Table of Contents
The Kitchen Floor at 495 Bloor
Hot Breath Karaoke: Church Service for Loud Alcoholics
The Dominican Republic and My Reckoning With the Universe
Slapped by a Sunset on Charles Bridge
An Afternoon in Berlin / The Day I Turned Liquid
Edinburgh, Written by Richard Linklater
Ghosts on the Coast of Reykjavik
A Very Jolly Central Park Bike-Taxi Ride
The Kitchen Floor at 495 Bloor
I started my year with a punch in the gut and tears on the seatbelt of my best friend's car. I had just ended a five year relationship that had been clinging to me far past its prime, making me feel sick and dizzy like a dirty wound seeping into the bloodstream. I spent a lot of 2022 trying to convince myself that wallowing in this infection was easier to deal with than the sharp rip of ending things and pulling the bandaid off. That night, unplanned, it finally happened. The adhesive was removed, and the pain wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d imagined. But I think deep down I always knew it wouldn’t be.
I could say more, but I’ve written enough about this person. He filled all the phrases in my notebook that winter, and in the spring, before melting away with the snow in the summer. I’d say he doesn’t deserve any more of my words, which is true, but honestly I just find him to be tired material.
Something that I haven’t written enough about is myself. And this sounds fucking stupid, because everything I write is about myself, As I am, to my own dismay, an extremely self centred person. Yet I rarely write about myself untethered to those who have hurt me. And in those frigid January days following this break-up, this is how I was forced to hold myself up. Alone, no poison to lull me submissive anymore. Myself, on my own, for the first time since I was just a young girl. Myself, in my apartment, wet faced but smiling. Myself, the next morning, putting on mascara without crying. Myself on the streets of Toronto, hands bare against the cold January air, feeling more raw and off balance than usual, like an infant taking its first steps, like I had just shed a layer of flesh and my new skin was still adjusting to the climate.
Yet the image which sticks in my memory the most from this time is not of myself alone, nor of myself poisoned. When I think of January and the break up, I think of the floor of my friend’s apartment. The details of how it all came together are blurry, but the picture itself is crystal clear; Freezing rain outside the windows, food on the coffee table, assortments of meat and cheese and fruit arranged beautifully to only serve us. Wine in our glasses, poured a little bit too full, or simply being drunk from the bottle. Lit candles on the table that all of us surrounded like witches at a seance. We talked about him but we talked about me more. We laughed at things from the past, painful things, but things that were far enough away that they were funny now. We talked about the year ahead of us. We stood on the edge of the cliff that was a new year and tried to make out figures in the fog. I smiled and not once did I cry.
I find such sanctuary in these spaces that aren’t mine. And it’s weird, really, because I used to be the girl that hated not sleeping in my own bed, always leaving to my apartment at the end of the night regardless of how tired I was. But I’ve spent so much time in these little homes that I feel as though I am now both a guest and a part of the furniture. All of the details that clutter my friends' living spaces reassure me of my existence in proximity to love more than my ex’s words ever did. The home above the sushi restaurant, too many shoes near the entrance, Drake playing from the bathroom while the shower runs, the cat and the rabbit. The home behind the paint store, skateboards as wall fixtures, the dried flowers and vintage lamps that fill the space with such warmth it could lull you to sleep. Nights spent in sweating living rooms, surrounded by friends and strangers, drinking whatever liquor is offered into our cups. The nothing day that follows, hours on the couch huddled together, an exhausted pile of girl laughing at things that aren’t funny. It’s the routine of it all, the ritual. I love being a throw pillow here.
Hot Breath Karaoke: Church Service for Loud Alcoholics
I have an extremely love-hate relationship with Toronto, which isn’t anything abnormal for anyone who’s spent more than a week in the city. More specifically, I don’t feel as though I have a place within it that’s mine. Everybody loves to claim a piece of this city as their own - a cafe that has seen their most fluttering first dates and their most overwhelmed afternoon study scrambles, a restaurant that they'd go to war over to defend the sanctity of a specific dish, a bar where the bartenders know their order off by heart. I’d never really felt as though I’d found this place for most of the time I lived in Toronto. My friends' apartments don’t count, as they don’t belong to the outside world, they belong to the people that fill each room with colour and love. There are certain cafes I frequent, certain stores I always drop into when I’m passing by, certain restaurants I always choose when planning a special evening out, but none of these venues really feel like they belong to me. A piece of me doesn’t exist within their walls. My friends will probably laugh at me when they realise the space that I do experience this soul tie to.
There’s this bar in Kensington, down the south side near Bellevue park, that’s no different from any other bar in the market on a normal night; exposed brick, overpriced IPA’s, and sarcastic graffiti coating the bathroom, competing to be the funniest one-liner on the wall. Honestly, it’s really not much different on a Wednesday night either. The only difference is that this is when they host karaoke. So why do I care so much?
There's something that happens when I enter this specific bar on this specific night with a very specific group of people. When everything aligns something sparks in the air that renders me frantic. I lose grasp on what it means to be a functional human with an opaque body and I end up laughing and screaming so harshly, with such hysteria that it almost seems like anger, that I leave my throat raw. And god, I know that I piss people off.
We show up early, when the only people in the room are hugging the walls and sizing up the people around them, waiting for someone more outgoing than themselves to volunteer to go first. We scribble countless illegible requests on slips of paper and clutch them in our sweaty palms until the time is right. The host always lubricates the room with the most obnoxious, screechy opening track he can muster, so nobody that goes after him needs to worry about being the worst act of the night. Slowly, signs of life start to prickle throughout the room. A person sings and their group of friends cheer loud enough to make the small bar feel thunderous, people drink more, all the chairs fill up and crowds are first to linger on the dance floor. Then all it takes is the right song, the kind of tune with lyrics that are subconsciously ingrained in the brain of every breathing human under the age of 45, to make the room fizz over like a soda bottle. You don’t remember ordering them but now you’re four dark and stormys deep and the crowd is swaying like a warm wave and somehow you’ve found that it’s possible to scream along louder than the rusty soundsystem can project. The crowd is so bizarre, such a Frankenstein-ish mix of spritely young faces and men old enough to be your father looking like every American's stereotypical image of a Canadian. Very often, half of the people in the room freak you out, just a little bit, but that's all part of the fun. You might make it on stage at some point, but that hardly matters, you black out when you’re up there anyway. All of the life swims on the sticky concrete floor below, where you dance like your body doesn’t have borders and you laugh so hard that you feel as though your lungs might give out right then and there. And how embarrassing it would be, to die at Hot Breath Karaoke, lifeless back against somebody’s spilled Miller High Life, ending the night early for a bunch of bitter strangers who just wanted to get their song in. But if I had to die in Toronto (and all of my friends' houses were locked), I wouldn’t want to go in some tacky gentrified small plate restaurant or between the isles of an overpriced vintage boutique. I wouldn’t want to go with my face falling into an almond milk latte at an Annex coffee bar or by suffocating on the dance floor of a sweaty nightclub where nobody actually dances. So yeah, I guess if I had to choose somewhere, the floor of that bar wouldn’t be half that bad. As long as I don’t go before I get to watch all my friends perform their songs, I think I’d be just fine.
The Dominican Republic and my Reckoning with the Universe
To celebrate our graduation, two friends and I booked a trip to the Dominican Republic. We hyped up our three-star SunWing budget resort like it was a luxury ocean-view penthouse in Monaco. The outfits were planned from head to toe, we all got matching manicures, I got my hair done; all this maintenance knowing damn well I was going to melt and rot into a nasty, beer-bellied unsexy mess once I stepped foot in the country.
I’m having trouble finding poetic words to describe this trip. There was nothing elegant or tasteful about it. Sweat and chlorine in our hair, sand stuck to our inner thighs and in the folds of our bathing suits, hands and mouths sticky from sugar-drenched frozen cocktails, sprawling blue pools filled with spilled drinks and piss, obnoxious laughter turned hiccups turn coughing fits. Tipsy flirting with anything that breathes. A nightclub filled with blackout bachelor parties and top 40 music from 2015. Sleaze, raunch, embarrassment, hysterics. I was dirty, annoying, and drunk all the time. I wanted to be this way, I was thriving on it.
The heat and the alcohol simmered my brain into a soup and now all of my memories are stuck together like melted gum inside a magazine. The things I do remember appear like streaky oil paintings, uneven and dripping all over each other. We watched a lightning storm roll over the Atlantic from the beach at night, barefoot in the sand, questioning how far each strike could travel through open water and if it would scorch our toes into the beige below us. One night I discovered this sinister rust-red liquor called Mama Juana that lulled me to make out with an idiot from Alberta in the middle of the dance floor while my friends laughed at me. We jumped into the pool after dark in our evening wear with at least a dozen other people and all god kicked out of the water moments later. We went on a snorkelling excursion that ended with us parked in a shallow lagoon, surrounded by party boats, clutching triple shot rum and cokes served from a floating bar, waist deep in warm blue water, giggly, tipsy and sun kissed. We send drunk sleepy waves to passing cars on our windowless bus ride back to the resort.
On the night after this excursion, we were all a little bit seasick from the chaos of our past two days. The sun drained all of the energy out of our skin and drinking was nothing but punishment on our overworked stomachs. Still, we forced ourselves to go to the resort nightclub and reunite with some friends we’d made the day before. We floated through the shifting lights like zombies, giggling with heavy eyes and aching legs.We were thinking about going to bed when somebody suggested that we go skinny dipping.
Without thinking twice we all huddled together a golf cart and headed towards the beach. There was an open stretch of sand, untouched by resort lights, that served as a no man's land between two properties. We all stripped down right there, forming a damp pile of dresses and button up shirts on a sand-coated lounger. We all ran into the water together, stifling our giggling to avoid alerting any security to the flailing pile of naked drunk people in the ocean. The air was warm and the water was warm and my insides were warm and my feet sunk into the slimy sand below making me feel as though I had no feet at all. I couldn’t see the horizon, I couldn’t see where the voices around me were coming from, I couldn’t see my hands floating in front of my face. I was a tiny vulnerable thing being caressed by one of the grandest natural phenomenons the globe has to offer, so inky and filled with secrets and terrifying, but so gentle with me in that moment. Water against every inch of skin against even more water made me forget where my body ended and where the ocean began, where the sky began and where the ocean ended, where our atmosphere ended and outer space began. The vast, incomprehensible magnitude of the universe had never been so clear to me before and there I was, drunk, tits out and sunburnt.
We went back and did it all again the next night, with even more people joining us. The next morning we packed and boarded our flight back to Canada. Even the view from the aeroplane window, nothing but murky blue for as far as the eye can see, could make the feeling I felt while skinny dipping return to me. I don’t think the realisation will ever hit me quite like it did that night, unless I ever find myself shit-faced and ass naked in an ocean in the pitch black again. I really hope I do.
Slapped by a Sunset on Charles Bridge
June was the colour green. Green like the algae growing on the concrete canal walls of Venice. Green like the steep rolling Alps as Italy turned to Austria through the window of the train. Green like basil on our pasta and mint in our cocktails. Spring had bloomed into summer, and so had I! It was near the beginning of what would turn into three beautiful months in Europe, a time that was so filled with life that when these memories burst into my mind they spring tears in my eyes.
My mother was with me in these first few weeks, as we floated through hot Italian cobblestone streets and looked over red-bricked Austrian towns from the peaks of mountains. It was picture-perfect, sunny, sweltering and blurry like a dream. Also like a dream, I had a rude awakening awaiting me around the corner. We were slowly making our way to Prague, where my mom would leave me and I would begin an intensive, month-long course to become an English teacher. This was the whole reason we were in the country, this was a goal I’d held since I was a child, and yet the closer we got to the Czech Republic any excitement I harboured began to turn to fear. I’d never been to Prague before. I would be living there, alone, while everyone I knew went about their lives thousands of kilometres and an entire ocean away from me. I had no idea what the course would be like, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was blind, walking into a thick fog and merely hoping I would come out the other side unscathed.
(Yes, this is all very dramatic. But the melodrama of it all served as a comfort for me at that time. If it was dramatic, it was narrative. It was fiction; less real and less jarring.)
When we arrived in Prague I was living in my own head more than I was existing in the space around me. I wasn’t processing anything that passed in front of my eyes. We went out for dinner and the food tasted like dread and all of the street signs I couldn’t understand read as pure spite, taunting me for not being as good with language as I should be, as a real teacher would be. I was beating down on myself so hard that I could barely look up from the cobblestone at my feet.
After we ate we went for a walk. Just a short one, from Archer’s Island on the Vltava to Charles Bridge and back again. This next half hour served as the most intense and relieving slap in the face from the universe I’ve ever experienced.
There was a concert and a pop up bar on the island and the blinding golden hour sun was lighting the trees on fire. Happy people floated past us, so content and warm (and most likely tipsy) that they felt barely tethered to the ground. Old gothic buildings lined both sides of the river, glowing auburn in the light as laughter drifted across the water on paddle-boats. There was music ringing out from everywhere and big inflatable pool balls all over the river’s surface. We passed through a park that was bursting with life, both foreign and local voices mixing together through the air to make a beautiful cacophony of people that were just happy, in that moment, to be exactly where they were.
When we made it to Charles Bridge, I might have genuinely started crying. I can’t remember. My eyes were so overwhelmed with everything in front of them that the rest of my face lost sensation. It was sunset now, and the sky’s peach and periwinkle gradient was flickering against the water. The moon hovered perfectly above the centre of the river. You could see everything; the island, the little people in their boats, the pastel buildings lining the streets, the darkened bronze statues on each pillar towering over the crowds below like guardians. A jazz quartet was busking near us. It all kind of clicked right then - I understood the hype around Prague. I understood architecture, I understood the human urge to spend dozens of years handcrafting beautiful things and to preserve them to the point that they outlive us. I understood people and I understood my mom for following me on my batshit expedition across the world and I understood myself. I understood that I was doing this to be like her but also to be my own person, I understood why I thrust myself into situations that terrify me to the point that I’m on the verge of breaking but somehow I never shatter completely. I understood why I picked this city, I understood why I was standing right there at that moment.
There's this brass plaque on one of the statues on Charles bridge. One of the images depicts a soldier petting a dog. Over the decades, so many thousands of passing hands have also petted that dog that its image has been rubbed bright gold. Next to the dog is a vignette of a priest being thrown off a bridge. Old legend says that touching the priest is good luck, and that it will bring you back to Prague someday. At that moment I understood superstition.
I touched it, of course, and I’ll be back soon.
An Afternoon in Berlin / The Day I Turned Liquid
August was never-ending. After my course finished, I decided to do some solo travelling, meandering through Central Eastern Europe before crashing with family in England. It was only supposed to last a few weeks. I heaved my big yellow suitcase from train to train relying on the help of strangers, lingering in unfamiliar cities for just long enough to leave my lipstick on beer bottles and creases on bunk bed mattresses, but not for long enough to hold any true presence in each place.
I could write a million words about these weeks and still have a million more to say. I could write about the fear I carried on my shoulders as I entered Vienna and the way it all melted away in an instant as I found myself drawn in by a patchwork group of solo travellers, who greeted me with such instant warmth that I felt ridiculous for ever doubting the kindness of others. Drunk nights, laughter, hugging with a grip so tight as if I’d known these people for years. Chaos in Bratislava, calm in Budapest, golden hour walks by the Danube with my friend from back home. Crossing paths with people I met in past cities as if I was running into old cherished friends. Making blurry promises that we would meet again, in Australia or in Canada or somewhere in between, knowing that these words were flimsy but still believing them with iron strength in the moment.
The apex of my solo travels found me in Berlin, Germany. I booked into a no-frills hostel, building my temporary home in a corner top bunk next to a paint-chipped mural. It took longer than I thought it would to settle in. I was the only girl in a room filled with all men, most of them double my age. There were no privacy curtains and the lockers didn’t lock properly. I was having an allergic reaction to bedbug bites I got in Bratislava and I was barely stomaching one meal a day. Don’t get me wrong, I was having the time of my life, but I was losing my lead while running from an inevitable crash. I barely said a single word to anyone for 24 hours.
It’s interesting how people find you in such volatile places. So many people come and go every day that you never end up remembering the moments that you meet the ones that matter to you. Eventually, certain faces just become familiar, and then that familiarity becomes something you search for in the ever-changing crowd. Somehow, what must have spawned out of a blurry tipsy evening, I was placed into a group chat with a group of hostel dwellers who I only knew the Instagram handles of, not even aware of their first names. Of course, as anyone would do when surrounded by strangers in a city known for its degeneracy, we made plans to have a sunset picnic.
Our hostel was a three minute walk from Berghain, so we settled with our Aldi feast in the field next to the nightclub, its oppressive walls looming over us. Instantly we all hit it off. This isn’t a surprise, because when you’re left to your own devices with nothing but a carry on bag for months, you tend not to have the energy to maintain shallow niceties or put on an act. You are your most unfiltered self, interacting with other people in their most unfiltered forms, reaching personal depths that would usually take months to unveil in a matter of hours. Even beyond this, though, something about this group felt different, felt especially tender.
The sun set a fiery red over Berghain as we drank cheap wine and ate pretzel bread. When the sky became dark, we put on black clothing and eyeliner and tried our luck in the notorious line. We were split up, two in and four out. The details turned to fuzz once I made it in the club (or once I sprinkled dust over my gin lemonade in the bathroom), but I remember feeling the drum line melting into my skin under deep blue light in the middle of the dance floor. I remember the sleek hours of the morning when our group reuniting by coincidence outside of the hostel, hysterical laughter followed by giggling hushes, the fear of disrupting the windows above.
The softest memory from this time, its mental image sun bleached and auburn, came the next day. It was hot and bright without a cloud in the sky. I'd made a plan with myself to find a park near the river to relax in and read my book. As I peeled off last night's makeup and put myself back together, I sent a quick one-off invite to the others before turning my phone off, expecting them to be too busy or hungover to venture into the heat with some girl they just met. Turns out I was wrong. In the lobby, everyone greeted me, surprisingly fresh faced and alive, and we headed out into the sweltering German streets.
It was the perfect kind of do-nothing day, where movement lacks purpose and your brain rests on standby. We drifted with the breeze through the industrial maze of Treptow before settling in a green space with a fresh pile of beer and cigarettes. We played cards and chatted for hours, perfectly content with being frozen in that moment; warm sun, calm music, soft grass, surrounded by lovely strangers in a lovely city, fuzzy inside and out. At some point we went to a waterfront bar and drank Aperol Spritzes under the blazing afternoon sun. At some point we found ourselves somewhere else, tipsy now, laughing as we pushed each other around an old wooden carousel. In my head this day has melted together under the heat of its sun. I was liquid, soaking into the grass, sliding through the city with a flushed face and a grin.
This is my favourite day of my whole backpacking journey. I’m not exactly sure why. Other days were more lively, more stuffed to the brim with activity. Other days are the ones I brag about, the ones I swoon over, the ones I can recall second to second from memory. But no other days were as warm as this. It sounds cliché, but I think this was the moment that I realised that I’m gonna be alright. Everything was so unknown at that time, from what I’d to that night to where in the world I’d be living once I was done with my travels. I know now that wherever I am, whatever situations I end up throwing myself into, no matter how far I pull myself from the comforts that I cling to, I will find friends and I will find peace and I will find laughter.
Edinburgh, Written by Richard Linklater
Two nights before my flight to Europe, at the behest of a bunch of my friends, I watched Before Sunrise. The film follows two strangers, an American boy and a French girl, meeting on a train and falling in love over the course of one impulsive night in Vienna. It was heartfelt, beautiful, and a dangerous image to lodge in the brain of someone as hopelessly romantic as myself. I thought of it with every train I rode, every bar I entered, as I scanned the room of every hostel I checked into. I visited some of its filming locations when I passed through Austria. I tried to make eye contact with attractive strangers that lingered near me in bars and thrift stores. I willed myself into believing what happened in the movie would happen to me. Idiot.
This delusion had a chokehold on me for a while. Rose tinted lenses covered my eyes in Prague, Vienna, Bratislava, Berlin - but after months on the move and thousands of kilometres, this delusion began to fade. I was making friends, making memories, seeing beautiful sights - I had better things on my mind than seeking out someone to project this fantasy of love onto (though I won't pretend I wasn’t giving out many drunk kisses for free). Then, after staying with family in Cambridge for a week, I decided to head north, stopping in a couple cities until I reached Edinburgh.
He was staying in the bunk above mine, in our solar system themed room at the hostel. His bed was labelled Earth, and I was Jupiter. From the moment we introduced ourselves to each other to the moment he got on his train out of Scotland, we didn’t leave each other's side.
I replay these three days in my head a lot. So much so that I think it’s distanced me from these memories, like when you say a word so many times that it doesn’t sound real anymore. Walking around the Royal Mile at golden hour, inviting him to do so mere minutes after us meeting, not expecting him to accept the offer. A conversation that flowed so butter smooth that it felt scripted by some weird strings of fate. Watching the sunset from Arthur’s Seat while clutching mini bottles of Sainsbury’s Pinot Grigio. Sticking together in every bar we drifted through, despite being with a group, finding ourselves to be in tune with each other in a way that nobody including us could understand. (He taught me a German word for this sensation since then, zweisamkeit.) When he kissed me in the back of a sticky neon nightclub; the giggle-drenched shenanigans that followed. The coast, the park, our drunk duet at karaoke. Stolen kisses scattered along the way, hands latched together refusing to let go.
On my last full day in Edinburgh I had a trip booked to the Scottish highlands. I didn’t ask him to, but he decided to join me. I remember the mountains, the thick slate-toned clouds, the waterfalls, the lochs. I remember feeling his icy eyes burning the side of my face as I looked out the window of the tour bus. He could’ve, he should’ve, watched the view, but he watched me instead. At times I tried to hold his gaze, but I could never look for too long or else I’d begin to drown.
We only spent an hour at Loch Ness, but the burnt out tape of my re-ran memories has stretched to make it feel like days. We paced the shores hand in hand searching for monsters in the water. We sat by the coastline and looked out over the smokey, sprawling view, so cold and eerie but also oddly warm when experiencing it with someone else. We ate lunch at a tiny quaint pub and chatted about the incoherent chaotic perfection of our time together. As we waited to get back on the bus it began to pour, so we hurried into a patch of forest near the parking lot and held each other tightly under my umbrella. This is the image that has scorched me most. Me and him and the woods, the rain heavy and grim all around us, but we were dry and cosy and intertwined. Cheek against chest, lips against lips. Clutching each other with a familiarity so much older and wiser than three days that we knew one another. The way he grabbed my face and studied it before going in for a kiss. The sound of raindrops on the umbrella and on the leaves. His fucking eyes.
We don’t talk anymore. But through all the confusion that clouds his image, these days still glow within my memory. My sweet seventy-two hour love story, such a magical moment amid a summer that was already so filled with whimsy. My own Before Sunrise, this silly delusion of mine brought to life, fed like a wildfire, now left as a ghost haunting the corner bunk beds, the nightclub bar, the rocks on the coast, and the Loch Ness woods.
Ghosts on the Coast of Reykjavik
I’m not sure how to begin unravelling this one.
One of my grandmother's biggest dreams in life was to see the northern lights. Every time we spent a weekend in cottage country, we’d keep our eye out for even a sliver of green somewhere in the sky. The chances of Aurora Borealis in our part of Canada are too low, and we knew that, but something about the play pretend was comforting and exciting. My grandmother passed away when I was 12. She beat cancer four times, she didn’t make it through the fifth. Later on through the years, it became a tongue-in-cheek competition between my grandfather, my mother and myself to see who would see the Northern Lights first, for her.
While in Ireland I finalised my journey back to Canada, opting to stop for 4 nights in Iceland before flying back to Toronto. My only goal was to see the Northern Lights.
On the streets of Cambridge, two days before my flight, I found out that one of my close friends had passed away.
Processing death is impossible, I think. You can react to it, chew on it, swallow it, but I don’t think the digestion ever stops. It sits like a pit in your stomach forever. When I was 12, I dealt with grief the way you might deal with burning your fingers, a white hot flash of pain that leaves you shaking your hand until you don’t think about it anymore. Screaming, wailing, pulling my hair out on the kitchen floor, immediately running out the door to find my friends, forcing us to play hide and seek, go swimming, do something. Distraction, distraction, distraction, movement, movement, movement, until the reason I started moving in the first place started becoming blurry in my peripheral vision. At 22, I dealt with grief the same way. Guttural sobs behind the concrete pillars of a church, running down the cobblestone streets to the closest pub I could find, countless pints in the corner booth with my friend on FaceTime until I was so tipsy I could hardly find my way home.
Reykjavik became purgatory, a grayscale waiting room holding me captive until I’d get thrown back into the real world, no longer able to look away from the harsh reality I was avoiding eye contact with. The mountains in the distance were beautiful, but the city itself felt cold and sterile, a sparse nordic uniqueness that may have charmed me in a different headspace, but instead felt taunting and cruel. I tried to find Lukas in beautiful things. I tried to find him in flowers but the ground was frozen. I tried to find him in groups of teenagers laughing loudly outside of bars, but the streets were always quiet. The city around me refused to acknowledge his existence and it infuriated me. It’s not Reykjavik's fault, she was sweet and mellow and timid. But at that moment I craved chaos and life. I wanted the world to breathe his name.
I kept myself busy and it was pleasant. I swam in a hot spring and stood on the edge of a waterfall. I saw art and glaciers and creatures and rainbows. The globe kept turning and I did my best to move with it, meandering on my own through this tiny permafrost corner of the universe.
On my second last night some new arrivals checked into my hostel room. One American, two Dutch girls. They were very sweet and also very eager to find the northern lights. The Dutch girls had a rental car. The Aurora forecast looked decent that night, and clouds were forecasted for the next day. I barely had to speak half of my proposal before the others agreed.
We all piled into the rental car and drove to a peninsula just outside the city, near a lighthouse. It was pitch black. I stared out of the passenger window with knots in my stomach as if I was on my way to meet an old friend or a celebrity, someone with a heavy reputation. We parked along the edge of a black sand stretch of dunes just off the shore. When we got out of the car and walked towards the beach, I saw it. My stomach dropped and I felt like a child meeting Santa Claus.
It was dim, much dimmer than ideal, but it was there regardless, slinking through the sky, drifting in and out of the inky black as if it was afraid to be caught. Pale seafoam tinted waves, a sleek veil coating the stars. It was so so faint, barely a whisper in the sky, but I teared up regardless. I hope my grandmother used my eyes to watch the lights that night. To me it felt like she did.
Lukas was lingering there too, somewhere and somehow. It was the first time since I started searching for him that I felt him so purely. In colour and in light, of course, I shouldn’t have expected to find him anywhere else. They were both there that night. It’s such a cliche way of coping, it's such a grossly regurgitated line, but in that moment it to me was real and tangible and I felt it with all of my senses.
Once someone has found you they never stop finding you, and you’ll always know where to find them. And if their usual haunting grounds grow scarce, or if you’re scared to confront the places that echo them too loudly, they’ll find you gently, hovering within the things that soften your heart the most.
A Very Jolly Central Park Bike-Taxi Ride
Me and my friend Mara were sitting in her room one day, listening to Arca and nursing a bottle of Pinot Grigio between us, as we often do. I’d been back home in Canada for three months at this point. The autumn was bleaker than usual and the lethargy of my hometown was beginning to suffocate me. Mara was overwhelmed with school and the rage-inducing monotony of life in our city and I was losing hair over a visa that was trapped in bureaucratic purgatory. She told me she’d been yearning for a New York City trip for a while. I told her I’d been thinking about it too, for weeks, trying to figure out a way to pull it off with no real plan in mind. But she was saving for a trip to New Orleans and I was saving for my move, so no, we really shouldn’t. We exchanged about 5 more sentences before we decided we were gonna do it. Two weeks and one Spirit flight from Detroit later, we were there. I love it when we do stupid shit like that.
We crashed on the couch of a friend she barely knew on the edge of Bushwick. Our 4 day trip was a clusterfuck in the exact flavour that you’d expect an impulse cry-for-help girls trip in your twenties to be. Our flight was delayed and we missed a concert we had tickets to. We got too drunk every night and always ended up either crying, throwing up or sleeping in way too late. We didn’t have the money to shop or buy tickets to anything, or maybe we would’ve had that money if we hadn’t spent it all on cocktails and overpriced pastrami sandwiches. All we did was wander around and drink. It was all fucking incredible. I wouldn’t change a second of it.
There were a lot of moments where I just got so overwhelmed and had to hold myself back from crying, not because Mara would’ve judged me, but because something about a 22 year old white girl crying over New York City felt a little too on the nose. Still, I was emotional, overcome with a level of excited joy that doesn’t quite fit inside my body that only ever finds me when I’m far away from home. Every day the skyline greeted us as we rode the shaky J train into Manhattan. We spent cool grey days crawling like ants past the towering skyscrapers, skimming each iconic landmark to avoid being swallowed by the thick crowds. We drank wine in the MoMA and ate overpriced pasta in Bryant Park. When the sun dipped below the horizon we consumed like locals, espresso martinis on Midtown rooftops, cocktails in teacups in LES speakeasies, free shooters served by drag queens in Greenwich Village, beer and shot combos in Brooklyn dive bars, fumes in a tiny bottle in BASEMENT. Timid days and delightfully rancid nights.
On a particularly delightful and rancid night, I blacked out in a Soho karaoke spot the size of a public bathroom and threw up in the apartment toilet. That night, however, started off with one of the only moments since I was a teenager that I experienced genuine, childlike wonder.
We spent the afternoon in Central Park. We ate deli sandwiches sitting on a rock and people watched as tourists bounced and locals marched by. We rode the carousel and watched buskers sing and dance and draw a crowd without ever performing an act at the Bethesda Terrace. We meandered all the way over to the MET before realising that we wanted to be on the west side instead. Our feet were sore and we were running on nothing but bread and the remnants of a hangover. We had seen a lot of bike taxis around the city, every single one drenched in so many plastic Christmas decorations that it must have made each carriage at least 5 pounds heavier. They all blasted holiday music and coddled googly-eyed tourists and were definitely overpriced. But we didn’t want to walk and an Uber would’ve been about 5 dollars cheaper and 50 percent less exciting, so we decided to bite the bullet. We found a lonely biker at the mouth of the park and asked him to take us to a rooftop bar in the Upper West Side. Then, the split second that we sat down in the carriage, we regressed into giggly, awe-struck children.
The blown out speakers blasted Last Christmas embarrassingly loud and every car that passed us seemed furious at our presence. It was twilight now, and though the clouds were too thick for a sunset, the finance towers were beginning to sparkle. The skyline shifted around us, threading through the brittle branches of each naked tree, and I understood why New Yorkers are so annoying about New York. My gums hurt from the cool breeze and from smiling too hard and every time Mara and I made eye contact we laughed the way babies do. Our driver pointed out iconic buildings from classic movies and I imagined that I was in one myself. We exited the park and our driver began swerving through erratic traffic, horns blasting at us from every direction. We could have been struck so easily right then and there, and any vehicle would have had every right to, he was cycling like an idiot. But all I could think about is how funny it would be - lying there with my best friend on the wet asphalt of Broadway, surrounded by smoke and crunched metal staring up into the grey, light polluted night sky, laughing at the hysterical absurdity of it all. How beautifully ridiculous that would’ve been, how beautifully ridiculous it all was anyway.