by the way, you know you've always been the one

I like to think that as the clock struck midnight and Thursday became Friday and 2009 turned into 2010 and the aughts became the past, the sky opened up and covered the entire city in fluffy white flakes. Can you imagine a more beautiful greeting to all this change I'm still not ready to embrace? I may have already been three beers and two glasses of champagne in, but I remember all that actually met me outside was grey slush and everything ugly and nothing pretty.

Yet hours and drinks later, my memory is less true and more wishful and so I can tell myself that flakes really were falling as I jumped into a cab and headed somewhere I probably shouldn't have. But although I knew this, at that moment, it was the only place I would've been, and my head was spinning and my heart was thumping and I was fidgeting in expectation as I blurted his address aloud. The parties had ended and the streets were dark and still and quiet and because of all the racing going on inside of me, I like to believe it was snowing as he greeted me on his doorstep.

I snuck out in the morning and waited in a bus shelter and wondered why I had just done what I did. But then it started snowing. Big and fluffy and white and for real this time. In that instant, the city was suddenly mine again and new and clean and beautiful. A little late, but it returned nonetheless. And at that moment, I knew why I'd done what I did. Sometimes all one needs is to be held on the city's most magical night when she feels no sparkle inside herself. And then my sparkle returned. Not in the form of a boy, but in the way everything outside the bus window became unknown but also all sorts of familiar underneath those flakes.

So Toronto, I may have been hiding away, but you've always been the one. Not some boy and especially not that one. No. Never. Just you.