I announced my escape plan to Curtis in December 2006. On February 24, 2007, two tiny Guatemalan men paraded furniture out my front door and into a van headed for Toronto. I was euphoric. I had mustered my resources, ones I didn’t even know I had. I stood watching the two men come and go, congratulating myself.
To top things off, I was asked on a date – my first date in 16 years. It was all wonderfully low-stakes. He was someone I knew and liked but didn’t know well enough that I’d regret flying across the country. The next day I would put this city and everything it had come to represent behind me forever.
There’s that word again: represent. I chose Toronto because, among other things, I had never lived there before. Toronto represented The New, a clean slate. Vancouver, a radical break with my Cape Breton childhood, was The Future. The city between those two, however, I had come to think of as The Mistake. And I did what we so often do when it comes to our mistakes: tried to forget it ever happened.
x
I arrived in Toronto in an appalling snowstorm. The taxi ride from the airport to my sublet apartment took two painstaking, terrifying hours.
The next day I tried to turn on the radio, but nothing happened. Nothing would turn on; the power was out. The temperature had risen absurdly overnight and mountains of snow accumulated from the storm were receding into torrents of slush. The sun blazed down. The busy, befuddled chaos of Kensington Market suited my mood perfectly. I waded past stores, wondering why every third one I passed had the power on, while everywhere else was in the dark.
I sloshed my way toward the burning neon sign of an open café, a purveyor of Jewish soul food, sat down and opened a free weekly paper to read the entertainment listings. Suddenly I had trouble concentrating, my heart was so full. All I could do was thumb through the pages – listing after listing of music, theatre, literature, art. The waitress brought me a fragrant matzo ball soup. Half the shops in the neighbourhood were shut down, yet I’d found this wonderful restaurant open five steps from my home. Complex, cerebral ambient music played in the background.
I’d escaped, I realized. I wept and ate soup.
x
But I didn’t tell you how my date went. And maybe I’ll tell that story backwards. Maybe I’ll start by saying that a year and half later, I moved back to Edmonton, and let your imagination do the rest.
When I left this city and “all it represented” behind, I hadn’t yet grasped how extricable those two things were. I loved Toronto, but it was delusional to think that once I arrived somewhere new I’d simply shed my emotional pain and move forward.
Now I’m back, and that misery I’d thought so inherent to this landscape is nowhere in sight. I realize now that a city is like a house. It may have its quirks – both endearing and infuriating – but you can’t blame shingles and wainscotting for the mail that lands on your doorstep – be it good news or bad. U
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Category: Work
