Today I ventured to Mile-End for the first time, to a café to see Neil Smith, Zoe Whittall, and Jon Paul Fiorentino read as part of the Blue Metropolis Literary Series. All three were good. I stayed afterward because I didn’t want to leave – the place gave me a feeling I couldn’t quite put my finger on, and I tried to write it out. This is an edited version of what I wrote when I was there.
6:15 pm: I can’t help but feel like a speck of dust that has chosen to materialize at this exact moment in this exact place: insignificant and lonely and right in the thick of it.
7:30 pm: Maybe I’ll stay in Montréal after university. Live north of the mountain, write in cafés, work in a bookstore. By then my French will be good enough. Know the people who give the readings I attend. Think about going back to Toronto, never commit until 5 or 8 years later when I decide to go home in a grand and cosmic moment of “this city is fucking me up”. Realize that my eternal idea of Toronto was formed in 2006: secret swings and mashed potatoes, sushi and Queen West in the summer. Try to live with a city that I adore that has moved on without me.
7:50 pm: (After reading a bit of Bottle Rocket Hearts): I read so intently it makes my jaw clench somewhere around my ears. It feels like gripping the railing at the edge of a cliff, and if you let go you know you’re going to get that butterfly tightness in your gut that means falling. Is this what it’s like to find something perfect? (I almost wrote “love”. I can’t pretend I know what love is. I can’t pretend I don’t know what love is.)
The piano is sitting in the corner, cool and James Dean casual. I want to fall asleep in the arms of this warm wood room, rest my head against its solid brick chest, feel it nestle its jazz and mirror ball lighting in my hair, wake up in a loving old-souled embrace.
