​Piece

I remember when my parents told me we were moving to China. I was staring at the pale blue of my dad’s work shirt and thinking vaguely of oceans. In my mind, oceans were what was on the globe in my room; they were plastic and hollow with black sans serif names, and I imagined getting on a plane and looking down at blue placid water and the words “Pacific Ocean.” 
I didn’t quite know how I felt about it all. I don’t remember being sad, but when I was younger I always had the vague sense I was faking emotions, rather than actually experiencing them. Unable to express my emotions, I made the mistake of thinking that I could control them. 
The weeks after they told me we were moving were bright with anticipation. A headlight kind of bright that you could only wait to hit you. I could see the headlights in the shine of the paint they rolled over the purple of my room. I could feel the wind as my parents rushed around the house. I could hear the squeak of tires in the whiteboard markers in class. 
There was no time for my parents to prepare anything to eat, and so I ate cheese wraps a lot. I have this one stark memory of sitting in a completely empty house, in my matching leopard print shirt and jeggings, eating a cheese wrap. 
It took a few more weeks for everything to be settled, but soon we had our Visas. The day we got on the Beijing airplane, the jet bridge was broken, and so we walked outside in the Ottawa night, the headlights of the plane blaring as we got on. I had the vague sensation of getting hit. 
I still didn’t know how I felt about the whole thing, but I took the cheese wrap out of the Ziploc bag, and ate it on one of the airline pull-out tables (which I stopped eating on a few flights later, when I saw a mother change her baby’s diaper on it). 
We continued having them for a few months after I moved to China. Everything there was different - even the air was different: Canada’s air was almost solid, when it got cold, it would scrape your hands like concrete; China’s air flowed like hot water, rippling at the edges. 
But in both places, the cheese wraps were still the same.

"Wrap On Snow," 2026

Ingredients 

1. Cheese
​2. Wrap

Steps

1. You get a wrap. 
2. You slice some cheese (about the length of your nails when you don’t cut them for two weeks).
3. You put the sliced-up cheese in the wrap.
4. You wrap the wrap.
5. Yay! You did it!
6. You throw out the wrap, because there are many wonderful meals on this planet, and this is not one of them. 
7. Actually don’t waste food, that’s bad. Separate the ingredients and put them back in the fridge.
8. Don't tell your parents that you made the ingredients into a wrap, and then proceeded to take the wrap outside for a photoshoot so it would look less sad. Or that, in said photoshoot, you put the wrap on a branch, in the snow, and on top of the shed. 
9. ​Say nothing when your mom grates this cheese into her lunch.