The city is a toilet.
Okay, you caught me—that line’s from Seinfeld. They were talking about New York, but the sentiment applies equally to Toronto, if you ask me. Not that I have much point of comparison. I've never been to New York City.
I've never been anywhere, really. I grew up in the suburbs. We camped, when I was young, in provincial parks across Ontario and Quebec. One year we drove down to Florida—went to Disney World, if you can believe it.
I can't.
What I remember of that summer feels like a dream—one of those dreams that's somewhere between a nightmare and an acid trip. Not that I've ever done acid. Most people don't believe this, but I've never even smoked a cigarette.
Wait—there's one thing I do remember, very specifically, about that Disney vacation: I remember my dad downing bottle after bottle in our motel room. He promised he wouldn't. But promises were cheap.
I remember how my mother tried not to see what was right before her eyes, and how silently irate my siblings and I were. How ashamed. Devastated. Even the happiest place on earth couldn’t slow him down.
It's funny how alone you feel when you're a kid. You don't realize how many other people are experiencing some variation of your life. I sometimes wonder if I’d have felt less like I was living in a black hole if I’d grown up in the age the internet. There are forums now, sites were you can chat anonymously with people who understand.
I guess there’s still a good amount of shame inside me. I would never walk up to a living, breathing human being and tell them about my childhood. Not even in a church basement with free coffee and Oreos. Not even “anonymously.” Because this body of mine is not invisible, as much as I’d like it to be.
Online is a different story. Nobody can see you if you don’t want them to. It’s freeing. Truly. You can open yourself up just enough to let someone inside, and if they understand, you open even wider. Like a flower. People always make that comparison, women and flowers, but it’s true. You feel the sun of that person’s sweet presence on your face, and you open your eyes, and suddenly the ugly old world is bright and beautiful. Everything is different.
I met a girl on one of those forums. Could you tell? If you saw my face, you’d suspect it by my smile. And if I told I was waiting for a flight to the Northwest Territories, then you’d know it for sure. Love takes us places, more than anything else in the world.
Well, I said I met a girl, but technically Annie’s a woman, not a girl. She’s an adult person, I just never much liked the word woman to describe a romantic partner. Too intimidating. Makes it sound like I’m some kind of highfaluting grown-up. And I most certainly am not. Sure I’m thirty...something... but that doesn’t make me an adult.
Annie doesn’t act like a know-it-all the way city girls do. City girls are above it all. Whatever it is, they’re above it.
Not Annie. She isn’t possessive or mean. She’s got nothing to prove, to me or to anyone else. In my life I've dated older men and I’ve dated younger women, and Annie is like a combination of the two.
She laughed when I told her that, because it wasn’t the first time she’d heard it. When I close my eyes and think of Annie, I feel the earth under my feet and I see the sky lit above me. Annie is my North Star. From that spot on top of the world, she can see it all. She has perspective like no one I’ve ever known. And balance.
It sounds trite to say she understands me, but it’s true.
“We come from the same place,” she says.
Everyone, everything, this whole world of wonders was born of the same entity with more names than we are able to speak. Annie of the North, Keri of the South. She and I share a common memory, a similar experience, but we are still divergent enough that there’s a lifetime of listening ahead.
I never feel silly talking to Annie. There have been nights, sitting at my computer in the southern spike of this cold country, when I’ve felt so drawn to the warmth of her company that I’ve cried for her. She sees me across time and space, and she tells me not to miss her. No need. She’s always with me. We hold special seats in each other’s lives. For us there is no apart, there is only together.
That’s easy enough to believe when you’ve got nothing else to hold on to, but my shoulder still aches for the welcome weight of her chin. I want to close my eyes every night feeling the warmth of her breath on my skin. The city is such an empty place without her.
The craving expanded over time. It wasn’t just a matter of wanting Annie, but of wanting everything that surrounded her—the solid earth beneath her feet, the heavenly lights above her head. Her earth would ground me, too. Her rainbows would cascade between my eyes and a velvet sky. I could hardly imagine a night without noise. Breathable air. Space. No more sirens. No more smog.
So I quit my job. I sold my condo and my furniture and most of my shoes.
When I told my mother I was moving up north, she threw her head back and laughed. “You’ll get there and find out she’s married,” she told me. “Chatting up pretty girls online—that’s what they do, you know.”
They who?
Didn’t matter. The idea made me furious, but it also made me question Annie and everything we shared.
I tried to shake those evil seeds. Why did my mother have to poison my mind like that? How dare she? All a ploy to keep me in the city, I bet. Keep me on a leash. But it wasn’t lost on me that I’d never asked Annie if she was married, or if she ever had been. Because... well, of course she wasn’t married. She wasn’t.
But even if she was, which I knew with almost absolute certainty that she wasn’t, it wouldn’t change my plans. The north winds swept across my skin, beckoning. There was space for me there, so much space. Nothing but space.
My bags were packed.