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Companionship is worth the occasional regret

FICTION / JULY/AUGUST 2026

Companionship is worth the occasional regret

ILLUSTRATION BY YANI FENG

Published 6:30, JUNE 11, 2026

It’s nearly 2 a.m. when my friend Saryas texts, “You awake? Can we meet at the park by your place?” The late hour and urgency of his request make me uneasy. I consider calling him but think better of it. If he wanted to talk on the phone, he would have called directly. “Be there in 10 minutes,” I text back.

Already tossing and turning in bed, I’m grateful for the excuse to step outside. Not that outside is any better. It’s late July, stiflingly hot and humid. Hard to believe that just months from now, Montreal will be blanketed in snow and ice.

I pull on a T-shirt and shorts, then tiptoe in the hallway to avoid waking my two roommates—a couple living together. Still, the floorboards groan under my weight. Just as I’m about to slip into my flip-flops by the main door, I head back to my bedroom to grab a book. The floorboards groan some more, but I’m not concerned about my roommates any longer. It’s me who has to suffer through this heat alone; at least they have each other. I’m in my mid-thirties and single, and ­seeing happy couples fills me with both joy and envy.

Garneau Park, in Le Sud-Ouest borough, is a short walk from my apartment. Above me, a waxing moon hangs in the sky, seeming impatient to reach its full glory. At the park, a group of teenagers­ occupies two adjacent benches, their banter, laughter, and animated gestures punctuated by moments of silence as they retreat into their phones. I keep my distance, settling on a bench on the opposite side of the small square, about thirty yards away.

Though Saryas lives just a few blocks from the park, he hasn’t arrived yet. I often joke that his chronic lateness reinforces the stereotype that Kurds are always behind schedule—whether it’s for meetings, events, or even their long-awaited independence. It’s 2015, nearly a century after the fall of the­ Ottoman Empire, and we still don’t have a country of our own.

A lamppost next to my bench casts a dim, orange glow over me. I open my book, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. I’ve read it before, ­marking it up heavily when I was an aspiring writer and poet. My bookmark is ­nestled between the pages of a passage that begins, “And to speak of solitude again, it becomes clearer and clearer that fundamentally this is nothing that one can choose or refrain from.”

Are we doomed, then? I wonder. It is doubtful that such a question ever­ occurred to Rilke; he suggests that solitude is beneficial, something poets can use to their advantage. But what about everyone else? Or even me during those moments, hours, and days when I’m not writing, when I simply need a break from the poet’s life? Rilke would have likely been appalled by my questions.

Five years ago, when I first arrived in Montreal, I fully embraced Rilke’s romanticization of solitude. I spent days without speaking to anyone, strolling through parks, staying up late in introspection, and scribbling away. “In the immense scarcity of beauty,” I had once written, “I seek death in silence.” It ­captures the mood I was in back then.

Everything changed when I fell in love with Marrigold. Oh, Marrigold, a­ petite brunette with a sharp wit and an infectious energy. After she ended things two years ago, my first reaction was to curse. People are meant to be ­together! I exclaimed. In relationships! As the Kurdish saying goes, “Loneliness ­only befits God.” I decided that the next time I met someone, it would be with the intention of marriage. Enough with the “let’s-see-where-this-goes” poppycock. I became bent on proving ­Rilke wrong. If we’re ­going to be stuck with anything, I began to believe, it should be companionship.

When I hear Saryas’s flip-flops scraping the ground, I close my book and lift my head.

“There you are!” I say.

He plops onto the bench with a heavy sigh, as if he’s just put down a load of cement.

“I don’t know what to do, Aso,” he says. “I’m in this dark tunnel, and the only light is this.” He takes a long drag, making the tip of his cigarette glow.

“Are you guys having trouble again?” Saryas and his wife have been going through a rough patch lately. Since they moved to Montreal a year ago, not a week has gone by without them being at each other’s throats.

I hope they will smooth things over. Doesn’t everyone get tired from arguing and fighting? I know I do. That’s part of why I left home. I had taken to ­constantly quarrelling with my friends and family about politics and religion. At one point, my father said to me, “If you keep going to demonstrations, Aso, you’ll cease to be my son.” My mother, her head bowed over a tea tray, served him tea, perhaps silently praying that I wouldn’t respond. I honoured her wish and drank my tea in silence. When I eventually moved away, I told no one.

“I have been sleeping badly,” Saryas says. “And it looks like I won’t get a wink of sleep tonight. My daughter is a little night owl. My wife suffers from PMDD. And this damn heat!”

“You’ve no idea, dude,” he says. “It’s these terrible mood swings.” He sighs, perhaps at the seriousness of the........

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