Crossed

Like clockwork, at the start of every new year, just as the holiday spirit meets its timely demise, I am met with dread. Not quite anxiety. Definitely not languidness. Something closer to madness. A low-grade, simmering awareness of the overall state of it all. It being the roadmap laid out by people who don’t tread lightly because they don’t have to. The ones supposedly responsible for leading us toward a better, greener, more sustainable world, or whatever buzzword soup they’re serving this quarter. I try to fight the feeling. A ’90s chick-flick makeover montage: Debbie Downer into Polly Positive. It’s an honest attempt, but rarely a successful one. Okay, let me backtrack and genuinely try to embrace this transformation. I’ll leave my sarcasm at the period for this entire paragraph. This winter, I worked hard on ticking things off a list that a more-motivated version of myself made at the start of 2025. Learn how to figure skate? Done. Track my expenses better? Check. Fully launch a petition banning products made in countries that use child labour? Not quite … yet. Small steps, big strides – my mom’s infamous oxymoronic words. Anything to move forward. Something a certain leader of a particular country seemed determined to do the opposite of. He set high expectations, ladled out the most delectable environmentally friendly buzzword soup imaginable during his campaign, and carved a path for climate policy—then capped it. Or didn’t. As soon as his seat warmed up. Maybe it’s global warming. Maybe it’s pocket filling. I struggle to tell the difference sometimes. Hindsight is for the wealthy. That one’s from my dad. Looking back, reflecting, reminiscing, eventually learning; it’s a privilege. One most people don’t get. Not when survival takes precedence. Not when you’re too busy keeping your footing to admire the view behind you. Eventually, you realize that forward is just a direction people in power point to when they don’t want to explain the ground beneath your feet. Progress becomes a performance. Rehearsed, applauded, and abandoned the moment it stops being profitable. For a long period of my life, progress always looked like that: easy to destroy under pressure. We’re handed promises like they’re solid, like we won’t be the ones falling through when they crack. And the worst part is how casually we’re expected to accept it. To keep moving. To stop asking whether any of it can actually hold us. So I stopped listening to the ones who never have to test their own claims. I started paying attention to places where the margin for error is zero; these places were not hard to find. Somewhere in the middle of winter, when the light lingers less and the cold feels like an enemy and a test, my community starts talking again. Not announcements. Not press releases. Just murmurs. Side conversations. Messages passed along like a secret we all already know. Is it freezing yet? Not safe. Not time. Someone went out a little too far. Someone else turned back. We warn each other. We wait. There’s a kind of love in that waiting. The kind that doesn’t need credit or leadership. Caution here isn’t fear, it’s respect. For the land. For the water. For the fact that none of us are bigger than it. Wanting doesn’t make it solid. And then, one day, there’s the first brave soul: a man named Doug. The one who listens harder than the rest of us. Who tests the surface and makes it across. Word travels fast. Safe. It’s not loud, but it’s a celebration all the same. A collective exhale. A signal to the people and to the wildlife: our time has come. Every year, that time gets shorter. Every year, certainty thins. Climate change doesn’t announce itself here; it just steals days, inches, confidence. Still, we adapt. We share knowledge. We make it communal. That’s what makes the promises sting the most. Being sworn solid ground by people who will never have to stand on it. Who warm their seats while the rest of us listen for cracks. Those who call it progress while slowly shrinking the space in which we can safely move around. I think about my list again. The items still hovering, unfinished. Ticking something off doesn’t mean it’s solved. Failing to mark something off doesn’t mean it never will be. I’ve crossed items off a bucket list. I’ve been double-crossed by those in power. I’ve crossed water that could have swallowed me whole and made it home safe. And despite it all, in spite of the dread, the shortened seasons, the lies dressed up as leadership, I still believe this: we know how to cross. We always have. The only question left is whether we continue to trust those who blindly lead and have their feet off the ground, or we choose to make it safely to the other side – together. *This poem was the winner of the creative non-fiction category of our 15th annual Writing in the Margins contest, judged by River Halen. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Regina Public Interest Research Group (RPIRG) fo