Week 24, 2026: Twilight
Building a life from scratch is exhausting, even when it’s so much fun. Hard to celebrate the good in case it slips and easy to grieve the bad in case it sticks.
I still eat like I live in a hotel. The run club I appear to have joined pushes me to my fastest and longest run yet. A cooking book I borrowed from the library is asking for ingredients I have no interest in owning, like flour and onions. Just as I continually refuse to learn that impatiently biting into a steaming hot pizza will burn the roof of my mouth, I’m stubborn about being able to carry a basket-ful of groceries without the aid of a bag. A prop comedy act, in effect, one that garners smiles of sympathy from my neighbours.
The nine to five is mostly remote. The five to nine is a date or a book. A date with a book. A book from a date. A booked date. A dated book. I wake up in the middle of the night to find that I’ve fallen asleep reading on my rug. I stay up late thinking, thinking, thinking about someone else. My mother says it’s been so long since you just focused on yourself and I tell her she’s being really unsupportive to stop her from telling me what I need to hear.
I’m still meeting new people every week. I’m also now meeting people for the second and third time, and getting to know them a little better. Mo and Anja, I decide as I sip on an NA pale ale that Anja bought for me in a dive bar that Mo picked for us, are quite possibly my Torontonian godparents. There is a kinship I feel with them that I once felt with L&S. I have space for an agreeable interracial couple with a mortgage to tell me exactly how to live my life.
A’s bedroom captures her story to a T: girl who just moved to a new country, open to anything, bound by nothing. It has big windows, a clothing rack displaying every item she owns and a charming fireplace. She is one of those girls with a disposition that makes a mattress on the floor look like a chic design choice.
She flows around her flat like a fairy, apologizing for a mess that doesn’t exist as fairies often do. Dinner is a feta and caramelized onions galette, plus a side salad. She pours us elderflower water and we talk on the balcony into the twilight. I have work the next day but I wish that wasn't the case. The sky is clear and the stars are watching when she spits out what we’re both thinking. I ask on the streetcar home if I can see her again the next day.
My hair is wet when I greet her at my door. I’m in a dress I usually reserve for the beach because it’s boiling hot. She’s wearing white and red in honour of Canada’s first match. When I find her eyes drifting around my flat, I comment oh my god you can’t find a single nice thing to say but she laughs and denies it. I ask if it's the fake plants. There’s just so much black and white. She’s amused by the height-based cupboard-sharing system and impressed with my view of the CN tower, at least.
We sit on my balcony and drink orange soda, before deciding to wander my ends. Smoking isn’t allowed on the beach, it turns out, and we’re both good girls who like to follow rules, so we people-watch and share fries and what might possibly be the best portion of onion rings either of us ever had instead.
On our way home, a young girl smiles at me and says I like your dress and I reply thank you so much, I like your dress and A waits until we’ve walked far enough before saying what about me, which pulls a big laugh out of me. Later that night, I ask her about something that has been weighing on me and her answer fills me with calm. I feel light and possibly happy. My mother is right.