Mi Amor

Spanish was the first language I was shown love in. It's shaped my understanding of parenthood

- BY CHANTAL BRAGANZA ILLUSTRATION BY FRANZISKA BARCZYK

I WENT TO SEE a movie alone at the Carlton Cinema in the last few weeks before you were born. Though I haven't in years, I love to go to the theatre on my own, and the Carlton is one of my favourites. Each room is so tiny; the theatres are too small for aisles. The maroon carpets, compact screens, sticky floors, the illicit rustle of bagged candy from the bulk shop next door: it's the feeling of watching a movie in someone's rec room with a dozen strangers. When I lived down the street as an undergrad student, I'd spend $2 on a bag of gummies and $4 on a matinee ticket. The best thrill, conveniently cheap, and one I indulged in religiously for years.

It was November 2016, and Donald Trump had just been elected president of the United States. In the newsroom where I worked at the time, colleagues had just lost bets over the results and were recalibrating their sense of the world order, despite, only a few years earlier, having seen a similarly yellow-haired buffoon take office in Toronto and proceed to subject the city to extreme civic mismanagement and global humiliation.

I eased myself into a front-row seat with a quarter pound of Swedish Berries and stared up at the screen, eight and a half months pregnant. I was achy, happy, and ready to cry at any kind of movie that popped up on the screen. I didn’t know a child would die within the first ten minutes.

Arrival is intended to be a film about language. Adapted from Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, it features grand, sweeping scenes of misty grasslands in locations all over the world that have been visited by massive alien spacecraft, each the elegant ovoid shape of a well-filed nail. These ships are staffed by teams of squid-like aliens responsible for teaching humankind their language in order to communicate the reason for their appearance. Only one group of human researchers is successful in understanding it—the Americans.