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.