Trust Fall
Kate Black

I stopped weighing myself the year we all stayed inside. I’m still not sure what my face looks like, but came close when I wore a mask every day. I became my own eyes and eyebrows. I also became a bitch on the internet. I started doing things like laughing in public, if only because nobody could see my mouth. I started doing things like soaking my feet on the balcony in a red plastic bucket. I would leave my blinds open as I crawled into bed in the midday. I would make eye contact with the seniors’ home across the alley as I slipped my hands under the sheet. It was one of those things I did just for me. I nearly biked into traffic several times. I walked across many bridges. I felt nostalgic for everything. I took an Uber whose driver had a disco light, which felt overwhelmingly beautiful like a junior high dance, overwhelmingly beautiful like dancing. I wanted to go back exactly three months prior, to March 3, to a bar in Texas, where a stranger became obsessed with all of my friends and told us he could get us whatever we wanted and drove us to a party that ended before we got there, before the world ended one week later. I wanted to go back one year to your car, where I said you could take me wherever you wanted and you took my drunk ass to A&W. In the middle of the present, I picked up a passenger: a hair too long to be mine in the teeth of my sandal’s Velcro, before the wind blew it away. It seemed to touch on a greater theme of my life I could not quite define. I think danger is what I’d get if I could get whatever I wanted. I could touch the crosswalk button with my whole hand, lick cinnamon right off my finger.
Kate delivered a reading of this piece during the Abandon panel for the 2024 Fraser Valley Writers Festival.

Kate Black's essays have been published in The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and Maisonneuve. In 2020, she was selected as one of Canada's top emerging voices in non-fiction by the RBC Taylor Prize and the National Magazine Awards. She grew up in Alberta, and lives in Vancouver.