canadian love sung

This blog initially blossomed out of response to a breakup. It then gained even more speed during the surprising beginning and end of the relationship that followed soon after. Both those Hes I once blogged so very much about have moved on to become distant memories. The first has finally moved so that the corner I once thought of as home is now just seedy and grey. I don't know where he lives and I don't even know if we'd stop to say Hi if I were to stumble upon him someday. The second He was so fleeting and so long ago that the memories I had of him and of us become more than the actual relationship ever was. And all the Hes that followed these two never really mattered much in the end.

But after all the years of writing of searching for love, I have found it and unexpectedly at that. This love is not new. In fact, He's been around for over a year now. Yet whenever I sat down to write about him here, I just couldn't. My words sounded too real and normal and uncomplicated. There was nothing to lament or yearn for or romanticize because what we have is real and strong and what I had been searching for in all those posts but just hadn't realized I wanted.

And so instead I wanted to tell you about things we'd done, or food I'd made, or places I'd seen, but the words and the stories didn't seem to fit here in a blog so unintentionally devoted to lost love and all sorts of other pasts. And so, with all this in mind, I've decided to bid adieu to Canadian Love Song. New stories are beginning (did I mention that we are moving in together?) and I need somewhere to spill them all.

Please join me over at Plaid Habits. My new blog is going to be much more about the here and now and lifestyle focused. I want to tell you stories in words that are less cryptic, but just as pretty, this time around. Oh, and I want to share lots of photos, too. I'd love to hear from you over at my new address to make sure you made the trip over okay.

So goodbye Canadian Love Song. Thanks for being such a good friend.

Afterwards

Leslie drove by Ossington the other night and said my once room is still mint green all over. For some reason, this made me happy to hear. Whoever lives there now just probably couldn’t be bothered to paint, but even if this is so, I like to imagine that this person is a she and that this girl chose not to, and instead is growing her own big dreams and creating her own stories to tell and feeling the real hope I once felt between those very same mint green walls.

still

Sarah came over last week and we drank too much wine and sang along with songs we looped on repeat back when we were young. Somehow I still remembered most of the words that I used to scrawl across the pages of my notebooks when I still believed in forever. Sarah said I used to listen to these songs in residence and gesture love over a webcam to that boy twenty minutes away. She told me this and at first I didn’t believe her but then I did but I still couldn’t remember that girl but then I could and I could even still remember all the words.

i want to go everywhere

*This was written in a tiny notebook on a train from LA to San Diego the other day but I'm only now finding the time to enter it here.

It's been forever because there is too much to say and feel but never the right words to say and feel them in. Or maybe I'll just never have the right words for the present. Maybe I'm only ever capable of writing beautiful about the past. Maybe the past is always beautiful because it's not the present. And so maybe I can write now because I'm on a train and the sound of metal against metal reminds me of a past I can see as beautiful because it became the past will over two (!) years ago. I remember riding a different train back and forth between my temporary and soon-to-be homes constantly that year that has now become long ago. It's too dark to see anything outside this window and it was always too late back then, too. And I was a different person then as well. But this feeling of journey, of travel, of departures and arrivals is suddenly so familiar I find myself listening to that album I listened to on repeat for all those trips of return and goodbye. And this feeling is all so strangely familiar I can remember how it felt to first glimpse the purple and white lights of the city in the distance, to put away my book and button up my coat, to will the train to race into the station, to know how Jim Guthrie felt as he sang "I want to go everywhere with you" and bounce through the cold of the station unphased. And it's probably the free wine swimming around inside, but I can't help but listen to Jim on repeat again and shed a tear or two.

this season around

It’s been too long, but not because nothing has happened. No. This summer was the brightest and the bluest and how do you write always sunshine and the longest days turning into longer nights and the hazy happy blur they all became? This summer was also one of Toronto’s hottest on records so I floated through it, above and beyond the heat. But that heat was strong and in that heat I slipped away. Last week I saw myself from a distance and I felt distant from that girl I saw. Somehow in that heat I’d forgotten myself. But yesterday, a text from an old friend suddenly so far away came. He said fall had been feeling heavy but my words made it feel lighter. And then I walked home alone in the cold and the crisp and the dark and everything seemed to right itself. Fall signals the onset of winter and all sorts of endings, but yesterday, during that walk home, everything felt like the beginning and possible. I remembered the me that came before the heat and I realized how much I’d missed her. I want longer days and the longest nights, and I refuse to float above them this season around. Pass me a hat and scarf and I will be that girl I used to be.

interstates

My recent business travels through New York State this summer remind me of the road trips my dad became consumed with taking throughout my preteen years. He navigated those American freeways as if he’d been doing so forever. From the I-90 to the I-79 to the I-279, he was invincible. Traveling in my mom’s more sensible grey Toyota Corolla, he was still a warrior as he passed baby blue Buicks and singing minivans. In that instant it didn’t matter that his health was still too unsteady for him to work full time, even though it had been years since his first operation. I no longer cared about flying to exotic destinations like my friends did; we too were flying through those anonymous cities, blurred green landscapes, Dunkin Donuts standing glorious as they marked the miles we’d traveled.

hey now i'm movin'

For the past two years, I've fallen asleep to the quiet hum of the 24-hour bus that drives up and down the street outside my bedroom window and woken to Tender Green walls and spent afternoons with the warmest midday sun. These same Tender Green walls have come to hold my memories and helped me make memories and even held me when there were no memories I could even think of making. The walls in this room slope and make hanging photos and art hard. The ceiling is ugly popcorn and the floors may be hardwood but they are creaking and breaking, slowly but surely. There are dead bugs trapped in the light fixture and I'm partly too lazy but mostly too scared to clean them away. I've spent night after night sitting on that broken floor, staring into a mirror, wondering if it was a red lips sort of night, wondering who I'd meet, or if I already knew the answers to all these questions, wondering if he'd call or I'd text and wondering if I'd regret it all in the morning. This room is on the third floor of a house built at the turn of the century, and so the winters are always too cold and the summer's much too warm. But this room held my hand tight through a degree I never thought I'd finish and it held my hand even tighter when old hopes slipped away and new ones formed in their place and this room may not be perfect and even though it is time to leave it behind, I know I will forever search for the way this room erupting in late afternoon sunshine made me feel when this city was still new and everything still waited ahead.

young hearts

Young love, you were so many summers ago. Tanned and fresh faced and twenty-one, I waited at streetcorners with the hope of you floating all around. Beautiful you were as you crossed the street to greet me with a kiss and beautiful I felt, too, from the way you kissed me. Young love, you were light as a feather as you shared shared shared and listened to it all. And light as a feather was I when you lifted me into the night and said you loved me and meant it in a way you only can when you're eighteen. And my eyes were only ever wide open and bright that summer and they hardly are anymore and so sometimes I close them to still see you standing there, a bouquet of sunflowers in your hand.

today

Sometimes, like today, I really think it would be possible for me to flee this city and all its people. On most days, the idea of elsewhere always seems alluring and exciting and a little bit dangerous but never real. On most days, I have no need for elsewhere because here is where I only ever want to be. But today is not most days. And today as I sat on the streetcar coming to work, all I could think about was what would happen if I didn't get off at the same stop I get off at five days a week and instead stayed seated, riding the streetcar in giant circles around the city, never having to speak to anyone once. And then I started thinking about jumping in a car, or even a plane if I could dream big enough, and going so far away everything would be new and nobody would be familiar. I didn't know where this elsewhere would be. All I knew was that it would be better than today.

when the night meets the morning sun

Rainiest of Mays and I'm walking home in the rain, again, and the wind is so strong it pushes my umbrella inside out and my bags are so heavy I have to stop four times to shift their weight and rest my hands, all the while juggling an umbrella that won't right itself, and I walked these same streets drunk and in the fog just days ago, and everything seemed different back then because right now I'm crying and I don't know why and all I want is for the sun to come back and for it to feel like real May again and all I want is to hear real words and to be hugged at the end of it all.

you still smell like last winter

It’s last winter whenever I think of you because you were only ever last winter to me, and last winter will always be the hope of it all that followed the heartbreak of what came before. You were there in the snow and the cold and the hush to walk me home and hug me goodnight, and you were there in a tie on my birthday, and you were there, but always too far away to touch and always too nervous. And now it’s next spring and here you are again, but only for a night. And you still smell like last winter, but there is no hope of it all because you were the last heartbreak there was.

after the rain

This city smells like spring these days and this city smells the most like spring in the early evenings that follow afternoon showers. Shocked but damp and clean, I watch this city shake itself awake as the yellow cuts into the grey, and I find myself trying to do the same.

wyebridge

Driving north with him, driving backwards, windows down, blue breeze blowing, pressing play on my favourite song at my favourite part of the drive (the moment we pull off the highway and I realize we are suddenly the only car following this curving road back to his once home), swallowed up in green, the familiar dotting of houses, the one with rotating stuffed animals outside, pulling into a driveway still marked by a basketball net, stepping out of the van into air that is always cleaner and cooler 1.5 hours outside of the city, stepping into the house he grew up in and into his mom’s open arms.

Almost two years since I last took this drive, I still find myself replaying it on days like today where everything feels on the brink of springsummer because this drive and that one tiny town he once called home and what it felt like to be twenty-two and in love are forever springsummer in my mind.

the past in present

The past is never the past because it's never gone. No. The past catches you off guard as you round the corner one day and bump into him and his new life hanging off his arm. And the past is there every morning and every afternoon as you ride past his house on the streetcar, sometimes daring to peer into a bedroom that still looks the way it did so long ago when you thought of it as your own, too.

But the past is more than just the physical recurrences of him stamped across this city. It's more than just the way your hands sweat at the mere sight of any and every lanky boy with brown hair dressed in a heather grey tee. It's not just because you still refuse, after all this time, to wait at the corner of College and Spadina in fear that you may round the corner and bump into him and his new life again. The past isn't even just tied to him. There are so many pasts of so many boys following you around that they all become one in the end.

And the past plagues and will never disappear because it can never actually go anywhere. At twenty-four, it's much too late. The past is the present and it becomes easiest to remember everything bad and forget all that was good. And because of those long talks that never fixed a thing and all that was wrong and whatever you felt too much or too little of, you promise yourself you'll never let the past become the future again. And all the while you're trying to figure out if this is possible or not, you sit with walls up and everything securely tucked away.

old blue eyes

Some dates and some days are impossible to forget. Like last week when I woke up and looked at my calendar and then looked outside and thought to myself how I hoped you were having the best birthday because how could you not with the sun as high as it was? Twenty-six and a face I sometimes don't remember right anymore, I will always remember you eighteen and nineteen and twenty and twenty-one and twenty-two, and how I hugged you the tightest I could on every third of April for all those years. So happy birthday, old friend. Here's to you.

#63

Today I pulled back the curtains in my room and opened the window to the sound of a passing bus. It's been months since I've heard that sound or felt that breeze or seen the way the sun looks shining through the white of my curtains, but it all felt so familiar that it felt like home.

i'll believe in anything

This city is blooming and beautiful and mine again. All mine. Last night I saw the band that made up the soundtrack to the first Toronto there ever was. I listened to them on repeat that first summer I found myself alone finding myself, back when I didn't know anything west of Bathurst or the difference between College and Dundas. I remember sitting in the first boy's apartment that wasn't his and saying "put on this song. It's a really great song." And there I was, sitting beside a boy who barely mattered but what mattered was where I was and how I didn't exactly know where I was but how I suddenly felt like I could believe in anything. A year later the band still mattered but this time with a boy that mattered and this city now slowly becoming home. A year after that the boy was more of a question mark but we still listened to the band together over a sink full of dishes in a Toronto now familiar in a comfortable sort of way.

But last night they sang this song that once made me feel like anything and everything was possible in this great city of mine and for the first time in a long time I believed it.

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.