In this way the world is constantly unveiling itself. A stand of trees seen from a fresh angle, the laughter of a dog, a nameless colour, new patterns of movement, of light, of behaviour, patterns in fabric, in birds, in traffic, in music… In this way “revelation” is not something a bearded white man apprehends once an epoch, but rather a state of becoming that imbues all things at all times. Of course to be in a state of perpetual unveiling is exhausting and disorienting; it’s essentially the way we moved through the world as babies, when everything was revealed and nothing was legible. Gradually, to make sense of the chaos, we fixed things in place, we fixed meaning, we fixed potential, we fixed objects and people and places as knowable and predictable entities and attempted to reduce the instances of unveiling because those upset the order by introducing new variables into the mix. Unveiling, by nature, un-fixes.

As I stand here at 11:04 a.m. on Saturday January 21, 2017, you in bed, me in the doorway in the moment of beholding, something — perhaps everything — is unveiled. And I become unfixed. But I do not yet understand. I am in the moment between awareness and comprehension. The interval between a hand touching boiling water and the pain of its scalding. Between sense and sensation.

II

II

Monica. A name of North African origin. Santa Monica, mother of Saint Augustine. “Until the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard” went the chorus of a song from my childhood. It was the name of a presidential intern-turned-mistress. A sitcom best friend. You hated it growing up. It didn’t sound serious to you. And as a blond in the sixties, being taken seriously was a grail quest. Monica Tannahill. A young feminist in Trudeau’s Canada. Now a fifty-eight-year-old feminist in another Trudeau’s Canada. Single mother. Breast cancer survivor. Suburban jogger. Fitful yoga practitioner. Book club member (always loved a good multigenerational family saga). CBC Radio devotee. Maclean’s magazine subscriber. Christian with new-age tendencies. Humanist. Card-carrying member of the Liberal Party. Gravitational force of a small galaxy of girlfriends. A self-proclaimed “hard-ass.” You saw money and status as forms of emancipation. You saw female colleagues, close friends, ground down in the gears of public bureaucracies and chewed up in the lion’s den of the private sector, and there was no way in hell you were going to succumb to that fate. You believed in getting your due. In tough love. In being a clear and confident boss, the kind that men got called “strong” and women got called “bitches” for being. Your millennial colleagues exasperated you. Raise your voice once and they’ll brim at the eyes; you wouldn’t believe the amount of time I have to spend now just sorting through who said what to whom and what that made them feel; I mean, I’m there to run a lab, not a focus group.