My traumatic experience at St. George and Bloor
Look, we all know that living in Toronto can be dangerous. Muggers, bad drivers, falling into a snowbank twice your height— the dangers are pretty much endless. But I am here today to warn you about the single greatest danger any student at University of Toronto can face—one that I experienced first-hand.
My shoelaces came untied.
That by itself would be traumatic enough, right? Don’t you just feel the judgemental stares when you stop on the sidewalk and kneel down in that awkward crouch to tie your shoelaces, weighed down by the crippling sense of failure and self-loathing as you realize that you forgot to double-knot your laces, again? Because do you know who manages to tie their shoelaces perfectly fine? Six-year-olds, that’s who.
But my shoelaces didn’t just come untied anywhere, allowing me to spiral in peace. Oh no, they came untied at the corner of St. George and Bloor. For those of you not familiar, St. George and Bloor can be more accurately described as Satan’s armpit: a cursed combination of too-short traffic lights, university students somehow always running late for class while also finding the time to scroll through Tiktok on the way.
To top it all off, miscellaneous tourists take pictures of every building, hot dog stand, and random piece of shrubbery in sight, while the specter of OISE (a building designed so poorly that I’m convinced it was created by a Soviet spy who wanted to destroy Canada from the inside; a building with exits too small to escape from in the case of a fire) looms in the distance.
All in all, I was in the worst place possible for my shoelace to come untied. It was 5 pm, and chaos at the intersection in question. I was caught in a group of depressed engineering students trudging towards another class through mounds of the greyish, snowlike sludge that actually managed to bring some colour to UofT’s dark atmosphere.
Then, I felt it. That ominous feeling of my shoe becoming untethered, of losing my grip on the ground itself. Cramped between groups of students, I had no recourse, no way to reach down and re-knot my shoe. I was forced to press forward towards the subway station, conscious of the fact that any second, someone could step on a loose shoelace and send me sprawling onto the wet, snowy ground.
An unknown amount of time passed in fear and anticipation. Would this be the end of me? Would I leave this mortal realm at the St. George and Bloor intersection? My very life flashed before my eyes.
And then, at last, I reached freedom. I slipped into the subway station, in between a herd of students showing something inexplicable called school spirit, and found an empty place to tie my shoe. It was a close call. But miraculously, I made it through.
The moral of my story? Spare yourself the danger that I experienced, and wear boots.