Do You BELIEVE In Life After Canada?

Throughout this year I’ve had very specific, very specific longings — split seconds where I’m reminded of something, an exact meeting of time and place and activity, and it’ll be vivid and bright in my head and I’ll want to experience it again and again, like a craving. I’ve seen myself in York, walking through the autumn leaves with my best friend Jenni, eating pulled pork sandwiches by the Minster. I’ve been transported to Tuscany, where I’m sitting in the garden at midday, drinking the local white wine with Josephine. I’ve dipped back in time to the weirdest October, where I felt lost-and-found-again in Glasgow, waiting for myself to become a real person again while haunting coffee shops with my sister. There are so many other moments, all popping up in my head at the strangest of times, not just reminding me of people or places that I miss, but sensations and experiences as a whole.

Soon enough, I’m sure I’ll be reminiscent of this first summer in Toronto. I’m now sitting in this apartment, all of the guys have moved out — I’m the only one here now. Every room stands empty apart from mine, with my packed belongings; my toothbrush lies lonely in the bathroom cabinet. In time, I’m sure, I’ll be missing the nights where I could stretch my neck back on the mattress that I’d placed on the floor, staring up and out of my open window to look at the lone star hanging over my head. I’ll remember the warmth of the sun as I beat down the leafy lanes around Dovercourt Road, or the thunderstorms that had bullets of rain shocking the sidewalk under purple clouds.

And there’s now only one more phase to go: another four and a half months and I’ll be moving out of Canada for a bit. It feels incredibly close, but at the same time, so far away. This year has felt like a marathon — non-stop, long-distance, endurance training. I feel like this section — the golden summer days on Dovercourt Road — has been me finally hitting my stride, after the aches and adrenalin of my initial months in a foreign country.

It’s exhilarating but exhausting. I constantly feel like I’m on holiday and in need of a holiday. There’s an ever-growing list of things in my head that I want.

Here’s what I have so far:

• I want a massage. I want one that especially focuses on my tired barista arms and shoulders and legs and feet. Actually, I just want a whole day at a spa. I want hot water and fragrant soapy things and moisturising creamy things and you can chuck hot stones and me and fling seaweed in my face, I don’t care. My body needs some TLC.
• In addition, I want a pedicure. I want my feet to be scrubbed and scraped and whatever the hell one gets done at a pedicure. I want my feet to be buffed until they puff into light, fluffy clouds upon which I can float. And then put sparkly nail polish all over me.
• I want someone to come and do all my laundry. Everything can be washed at their correct temperatures and spin cycles, my work uniform can be cleansed off coffee grinds and grime in an actual machine instead of the bathtub, which is what I use when I’m short on time, and it will all be pressed and ironed and misted in subtle accents of French vanilla.
• I want to stay for a week at The Four Seasons Hotel, or any fancy hotel. I want my bed to be massive and have too many cushions and pristine white sheets with little chocolates balanced on the pillows. I want everything to smell nice and I want thick, expensive carpeting under my feet.

Really, I just want someone to come and take care of me and renew me for the final, home stretch in Canada, before I get home to the UK for a month or two and melt into a puddle at the airport. Instead, I am feel achey and dirty and hassled and… blecgh. This reached a peak the other night at work, when I had a hell of a night: lost my handbag in a taxi; had to huff back to the restaurant to hang around the kitchen with pastry staff, sommeliers and Sous Chef until 2am; bag a sleep on Robert’s couch and wake up the next morning to get my bag back from Beck Taxis and a quick walk to work to do it all over again (work, not losing my bag, thank god).

Maybe it’s the sheer exhaustion talking, the emotional residue of waking up at 4:45am every other morning, or maybe it’s the PMS (note: it is nearly always the PMS), but I’ve been feeling so weird as of late. Things move so quickly these days, and it seems like I’m just starting out when the tables turn again and I’m back to not-quite-square-one. My emotions are balancing between a state of excitement and elation and faux-nostalgia and minor melancholia. I’m looking forward to September, but having seen how August has raced by, I can’t help but project myself into October, November, December and January already. Four months is nothing — just as these seven months have been nearly nothing, themselves. And yet within those seven months, I’ve packed so much in: three different beds, two jobs, several gigs, a handful of new friends and experiences… I have a feeling that the next few will match the first several months with just as much content, if not more.

Oh well. This was a rather reflective post. There’s not much that’s completely remarkable that’s happening day-to-day to relate in great detail… I come home from work every day covered in coffee grinds, burns and bruises and vanilla syrup, and then I lie in my bed, trying to recover some feeling in my legs.

Final nights in the apartment, just by myself. It means I can listen to pop music really, really loudly: