Blue Waves

That’s the thing about this city...its magic lies in its history and in the diversity of its people but its history is filled with inconvenient truths and its diversity is considered to be too colourful and cacophonic to most of those who surround its shores. It is a beautiful island city, but it is a lonely island city...it is a city without a friend in the world. It fights to survive, as it has for almost four centuries, to preserve its unique character, but years of starvation take its toll, and it has grown weaker and warier over time. Many have left it over the years in search of an easier, more stable way of life, and though they miss it to their core, they never look back.

Jonah read the paragraph he had just written back to himself, then reached for his dram of Islay single malt and took a sip. He savoured the smoky and slightly sweet flavour as he glanced out of the window which looked out over Saint Denis street. The bar had just opened a couple of hours ago, and there were only a few other customers inside. He could hear the bartender describing the day’s featured scotches to a couple who sat at the bar. He was on Montreal’s more French side of town, and they were unsurprisingly speaking in French. Afternoons were quiet in whiskey bars like this one, which wasn’t located on one of the streets better known to tourists, such as St. Catherine’s street or Crescent. That suited Jonah just fine. He liked to watch the sunlight streaming in through the window onto the empty tables and chairs, and the relative quiet which he found conducive to his work.

He was working on a book about his city, the city he had been born in, and the city where he would probably breathe his last breaths...Montreal. It’s a hard city to live in, but it’s and an even harder city to leave...which was why Jonah was still here. He couldn’t imagine leaving, not being able to see the beautiful old buildings which stood right beside the newer, more modern structures; the many old, Neo-Gothic churches; not being able to go grab a warm bagel, still shaped by hand and cooked in wood-burning ovens, or walk through streets that were alive with many different tongues, not only the ubiquitous English and French.

The winters in Montreal may be long and snowy and dark, but the summers are warm and joyous and filled to bursting with festivals that draw many tourists to the city. The roads are bad because crooked politicians hire crooked contractors who mix too much water into their cement, but there’s a metro which makes it easy to get around, and which also helps bypass the orange cones always present due to perpetual construction. The city is falling apart, and has been for years. Urgent repairs of hundred year old water mains and collapsing overpasses go on alongside the construction of luxurious condos that only foreign investors and Airbnb profiteers can afford to buy. 

The hardest thing about living in Montreal, though, is the blue waves of hatred which emanate from the rest of the province, which would rather Montreal (and its strange, diverse, bilingual residents) simply cease to exist. It is indeed a sad day when every proud Montreal anglophone or allophone comes to the realization that they belong nowhere, as their home is in a province that doesn’t want them, and that their country has long ago given up on regaining custody of its loved but misplaced child.

Jonah had realized these things years ago. He was a truth-seeker, like his name-sake. Truth-seeking was an ugly business, but he just couldn’t stand to let the politicians and other people of power spin his eyes shut while they danced around waving flashy signs proclaiming their own greatness. They would get away with their crimes, their back-room deals, their exploitation, their self-serving lies, he knew that...but there was no reason he should stick his head in the sand and pretend it wasn’t happening, which was what most people seemed to do, as far as he could tell.

There were, of course, others like himself, who also sought out the truth instead of taking a grain of it and using it to grow lies...but it was hard to live in the real world, which seemed to offer no solace or comfort. Many of the friends Jonah had grown up with had moved to Toronto or Vancouver or elsewhere, hoping for acceptance and prosperity and, tired, above all, of being blamed for ‘the decline of the French language’. If the erasure of English street names, the closure of English schools, and the removal of English from road signs was anything to go on, it was English which was on the decline, not French. There was even a special type of police called the language police tasked with going around and measuring the English on commercial signs, and ensuring that it was only half the size of the French text. They also issued tickets to restaurants who used non-French words on their menus, such as ‘pasta’, or ‘espresso’. Somehow, though, it was never enough. There was always some fresh wound, some new study that was used as proof that stricter measures were needed to control the spread of the evil, insidious English language and by default, the anglophone community that was no doubt responsible for the decline of French.

It was all very tiring, and he didn’t blame them for leaving. It was also hard to find work, here, with the discrimination which was rampant, even when it came to invisible minorities who spoke French fairly well, like himself. He knew he was fortunate to at least be considered ‘white’, but even so, with his Jewish last name and the fact that he clearly wasn’t a francophone, he had never once been hired by a French Canadian during his working career, which had lasted more than a decade and had consisted of many different types of jobs. He had given up on applying for jobs posted in French only, since he had long ago realized that was an exercise in futility. He hoped to one day bypass this issue by means of his pen.

‘Ah, Montreal,’ thought Jonah, ‘your storied history and your diversity and your joie de vivre is what keeps us here, and keeps us going...but what happens when the river of blue overtakes us, erasing us, drowning us? Will you sink like the Titanic? Will tourists still flock to your shores?' Tears stung Jonah’s eyes as he looked out over Saint Denis street once again. It was now dark, and the bar was starting to buzz as the cinq à sept crowd streamed in, ready to put the day behind them. Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’ played in the background.