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IGA near the Métropolitaine. Tuesday evening. The snack aisle wheezes with the quiet desperation of people who've forgotten how to cook, or why.

You're holding the family-size Doritos—cool ranch, crinkling plastic, absurd. The bag is engineered for parties, for movie nights, for the kind of abundance that assumes company. For whom? it seems to ask. For the apartment that echoes wrong? For the couch that holds one?

Then you feel it. Eyes.

Across the aisle, a woman in a puffer coat. She's got cottage cheese, a Boréale, a single sweet potato. Her cart lists toward dairy like it knows the route by heart.

She sees you seeing her. You see her seeing you see her.

The smallest nod. Not judgment. Recognition.

The fluorescent lights buzz their endless hymn. Two strangers who understand the arithmetic: one bag of chips, one beer, one sweet potato that will sit on the counter for three days before you roast it, alone, with olive oil and salt, the kitchen filling with smoke you hope won't trigger the smoke detector.

You both turn away. At self-checkout, the machine scolds you—first in French, then in English, then in French again, like it can't decide which language your failures belong to.

"Place item in bagging area."

You place the item in the bagging area.

Marché Jean-Talon. Saturday morning. Cold so sharp it hums in your vintage Humeur Design t-shirt.

You watch him from behind a crate of clementines. He picks up an eggplant—purple, taut, glossy—and turns it over in his hands like he's solving something. His thumb traces the curve. First time, you think. He doesn't know what to do with it. He doesn't know it drinks oil like water, that you have to salt it first, that it will betray you if you rush.

Then he moves to the okra.

His whole face changes. Wonder. Reckless hope. The kind of expression people reserve for sunrises, for infants, for the first snow of the year. He selects six pods—small green fingers pointing toward a future you can almost see. Steam rising in a narrow kitchen. Oil popping in a cast-iron pan. A pot of something tender and strange bubbling on the stove while the radio plays and the windows fog over.

A beautiful, inevitable disaster.

You don't warn him. You don't say: it gets slimy if you crowd the pan. You don't say: some things can't be saved by good intentions.

The market hums around you—Italian, Arabic, Québécois—vendors calling prices like cantors, shoppers flowing past like water around stone. He walks away with his okra, believing in something.

You buy lemons. You go home. You cook for one.

The okra, you imagine, tastes like faith. Which is to say: strange, and fibrous, and not what he expected.

But he'll try again. That's the thing about hope.