City space is my favourite space.
As much as I love the open country, star-filled skies, mountain tops and the shorelines, I always find my heart most enraptured when walking in the city.
Even in its dirtiest, ugliest, and stinkiest, I find that there is so much for me to absorb and know, so much I can turn over and take apart, so many layers of time and space just haunting, just hovering.
Recently I have been forced to take longer walks in the city in this deathly cold, and although I detest the cold, I do think that a cold city has its own flavor.
I think a lot about Michael Ondaatje’s Toronto, and Michael Redhill’s Toronto. Then I think about Dionne Brand’s Toronto and I sometimes feel like if I looked around I might see them walk by, ghostly inhabitants of this city rising out of words on words.
Sometimes, days happen to take you to roads you haven’t walked before, neighbourhoods you’ve never seen, and you might just catch a glimpse of a moment so breathtakingly mundane. For me, in those moments time has a way of becoming quiet space, space I want to inhabit and breathe for a little longer. It’s not really about perspective, just a view. A view that is ever changing, but also ever constant. That exact intersection of a moment will never happen again. How blessed am I to have caught it then, to be a part of it even.
Maybe the city means more also because I live in it. The roads I walk take me in general paths, but I am always heading toward home in the end. All the roads traveled are meaningful because they lead me to belonging.
As I traverse the city, the city becomes mine. But as I traverse, I also make my way back into mine. Home time is happy time and happy me.
