traffic, tourists, and clocks ticking, each sound has a different rhythm.

Each sound has a purpose.

For many years, I only considered rhythms in music. I could not hear soundtracks apart from repetitive drumbeats, guitar chords, and lyrics. The rhythm of life was insignificant. Lefebvre discovers that movement, whether it is inside the body or in existence around us, can be heard through an approach that binds motions and sounds. These patterns and routines that create the sounds in our everyday lives—like car tires galloping against miles of streetcar tracks or the 5pm Friday laughter from office workers—helps us identify and understand the way we use rhythm to structure our lives.

It is through the repetition of similar sounds and the patterns of movement that we build daily routines.

Spending time in isolation forced me to listen. I occupied myself by embracing the outdoors, even on the days when I felt like the outdoors did not embrace me.

I walked every day, aimlessly trotting along the grounds of Colonel Samuel Smith Park in Etobicoke, watching birds perched atop maple trees, and inhaling the damp aroma of melting snow and muck. I listened, carefully seeking rhythms in new forms, and sounds from near, far, and within. My newfound curiosity allowed me to notice the crashing of Lake Ontario’s waves against muddy shores, the crunch of bicycle tires on gravel roads, the pounding of my heart as my steps quickened and slowed. I wondered: how do the sounds around us relate to one another? What makes a sound alive?

In his writing, Lefebvre makes a fundamental

observation: rhythms, like all things living, are diverse.

Some develop in cycles—repetitive noises from schoolchildren, supermarket customers, and tourists. Others are brief—sounds of sirens, screams, and church bells—noises that pierce our ears in the most unexpected moments. These rhythms are external; these sounds are around us daily. Still, I often struggle to hear them.

In a world where visual aesthetics supersede the auditory, where the flashy images we see on our phones, in movies, and along billboards on the freeway capture our attention instantaneously, daily noises become just that—daily noises. They lack significance and their

“It is through the repetition of similar sounds and the patterns of movement that we build daily routines.”

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diversities cannot be identified. It is only in moments of shock—like when ambulance sirens scream or babies cry—that we stop and listen.

My recollections of my university campus are mostly visual—noiseless pictures played in fast motion. I visualize students zooming to class like colourful Nascar cars.

I can smell the slow-roasting campus shawarma. Back then, I wore headphones, drowning out the life around me for overplayed pop playlists. I fell into a rhythm of my own: wake up, trek to campus, go to class, leave. I could only hear the repetition of this dull routine. The rest felt silent.

Although often fear-inducing, silence awakens the soul like a loud thud, or an unexpected call. Silence is the off-beat in a cyclical rhythm, a beat that makes me wonder and reflect. It is in these moments, when the cars and the voices in front of my apartment pause for a short minute, that I discover what lies within me—my breath, my heartbeat, my stomach’s growl. I learned that silence is not soundless. Bodily rhythms chime like a never-ending orchestra. Breathe. Pause. Listen.

Repeat.

Pauline Oliveros, an American composer, writes about the “sonosphere.” The term “sonosphere” represents “the sonorous or sonic envelope of the earth.” In her writing, Oliveros enlightens readers about the human connection to sound, and how “all cells of the earth and body vibrate.” To me, the earth is a badass woman with continents and oceans tattooed all over her brittle skin. She’s “Mother Earth” after all. Even within the silence, the earth tells us her story. She binds us to her

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trees, winds, and oceans through sombre rhythms. She lets us know that her glaciers are melting, that her rainstorms appear in unpredicted patterns, that she needs help.

She wants us to listen. But do we?

On my strolls during lockdown, I let my mind wander. From winter into spring, the lake ebbed and flowed in lively patterns. It never took a break. In mid-May, I crossed along a path covered in multi-coloured stones, my Conversewearing feet wobbling towards the mud-rock shore. I scanned the filthy lakeside, its rhythms so cyclical yet its appearance so demolished.

and speedboats and Sea-doos and rocks and plastic water bottles—a solemn symphony that many ignored.

Daily rhythms and vibrations connect us with the environment and others. In her work on the “sonosphere,” Oliveros explores her reliance on sound as a guide; a sense that brings faith to her existence.

She writes, “We live in a sonorous environment. Most of the time we shut out sound that is extraneous to our current purposes. It takes energy to ignore sounds.”

Growing up, my dad and I always blasted music in our silver Honda

“Silence is the offbeat in a cyclical rhythm, a beat that makes me wonder and reflect.”

Coca-Cola cans, disposable face masks, condoms, and paper-thin pebbles ravaged by erosion bordered the shoreline like patches of green-grey sewage. Pedestrians passed, laughing with their friends, smoking, eating chocolate bars wrapped in plastic, the same plastics that tumbled along the mud they walked along. Through its continual movement, the lake spoke.

It spewed grotesque, polluted waters. Its tempo sped up and slowed down through the movements of winds

Fit. The bass boomed through the dotted speakers on the interior of each door, rattling the car as if we were inside of a pepper shaker— coarse and gritty. We listened to rambunctious disco, clattering hard rock, and elegant Italian ballads— even though we weren’t Italian. One of my dad’s favourites was “Piccola e fragile” by Italian rock singer Drupi. He would “ooo” and “aaa,” sing-shouting and mispronouncing the words in the chorus while playing air drums on the base of the steering wheel at every red light and stop sign.

“Its tempo sped up and slowed down through the movements of winds and speedboats and Sea-doos and rocks and plastic water bottles—a solemn symphony that many ignored.”

“Why are we listening to this?” I asked, poking fun at my dad’s passionate and raspy voice. “You don’t even know what he is singing about.”

“I don’t have to know,” my dad said. “I can feel his emotion.”

I’ve always wondered why songs like “Despacito” and “Gangnam Style” became international hits.

With billions of streams and YouTube views, these dance tunes written in Spanish and Korean received traction worldwide and they have not been forgotten. The reason? Well, the first ten seconds of each song features unique instrumentation. The use of ear-catching, finger plucked Latin strings and fouron-the-floor kick drum patterns make each tune memorable. Every beat inflicts some sort of bodily response—tapping feet, bobbing heads, arms high, fists pumping. It doesn’t matter what language a song is in; the rhythms can often tell its story. It is the everchanging movement of sounds that unites listeners.

Lefebvre describes rhythms in the present. He explores social media as a space that unites rhythms but creates false images for spectators. “You are there [when viewing a live broadcast], but no, you are not there; your present is composed of simulacra; the image before you simulates the real…”

I think about action movies—Baby Driver, Red Notice, everything James Bond. I hear all the explosions, the flames, and the cars flipped upside down and over. It’s interesting how these movies tell us stories of experiences that many have never encountered—how each noise is either produced by a special effect or by a foley artist crashing tin cans in a recording booth. Amid the falsehood and the intentionally over-dramatic booms and bangs, these fictional rhythms illustrate worlds that invite viewers in. We feel the emphasis of each cry, rip, shatter, and gun shot through our own responses—quickened heart beats, dropped jaws, fervid swearing at the TV screen. Although we are not there, we are present.

Through the daily sounds of moving vehicles, footsteps, winds, waters, music, movies, and silence, we understand ourselves and others. We connect with our world. Paying attention to rhythms is often tedious. It takes contemplation and frequent awareness to connect with the meanings behind sounds—an aspect of listening that is often puzzling. Regardless, rhythms are not universally heard but they are universally felt. Like music, the patterns of sounds in motion display a language of their own.

The unbelievable becomes believable. The inanimate becomes alive. If we pay more attention to sounds, if we take moments within our days to stop and listen, maybe the rhythms of the world can tell us something new. Something revolutionary.

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Seventy Years of First Dates Juliana Stacey

Jeannette - 1952 “I do not know how I’ll survive dancing in these shoes tonight,” I say, crouching down to rub the back of my ankle with my thumb.

The backs of my brand-new blue kitten heels dig into my skin with each step. Amelia, my best friend, laughs and pulls me inside the Gimli Recreation Centre. Streamers and balloons decorate the main hall for this month’s community dance—an event I always look forward to.

Amelia points to a table in the corner. There is a line of people waiting to get drinks and snacks.

We make our way to the end of the line, knowing that if we don’t get there soon, there won’t be anything left for us. I look around at everyone in attendance. Gimli is a small town, so I can pretty well name everyone in the room.

A young man I don’t recognize flashes his teeth at me from a table at the other end of the room.

His dark brown hair parts perfectly to the left, and his grin is so wide it fills the whole dance hall. I feel my cheeks go red as I turn to Amelia.

“Who’s that over there?”

“Who?” Amelia stretches up on her tiptoes to get a better view.

“Blue suit, nice smile.” I look in his general direction, hoping Amelia will take the hint. She peers over shoulders and cranes her neck to the side. I know she’s seen him when her eyes go wide.

“Him? That’s George Stacey.

He’s here with the army­­—drives the service bus out to Winnipeg Beach for the summer.”

I catch his eye one more time and smile.

“Huh. He’s pretty good-looking, isn’t he?”

“I’ll let him know right away. Thank you, General. You have a nice day now.” I put the phone back on the receiver and finish up with my notes, making sure to write the date in the top righthand corner. The RCMP office is always busy, but today feels as though I’ve been answering a call every 30 seconds. I’m not the only one though; everyone in the office is scrambling to get their paperwork in, being a Friday afternoon and all.

“Jeannette?” My boss, Mr. Sanderson, stops at my desk.

He wears a navy-blue suit with gold cufflinks, the kind you find in the expensive section of Eaton’s catalogue.

I straighten my back, smooth out my blouse, and look up at him with a smile.

“Yes, sir?”

“I have a friend that I think you would do well to meet. He’s been in the army for the past couple years.

Maybe I could arrange for the two of you to get together?”

“Sure, thank you sir.” I nod.

“Great! He’ll pick you up tomorrow and take you to Winnipeg Beach on the service bus.” He strolls over to his office.

“Jeannette, we simply must have a tea party before you leave,” Janie whines, pulling the sleeve of my top and dragging me toward the backyard. It’s 8:45 p.m. on a Friday—15 minutes after Janie’s bedtime, to be exact—and I’m 15 minutes away

from finishing my babysitting shift.

Janie tugs harder on my blouse, stretching my sleeve as far as it can go.

“No, Janie, we have to get you in bed before your parents get home.

You know the rules: you can stay up late, as long as it doesn’t get me in trouble. The RCMP dinner is over by now, they’re bound to be back any minute.” I point to the stairs. Janie pouts, folding her bottom lip over itself in preparation for the greatest display of crocodile tears she’s performed since last week.

“None of that,” I say, picking her up and whisking her into her bedroom. I make my way back to the living room, where a mess of crayons and dolls awaits me. I begin to tidy the room, careful to put everything in its rightful place; Mrs. Holloway is the kind of woman who would notice if a vase were on the wrong side of the table, or if a blanket had been moved to the other chesterfield.

Keys jingle on the other side of the front door. I speed through the rest of my cleaning, managing to straighten up the sofa cushions and sit down just as Sergeant and Mrs. Holloway walk in.

“Jeannette, the place is spotless!

I can always count on you to keep Janie in line.” Mrs. Holloway beams.

She throws her arms back and lets her coat slide into her husband’s arms.

“It’s no trouble, really. Janie’s a real swell girl,” I say, nudging a stray crayon under the couch with my foot.

“We sat at the table across from your cousin and her husband tonight,” Mrs. Holloway says, glancing over at my left hand, which I

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shimmy up into my sleeve. “Really sweet couple, and good-looking too.”

“Yes, the two of them are quite happy.” I smile once more, this time turning away from her gaze.

“You know, Jeanette, I also ran into one of my friends at the dinner tonight. Quite the strapping young fellow.

You really ought to meet him sometime. I can arrange a time for the two of you to meet, but only if you’d like.” Sergeant Holloway says, hanging his wife’s coat on the rack.

“I appreciate that, sir, but I’ve already got plans to meet someone that my boss at the RCMP telephone office suggested. He’s actually taking me to Winnipeg Beach in the morning. Thank you though.” I gather my things and put on my flats. Sergeant Holloway hands me an envelope with my stipend for the night.

When the RCMP service bus rolls up and I see the driver’s face, I know exactly who he is; I remember those eyes from the dance a couple weeks ago. I spend the whole bus ride to Winnipeg Beach staring at my shoes.

George Stacey sits next to me, whistling, humming, and tapping the steering wheel the entire drive down from the military base in Gimli.

We drive straight down the route to Winnipeg Beach, stopping periodically to let passengers on or off and never staying in one place for very long. George keeps his hands steady on the wheel, 10 and two at all times, his gaze fixed on the road ahead. I try to think of something to say, but every time I muster up the courage to speak, the doors to the bus open, and George takes the time to greet each new passenger.

George and I exchange quick glances and closedlip smiles, but nothing more. Silence sits between us, even as the bus fills with chatter from the RCMP members in the back. At Winnipeg Beach, we drop off our passengers and welcome new ones. We don’t stop to take a look at the water or spend time on the dock.

George turns around and gets on the road right back to Gimli. Our silence is uninterrupted on the way home.

The next day, just as I sit down to read, the telephone on the kitchen wall rings. I race to pick it up before my father does, getting there just as he puts his hand on the receiver.

“Jeannette?”

“Yes?” “It’s George. I wanted to call and ask if you want to come to the dance with me tomorrow night.”

I pause for a moment, trying to remember if I’d already agreed to babysit.

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“Sure. That sounds fun,” I say. I hang up the phone, turning my head to hide my grin from my father’s gaze.

Over two years later, George and Jeannette Stacey were married on December 18, 1954. In 2021, they celebrated their sixty-seventh wedding anniversary.

Cassidy - 2019 “I can’t do this anymore,” I sigh. After three hours of excruciatingly boring reading, I’m nowhere closer to finishing the chapter than when I first sat down. I close my economics textbook and lean back in my desk chair. Its wheels wobble under my weight, sending the chair, and me, backward into a pile of laundry sitting at the foot of my bed. I get up, stopping to remove a stray sock from the wheel, and collapse onto my bed face first.

Another Friday night and I’m sitting here alone.

Again. Great.

I groan as I roll onto my back. The fairy lights I taped to my ceiling last week have come loose, spilling onto my pillow and tangling in my hair. As I reach up to free myself from the mess of strands and strings, my hand meets my phone, which rests on the pillow next to me.

I punch in my passcode and scroll through all four of my notifications.

Being a Friday night at the beginning of the semester, most of my friends have probably found the nearest house party—not that I would know. They’ve stopped inviting me to those things because I always say no.

It’s always the same routine—they all file into someone’s living room, crack open a bottle of Grey Goose or two, and end up passed out on the bathroom floor. I’ve decided that spending my Friday nights studying was much more productive than nursing a hangover every Saturday morning.

While I’ve managed to dodge their Friday night endeavours, I couldn’t escape my best friend’s matchmaking attempts. Two of the notifications on my phone are from Tinder, the account she set up under the guise of a personality quiz.

I should have seen it coming when she snuck my phone out of my bag and began to quiz me on things she’s known for years, like my favourite colour and whether I like dogs.

One week and about 25 notifications later, I still can’t figure out how she found the time to swipe through so many guys. Most of the ones she picked are clearly not looking for a long-term relationship, especially with bios like “Here for a good time, not a long time.”

I open the app and look through my conversations,

hoping for a laugh more than anything else. Two profile pictures greet me—one of a blonde guy holding a golden retriever with a matching haircut, and the other of an iPhone selfie. I tap that one to get a closer look.

His profile picture is one of those mirror flash photos, the kind that blinds the camera to the point where the only recognizable thing in the picture is the phone itself.

Nice pick, Erika. She had obviously swiped right on every guy that popped up on the screen.

Both conversations start with the same message: What’s up?

I decide to match their unoriginality with my own, giving them both the same tired line in reply: Nothing much, how about you?

I cast my phone to the side and wait, not expecting to get any answer. I’m almost asleep when my phone buzzes. It’s iPhone—his name is Brendon, but all I can think of when I talk to him is that awful profile picture.

Stuck at home on a Friday night?

What’s going on with that?

You didn’t answer my question Answer mine first

I invited you to brunch.

Point taken, but I still know nothing about you Well come to brunch tomorrow and find out Meet me at Denny’s, the one on Dixie and Matheson. I’ll be in a blue sweater I turn off my phone and slink under the covers.

There’s no way I’m going to do this.

The next morning, I spend two hours trying to pick an outfit, only to settle on the same grey cardigan and faded jeans I gravitate to for every social outing. I show up at the nearest Denny’s for brunch. I enter the building, scanning the room for the blue sweater. The waitress at the front points me in the direction of a dark-haired boy in a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey, who’s sitting at a table by the window.

I slide into the booth so that I’m facing him. He looks up from his phone, his blue eyes wide.

“Cassidy?”

“Yup. You’re not wearing a sweater.”

So tomorrow then?

But I asked first

Not Denny’s again. Please

But your answer will be more interesting How do you know?

My stomach can’t take it It wasn’t that bad

Trust me, I just do

For you, sure

How about you answer me and then I’ll let you know which one is more interesting?

Okay fine. What do you want to do then?

You know what?

How about you meet me for brunch tomorrow and I’ll tell you then?

UH, slow down.

How do I know you’re not a serial killer? ...

...

What?

Tomorrow’s supposed to be really nice.

Why don’t we drive out to the beach?

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Soundless Vibrations Dalainey Gervais

It took me a while to understand the preciousness of communication and the beauty of being understood.

It took watching two of the people I hold closest to my heart—my cousin Maddy and my brother Noah—struggle with endless frustration. Their divergent means of communication obstructed their thoughts, leaving friends and family guessing at their needs.

I was an only child for the first seven years of my life but the role of a sibling was filled by my little cousin, Maddy—my honorary brother. Some of my earliest and fondest memories with him include building forts and playing video games. We were often described as opposites. Maddy’s booming voice echoed through the house while I silently watched him sing to his favourite songs.

He had a sense of confidence I craved. His humour and laughter made him stand out.

To the adults in the room, it was his speech impediment that stood out the most. As a child, it took me a while to notice. I understood him because I knew him, just like his mother understood him. I didn’t think much of the way that he spoke until after his tongue was fixed.

Tongue-tie, or ankyloglossia, is a physical abnormality where at birth an individual’s tongue is attached to the floor of the mouth, secured in place by the frenulum.

Symptoms of tongue-tie typically arise early, for example, when an infant has trouble latching during breastfeeding due to the extra web of skin. Most infants have the extra web of tissue cut at birth; it’s something that nurses check for post-delivery. But nobody checked under Maddy’s tongue.

A tongue-tie doesn’t affect a child’s ability to learn language, but it does affect articulation. The tongue plays an important role in the way we speak, constantly moving, lightly tapping the back of your front teeth to pronounce “t”s and lifting to pronounce “r”s, as if by instinct. With ankyloglossia, the inherent movement of the tongue is restricted.

“You mean Noah?” my aunt Crissy asks, crossing her arms over her chest.

“No, Nora.” His nose scrunches as he closes his lips.

“Noah, like Dalainey’s brother?”

“No, Nora!” he says, louder this time, his voice filling the room.

Speech disorders are conditions where individuals have difficulties communicating speech sounds. There are a variety of types of speech impediments ranging in

severity and origin. Some are present at birth, while others are developed.

A recurring stutter is a common speech impediment affecting the fluency of an individual’s idiom. Stutters can improve or worsen over the course of someone’s life. Some impediments may affect the pronunciation of certain sounds, such as a lisp. These are caused by the misplacement of the tongue during articulation. There is no eminent cause for a lisp, but years in speech pathology treatment as a child can ameliorate or eliminate it.

Biological differences in the anatomy of the mouth—like the tongue, lips, or throat—can cause speech disorders.

Cleft palate speech is a phenomenon similar to a lisp, caused by difficulties in articulation with a cleft lip. While most cleft lips are corrected in early childhood, they can still cause complications in speech development.

After years of misunderstandings as a result of his speech disorder, Maddy underwent a frenotomy. This procedure cuts the frenulum, the web of tissue holding the tongue to the bottom of the mouth, to allow his tongue to move freely. His tongue was unshackled, free of struggle.

In the following years, Maddy worked alongside a speech language pathologist to correct the lisp he developed with his ankyloglossia. He was relieved that people finally understood him. After spending the first part of his life endlessly repeating himself, he could pronounce his “t”s and “r”s. With a bit of help, he was able to pronounce both “Noah” and “Nora”. Finally, Maddy gained his voice.

My seven-year-old self was not exhilarated by the thought of no longer being my parent’s only child. A diary entry, stolen by my parents from my second-grade journal, describes my early relationship with Noah. In my sparkly pink notebook, I scribbled in janky cursive: Dear diary, I am so tired because I got no sleep. I got no sleep in the last week! The baby just cries and poops and eats and cries. And then he cries some more all through the night.

Dalainey

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In his toddler years, my little brother made us laugh with words we thought he had made up, like many toddlers do while learning language.

Once, at the mall, he saw a sweater he liked and described it as “froofry,” a word we still use in the family as a replacement to “fluffy.” The flexibility of language allowed us to understand what he meant and add a new silly word to our vocabulary.

At the time, we didn’t know the severity of his ear problems. In the first grade, my brother’s teacher recommended that my parents bring Noah to a speech language pathologist. There were delays in his speech development compared to other students in his class.

It is routine to have a hearing test with an otolaryngologist prior to an initial meeting with a speech pathologist. I remember Noah in his favourite Montréal Canadiens t-shirt sitting in what looked like a recording booth, wearing headphones the size of his head. After the hearing test, the otolaryngologist conducted a visual exam of his ear canal.

Through the pediatric otoscope, he saw a ruptured eardrum covered in blood, and wax obstructing his ear.

His ears were a problem through most of his language-learning years.

He developed a speech impediment because he couldn’t properly hear the language stimuli around him. My brother relied primarily on reading our lips. His made-up vocabulary quickly became a sad reminder that he couldn’t hear our mother’s soft laughter or our father’s cheesy jokes. He was only mimicking the shapes of our mouths.

After his first ear treatment, Noah came home from school and made my mother cry. He asked us about sounds around the house that he had never experienced before.

Sounds that we heard every day and brushed off—like the ticking of the grandfather clock in our dining room and the clicking his toy trains made as wheels travelled over tracks. He told us that he finally

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“He was only mimicking the shapes of our mouths.” heard his teacher give a lesson at school. When we asked him what he thought his teacher was doing at the front of the class all day, he opened and closed his mouth like a doll without its ventriloquist.

Once we became aware of the severity of his ear condition, my brother took part in regular ear cleaning at a clinic and underwent a surgery called a myringotomy. When a child shows signs of impacted earwax and recurring infections, a doctor may recommend the placement of tubes in the ears. This is a process where a small hole is made in the eardrum and a tube is placed to equalize the air pressure between the middle and outer ear. This surgery helped reduce my brother’s production of wax and the frequency of his ear infections.

Soon after, Noah began regular sessions with a speech pathologist to correct the impediment he developed from his hearing impairment. I took part in his sessions and learned more about the construction of language. Watching the speech pathologist break down sounds and vowels motivated me to understand the connections between the biology of speech production and the ways that we portray our identity through language. While the speech pathologist taught my brother how to round his lips to vocalize the letter “b” by obnoxiously opening and closing her lips to emit the sound, I

realized that I had no recollection of being taught how to do so myself.

I had never considered the influence that the anatomy of the ear had on the way that we learn language. To process speech, sound waves enter the ear and cause the eardrum to vibrate. This vibration is intensified by the ossicles, three tiny bones located in the middle ear which transmit to the cochlea. The cochlea, filled with liquid, alters the vibrations into electrical impulses that are sent to the brain through the auditory nerve.

I have also felt the vexations of being misunderstood. Growing up in a French-Canadian household in Toronto, my parents never encouraged me to learn English as a child. Why should I risk losing my language and culture if my friends and family were all French? My parents watched as their friends traded their Francophone-ness for English friends and English curricula, the pride in their shared culture diminishing.

My father especially encouraged me to keep up my French heritage.

He spoiled me with French books and movies. He served me breakfast while I watched La Boîte à Lunch, my favourite Sunday morning cartoon on the French channel. I grew up in North York with the Don River

as my backyard, and on walks by the water with my father we sang songs by Annie Brocoli. Over the Christmas holidays, our cozy apartment smelled of tourtière and traditional Quebécois sugar pies. The voice of FrenchCanadian icon Carmen Campagne brought us together for the season of giving.

I went to a French elementary school and spoke French with my friends, but I was still exposed to English. Anyone living in Toronto is exposed to the language through billboard advertisements and walking down the aisles in the grocery store. Most of my life, I knew Cinnamon Toast Crunch as Croque Crannelle; my language is proudly printed on every sugar-filled cereal box. Even now, I have the choice to experience most of my world in French.

Before I was old enough to go to school, my parents searched for a babysitter to take care of me through the day while they were at work. My parents entrusted me to an elderly couple, Nanny and Pop, looking for a friend for their toddler nephew. We bonded quickly and became part of each other’s family.

Nanny and Pop’s warm home in the suburbs of Toronto was where I was most exposed to English.

Through spending my days with them, I picked up on some English, but I never seemed to hear them right.

Before every meal, we would say the same prayer: “God is good, God is great, Bless him for this food, Amen” And my interpretation: “God is good, God is steak, Spank him for my food, Oh man”

Nanny and Pop were from Newfoundland and spoke a different dialect of English than the one I heard every day at the park. With strong linguistic influences from early English and Irish settlers, the geographical isolation of Newfoundland in relation to the rest of Canada has resulted in the preservation of a dialect entirely unique to the province. The features of Newfoundland English are reflective of Canada’s early history of colonialism.

A prominent difference between mainland Canadian and Newfoundland English lies in consonant variations, most noticeably dropping “r”s and pronouncing “th” as

“d” or “t”. This, along with relying on words of Irish Gaelic origins, may be one of the reasons I never seemed to hear Nanny and Pop right.

I was happy with my French identity and, like my parents, saw no need to deepen my understanding of English beyond what I had learned by spending the day with Nanny and Pop. When my father transferred to Mississauga for work, I was enrolled in an elementary school within walking distance of the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM). As a class, we often walked to the campus with our teacher and ate our lunch on the lawn by the Instructional Building while watching football players practice. Before then, I hadn’t really thought about university or what might come after high school.

Being in an academic environment with next to no experience in English made me uneasy. I had always dreamt of thriving in a place like UTM: it was a place of knowledge and camaraderie. I realized that English might be an asset in the future and that I should focus on expanding my language abilities.

Once I finished the sixth grade, I transferred to an extended French middle school in the area, where half of my day was in French, and the other was in English. I had conversational English skills, but I felt lost in my first year at my new school . My classmates weren’t fluent enough in French to speak to me, and I wasn’t fluent enough in English to speak to them.

On occasion, my accent would slip, causing my cheeks to glow from embarrassment. Teenagers are critical, and I felt their eyes on me as I panicked in search of words I had not yet learned. I saw confusion twist their expressions as I stumbled over phrases. This, I assume, is the closest I will ever feel to what Noah and Maddy experienced.

Over the course of my life, I’ve been exposed to the power of language without acknowledging it.

Language communicates our thoughts and desires and expresses our identities and

lived experiences. Soon, I will graduate from UTM, having spent the past five years learning about physiological differences that affect speech, like my cousin Maddy’s ankyloglossia. I have learned about environmental conditions that can cause lisps like my brother Noah’s. My professors taught me how dialects can reflect our ancestral histories through language variations such as those spoken by Nanny and Pop. Standing with my diploma in hand, I will whisper “merci” to Maddy and Noah for revealing the preciousness of communication and guiding me to my passion for language.

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Skin Against Our Fingertips Paige France A year without summer, A night without stars—the constellations aligned, Perched high above the sky’s radiant stunner, Life without connection is stumbling through the darkness blind, Connection, a delicate force of the human heart, Giving meaning in a world of conformity, With universality that does not hinder progression, prejudice falls apart, The distinction between harmony and uniformity, To see differences between black and white, And fight for them when inequalities arise, To respect the wrinkled and those of plight, And entrust the firm and youthful, without compromise, To acknowledge ones worn and dirty from labour, And ones scarred from war, To love every neighbour, And to stand up for what you stand for, Skin connects our bodies, uncloaking our identities, Molding us into one, Society’s built-in amenities, An exchange of positivity, where hatred comes undone, But how do we grasp connection? Is it skin against our fingertips?

Or the belonging inside our hearts?

The yearning to know every inch, To understand beyond the surface, every part,

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The knowledge that hearts beat fast, slow, and divine, A tender organ that connects us, negating history’s wraith, With an indestructible and ever-winding twine, Toward intimacy deeper than touch, we are marionettes controlled by faith, Guiding the world into a new age ahead, Respecting religions, without being compelled to join them, The needle and thread, We are a community, sewn in, With his turban the colour of marigold, And her bindi adorned on her forehead proudly, When chaos and turmoil and conflict are laid to rest, coming in from the cold, We sit around the fire, hands held profoundly, More than fleeting moments with passing strangers, Every human being has shared every breath of air, Those who have protected us from the world’s inevitable dangers, Share a connection that is as truthful as it is rare, Where you came from and who you love, Disappearing in a lackadaisical cloud of irrelevance, Where there are dreams of peace, the release of the dove, Married with the rejection of arrogance, To protect those unfavoured and condemned, The fallacy of law and order—a realm of shame, Recognizing the hand of justice lands heavier on them, Those not on the scoreboard, not invited to the game, To construct a future where you chant in the howling night’s chaos, “I don’t know where you are going, but I want to come along, And when your shaky raft floats toward the lighthouse, I’ll be sure to leave the light on,” Human connection is a paradox in and of itself, not just a mess of meaningless greetings, And for this I am certain, To be a person is to thrive independently as human beings, But to be a human is to bask in the independence shared by every person.

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References Soundless Vibrations Cincinnati Children’s Hospital (2019). Speech Disorders. Retrieved from https://www.cincinnatichildrens.org/health/s/speech-disorder Cincinnati Children’s Hospital (2019). Language Disorders. Retrieved from https://www.cincinnatichildrens.org/health/l/language-disorder Clarke, S., Paddock, H. & Mackenzie, M. (1999) Newfoundland & Labrador: Language. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Retrieved from https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/society/language.php Johns Hopkins Medicine (2020). Tongue-Tie (Ankyloglossia). Retrieved from https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/ tongue-tie-ankyloglossia Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital (2019). Frenotomy.

Stanford Medicine. Retrieved from https://med. stanford.edu/newborns/professional-education/ frenotomy.html National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (2016). Auditory Neuropathy. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Retrieved from https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/ auditory-neuropathy

Our World Through Rhythm Lefebvre, H. (2013). Rythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. (S. Elden & G. Moore, Trans.).

Bloomsbury Academic. (Original work published in 1992).

Oliveros, P. (2010) Auralizing the Sonosphere: A Vocabulary for Inner Sound and Sounding. In L. Hall (Ed.), Sounding the Margins: Collected Writings 1992-2009 (pp. 22-25). Deep Listening.

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we need is a rennections exist hether it is the two atoms, a wo lovers, a story hrough art, or a strangers—even