Date Retrieved: 7 August 2025
Subject Thread: Impermanence / Tension / Stillness
Status: Incomplete but Honest

“Some days, memory is the only reliable narrator.”

The blue jays start early here.
Sharp-tongued little philosophers, yelling their opinions into the morning hush like someone asked. I listen anyway. Coffee in one hand, edits in the other, the rest of the cottage still asleep. For a moment, just a moment, it holds. The world outside this screen door stays quiet enough to feel like it’s waiting for something.

And maybe it is.

Maybe it’s Alberta, teetering on the edge of a vote that could end more than just its federation ties. Maybe it’s the U.S., or whatever’s left of it, rebranded and scrubbed clean under a name like Unity(at least in my book), a label that sounds less like peace and more like a verdict. I sketch those what-ifs, unsure if I’m predicting or remembering. The lines blur.

Pejorative’s proof copy is getting heavier with each yellow tag, but it’s the weight of almost. Not yet finished, not yet flung into the wild, but close enough to hear its echo. The broken timelines, the fabricated testimony, the unraveling of a nation by inches, I wrote it to explore what could happen if we stopped paying attention.

And now?

Now I see headlines that feel like set dressing. Political theater so on the nose it could be mistaken for satire if it weren’t lived experience. Still, I sit. I revise. I choose every word like it matters. Because maybe it does.

Last night, I stepped out onto the dock as the sun dropped low behind the trees. The sky did that thing it does, even with the smoke, turning copper, then bruise-purple, then nothing. In that soft shift of light, I remembered. One year since my father passed. No prompt. No alert. Just me and the lake and the ache of time doing what it does. Grief doesn’t yell. It waits. And when it taps your shoulder on a quiet dock, you turn.

What awes me most is that in the middle of all this, shifting borders, silenced platforms, retrofitted truths, we still get moments like that. Jays hollering. Trees backlit in green. A mug warm in my hand. And that quiet conviction: I was here. I bore witness. I wrote it down.

Even if no one believes it later.

— J.B.

P.S. 
The book is almost there. But some of the world-building I invented is starting to feel too plausible. I seriously hope this one stays alt-history.