It’s monday and I eat two lemon popsicles as a start of the week meal replacement. I calculate the
contents in my disordered (eating) brain and you tell me that popsicles aren’t food. When I call you mom and thank you for your concern we laugh in smiling eyes about the way we fucked the night before and the gross and guilty way that mom sounds coming out of the mouth that touched you.

We hold hands down Harbord and you smile at the woman organizing her flower boquets and the cat that runs up Robert Street, where you swear lives the most stray cats in our small radius that is the big city where neither of us are home. 15 minutes from my house to yours, 10 minutes to school. 5 minutes to our first date cafe and 4 months to fully squeeze out the toothpaste tube in your bathroom vanity.

And I used to pretend I could choose how big my world was, until I met you and realized how tiring it was to pretend to be an adult at twenty. How much I like you and lemon popsicles for breakfast.

Maia Kachan is a queer identifying student, writer and activist based in Toronto, Ontario and Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is the current Editor in Chief of Acta Victoriana, and has been published in the northern appeal, as well as in chapbook form by Grey Borders Books (On Growing Old, 2017). She can be found on instagram @beetlefig.