Toronto: A Love Story

There are so many parts of myself that I rediscovered in the year and a half I lived in that apartment. It started from the first weeks. Any time I’d been able to decorate a place I lived in with him, I was forced to use beige. That was the colour walls were supposed to be. But I love colour. One of the things I love most about fabric is the colour. And so I painted my apartment exactly the way I wanted. The living room was a bright yellow. I painted the walls with a flat paint, and then took the same colour in a satin finish, a lot of tape, a measuring tape, and painted alternating twelve-inch wide stripes of the flat and the satin. It took hours, but the room was cozy and pretty even on a February day in Toronto. I painted the bedroom a sage colour, and the kitchen/dining area a peach. I loved that space. I also took the opportunity (that being having no furniture) of indulging in my Ikea passion.

I learnt to walk again. I remember the nights that a friend of mine and I would walk for literally miles. We’d start at a Szechwan place at Spadina and College, walk over to a repertory theatre further down College, and end up on Bloor. Or we’d walk back to Spadina and Bloor from King St, and I’d catch the TTC up to my apartment.

I learnt that I could look after myself. Pay my rent, put food on the table. Ok, I learnt that I’m really good at ordering at restaurants, not so good at cooking. I tried Indian and Japanese and Szechwan and Thai for the first time, and got hooked on all of them. I learned to love independent theatres, without loosing my appreciation for movies from Hollywood.

I stayed out way too late with friends, whether in a coffee shop or in a club. Or in Rol San after the club had closed. Some friends from work and I got asked to leave Joel’s brother’s club because it was closing time – we hadn’t noticed.

I started laughing more. I think I became less biting in my commentary. I threw parties for friends on their birthdays, and bought more than one pair of shoes a season. I started to read more. I learnt to express my feelings again, or at least started that process. I went salsa dancing. I learnt to revel in the variety of cultures and people that the city has to offer. And gradually, the frequently unhappy, uncommunicative, repressed, and scared parts of me shrank, to make room for the good parts of me, the parts I like.

This is what Toronto is to me; I see the best in me reflected back, and know that I can be that person if I try.

Toronto: A Love Story - Epilogue and Prologue

EPILOGUE
Walking past the swingset Joel and I would sometimes go swing on when he recognized that I needed to be out of the office. The sound of the city, and the faces from everywhere. Running down the stairs to make it onto the subway. Every time I go into the city, I yearn for it.

And then, standing at the subway door waiting for it to open, I realized what it is. It's not that I miss Toronto. (Though I sometimes do.) It's not that I miss the food. (Though I miss that constantly.) Nor is it that I want to be living there again. It's that I love the person I became in that year and a half I lived there, and the city is intimately tied to that transformation.

PROLOGUE
When I moved to Toronto in July of 2000, I was already changing. My separation was, in many ways, the result of that change. I'd spent years gradually becoming less than I should have been. My grandmother told me that she knew something was wrong between Shawn and I when I asked him if we could buy one of the five dollar pies my mother's service club was making.

Let me be clear: I wasn't blameless in this situation. I'd accepted the increasingly intolerable conditions. I quit the activities he told me to quit. I went out with him on his forays, looking for things to keep him amused. I drove him out to a field at 5:30 in the morning so he could fire potatoes into it with his trebuchet. And I stayed, and married him, after he slept with Gilda, and then made me meet her

I stayed in those conditions, to some extent, because I was terrified of what would happen to me if I left. How I'd pay rent and feed myself. I had no faith in my ability to look after myself, and so I stayed. And I'm not proud of that.

Then I got the job in Toronto, and discovered that I was very good at it. I had a level of respect from my co-workers that I didn't have at home. I started to notice that I walked differently, thought differently, was different, when I was in and en route to and from Toronto. And I noticed that it all went away when I came back in the door. I used to love going out by myself in Waterloo, because when I was out by myself, I liked myself. My efforts to hold on to that part of me inside of the house led to fights. Which led to me avoiding him by spending more time online, holding tighter to the elements of my job that were available to me at home. Things spiralled downward at home while they just kept getting better at work.

And so I found an apartment, and then told him that I wanted to move into the city. In a counselling session, because I was so afraid that he wouldn't let me if I didn't have a neutral witness. In the first week of July, I moved my books and my dishes, my clothes, and a futon mattress (the old one) into my new apartment. The first one I'd ever had all to myself.