if you go straight long enough you'll end up where you were

A year ago winter became spring and the hope of him slipped away and I walked outside that first morning after and everything looked different and strange the way it does when your heart is broken. The blue was beautiful but it didn't touch me and I floated through the day but not in a good way and I drank too much but the room never spun once.

A year later he tells me about this song as we sit apart as friends and he says he walked to the mall in the rain in first year university to buy the album and listened to it for the first time in his res room full of people and even though I didn't know him then I feel like I did because the words spill so easy and there is everything I want to share and everything I want to hear and here we are, sitting apart as friends.

And it is spring again but this time we greet each other on streetcorners under the brightest sun and we pause to hug hello and he listens to everything I want to share and the blue is so beautiful and this song is my new favourite and we are friends this time around.

your heart felt good

Sometimes traveling feels more like arriving than visiting. Last weekend, each turn of a corner and exit out of the subway felt like arriving again and again to the place I'm meant to be. On Sunday afternoon, perfect ice cream cone in hand, I looked around Park Slope as the sun was at its highest and thought how I could stay there forever and never want to arrive elsewhere again.

And that may very well be true, but today Toronto was perfectly blue and buzzing and ready to come out of hibernation and I felt like I was arriving all over again and at that moment I knew I could never actually go elsewhere because there was nowhere else I'd want to be.

break it down

The sun didn't hide once this week and every song I heard was my new favourite and in mere hours I'll be reunited with my most favourite city and fall in love with it over and over again and every day I felt so happy I could burst.

meet me in the city

The city was mine in song this weekend. First there was Joanna Newsom and songs so beautiful they made me feel affected like I was twenty again and hearing her for the first time and they were so perfect I had to stand still with my eyes closed and my breath held tight as two tears fell. Then there was Woods last night and the bar may have been dark and crowded and too tall and too drunk but then they played this song and everything got quiet and the tears didn't fall but they almost did and it felt like last summer but better and I could only think about how happy I was at that moment.

It's been forever since two nights of music were more than enough and so this weekend made me think of these guys and the days and nights when their music was always enough. I remember being fourteen and listening to their songs for the first time and thinking how I'd never been in love but they made me want to and then I remember falling in love with him and thinking how I finally felt the way these songs had always made me feel.

And today was grey until late afternoon when the sun forced its way through for my walk home and my walk home again and the night was dark and quiet but it was the first night that felt like spring and the hope of summer and that feeling was strange and familiar all at once because it's been so long but I love my city the most at the beginning of spring when everything's still possible and so this night and all those songs were like falling in love with that band and him for the first time all over again.

this city of ghosts

This weekend I ran into the first He that ever mattered and we may have been a We for five years but I haven't seen him for nearly four and isn't it so strange how your once best friend and boyfriend and everything and the person you thought you'd always know, in some capacity or anther, becomes so strange he's suddenly a stranger? We've passed each other before but I've always been too scared or lost for words but this time the night felt like spring and the beer was already inside and I didn't have time to think. I ran over and said his name, first and last because there never was a middle, and the words sounded as happy as I was to say them. There was no strangeness, only familiarity all grown up. His eyes were still as blue as they were when I was fifteen and felt how it feels to lie beside a boy for the first time, and his voice sounded the way it always did coming through the cordless phone I clutched to my ear late at night in my parents' basement. But he was shorter than I remembered, and I realized halfway through the stories I was telling that he didn't know the people in them. Yet even so, I said "it was really good to see you" as we parted. And I really did mean it.

the first day

This city is still waking and today may just be the most beautiful because the sun is shining and I walked outside for an hour without my ‘muffs and the sky seems the bluest its ever been. A friend said that days like today are just previews for the spring and summer waiting, and this may be true, but I’d still take today’s high of three over months and months of forever blue and temperatures in the twenties. Why? Because a day like today that follows months and months of winter feels like the first day. It catches you off guard and unprepared and it instills hope and happiness and excitement and so much anticipation.

of late

in my bones

This city is waking. The sun’s still out and the snow’s puddling into pools and I can feel the arrival of spring deep in my bones. This transition from grey to blue and green, to early nights to late mornings, always comes fast but it seems even more sudden this time around. Winter kills souls and leaves me out of it instead of in, but this winter was different from the rest.

This city was frozen to its core three years ago. It was submerged under snow the year following. And the city may have been beautiful and forever blue in my memories of it last year, but it was a city always anticipating and never actually delivering. This winter, the city was my one and only. It was not tied to the hope of anyone or anything. It was brighter than it’s ever been. And more beautiful, too. And it was more than enough to carry me through.