Here, there

1. There’s a place I’m going / no one knows me

The first time I hear the only Matt Simons song I know, I am sitting on the floor of my childhood bedroom. A girl I have only met twice has punctuated an Instagram montage of coming home from OCAD—landing fresh from Pearson Airport, driving across the Lion’s Gate Bridge towards purple mountains, greeting friends with hugs and tears on Robson—with the beat of a Catch and Release remix. That night, I get my first sense of what missing Vancouver might taste like, and it makes my throat ache.

2. I went out looking for love when I was seventeen

“Seventeen”: I play it on loop all of my first month in Toronto until the words taste like freedom. Troye Sivan sounds like summer, I always say; I am learning that this city is forty degrees in early September—unapologetically, bewilderingly so. The Chinatown restaurant I find myself in with five other first-years charges for extra plates, so we split our pad thai into tiny ceramic teacups and laugh about how this is it—the college life. That night, I fall asleep in a city where fewer than ten people know my name; after that first week, I never see most of them again.

3. I needed space, so I left home / but now I’m desperate for the things I know

Places of in-between—buses, trains, airports, airplanes—can be so lonely. It is only on my first flight home that I realize I can’t fall asleep on airplanes without my sister spilling out of her seat and sprawled all over me, the armrest between us slid out of the way. I push the window shade up and watch the Rocky Mountains sweep by beneath a canopy of stars; I think about high school physics, and how Ms. Wilson taught us that if an object returns to the exact place it came from, its displacement is zero. Zero displacement is not how this feels; I skip through every song in my library ‘til I get tired and Greyson Chance is singing “Low”.

4. Moments, living with your eyes half open / you’ve been thinking ‘bout these changes

“You have a nice day, darling, you look beautiful.” I barely hear her over Lauv singing “Changes” in my headphones. I turn to see a woman I don’t recognize in a red coat and black felt hat, brushing by me in passing on College Street. For over a year, Toronto felt cruel to me. That day, I start to believe that maybe it can be kind.

5. Take me back to the basics and the simple life

Charmain is from Edmonton; we live with Renata from Singapore and Ingrid from Calgary in a small house near Kensington Market. On a weekday night, Charmain strums her guitar to a tune that reminds me of the West Coast, and I begin to understand what Renata told me last May—that home wasn’t confined to Singapore anymore, that Toronto was growing into a home of a different sort, that it would happen for me too. At the time, it seemed incomprehensible.

But Charm and I bond over our love of Troye Sivan, and we play “EASE on a January evening at a coffeehouse full of friends. When I sing that line about my mama asking how I’m doing all alone, I am more grateful than sad, and that feeling sits with me strange, unfamiliar. Like if I tried to hold it in my hands, it would slip between my fingers. I tighten my grip on my guitar and try to take it all in.

6. You turn me into somebody loved

Home. How is it possible that the French don’t have a word for this? Home, home, home, home. I roll the word around in my mouth until it begins to lose shape. Listen to a little of The Weepies to remind myself how it feels to walk along Azure Road under a setting sun, seagulls shrieking overhead—through the alleyways and under the evergreen trees, on my way to my mama’s salmon dinners and my sister’s long hugs. Open my eyes and wonder if I’ll feel that way about this city when I leave—“the blue of distance,” Rebecca Solnit writes. “Something is always far away… the far becomes the near, and they are not the same place.”