(no subject)
You should stay awake for 12 hours in a city that you feel is Home, even if you don't really live there. Stay awake during the night time, when the streets are dead quiet and the subway tunnels rumble when a train is coming in.
In Toronto, the last train to downtown leaves at 1:15. AM, of course, the clubs don't even close till 2:30 or 3, and last call is 2 AM at most bars and coffeehouses.
Toronto is a good place to do this. I did it last night - this morning - with another good friend of mine. We stood out at the edge of the park, with one foot barriers between us and icy, polluted Lake Ontario. We looked out over the thin, broken sheets of transparent ice, dark blue and white stretching into the cloud cover, obscuring Buffalo and even the docks a couple miles on either side. It was a post-apocalyptic view, all lit up from god knows where. That was 6:00 AM. We could hear ducks.
We walked all over town, before that, from 1:30 until whenever we found the little chain coffee shop. We sat there for two hours, writing messages back and forth in a notebook and I folded Starburst wrappers. We drank coffee, then tea. I had a donut.
Around 2:30 maybe AM we walked by a radio station, playing its music outside the little building itself. It had just started a song - Sic Transit Gloria by Brand New - and we love it and the band, so we stopped and danced and sang it and screamed the chorus: "Die young and save yourself." We started laughing.
It was freezing rain and our hair froze solid. Everything was covered in that fine sheet of snow-ice that it gets. We skated over subway grates. We went to skate in Nathan Phillips Square, underneath the arches and by the bell that sounds like its ringing in the end of the world each hour. I'd like to hear it striking thirteen someday.. We couldn't skate there, though - the freezing rain ice had been broken and marked up by other people, and it was too rough and bumpy.
From there, we wandered more, encountered a man who liked my Elvis-record-cover bag and was on some kind of drug. He was friendly, nice, and eating a green lollipop. He walked with us for a block.
We encountered Dave-From-Northern-Ontario outside the radio station, just after the song ended. He asked us if we were having fun. We said yes, and laughed a lot.
It was cold out, that kind of bitter cold where it sinks through your skin and makes your bones ache, though our smiles just widened. The freezing rain made our hair go solid, and our coats and bags. Neither of us could help but laugh.
Toronto, the city, it never gets dark. There are always lights. It's perpetually just after sunset, grey and bleak and beautiful.
When you're out on the streets, Toronto is the city in which the world could end. We would smile while it happened. This is our new year and our future: night life and sunrises, stumbling to nowhere with feet so cold that they burn and go numb, perpetual good feelings and comfort in friends. And really, what else matters?
The city never gets dark.
In Toronto, the last train to downtown leaves at 1:15. AM, of course, the clubs don't even close till 2:30 or 3, and last call is 2 AM at most bars and coffeehouses.
Toronto is a good place to do this. I did it last night - this morning - with another good friend of mine. We stood out at the edge of the park, with one foot barriers between us and icy, polluted Lake Ontario. We looked out over the thin, broken sheets of transparent ice, dark blue and white stretching into the cloud cover, obscuring Buffalo and even the docks a couple miles on either side. It was a post-apocalyptic view, all lit up from god knows where. That was 6:00 AM. We could hear ducks.
We walked all over town, before that, from 1:30 until whenever we found the little chain coffee shop. We sat there for two hours, writing messages back and forth in a notebook and I folded Starburst wrappers. We drank coffee, then tea. I had a donut.
Around 2:30 maybe AM we walked by a radio station, playing its music outside the little building itself. It had just started a song - Sic Transit Gloria by Brand New - and we love it and the band, so we stopped and danced and sang it and screamed the chorus: "Die young and save yourself." We started laughing.
It was freezing rain and our hair froze solid. Everything was covered in that fine sheet of snow-ice that it gets. We skated over subway grates. We went to skate in Nathan Phillips Square, underneath the arches and by the bell that sounds like its ringing in the end of the world each hour. I'd like to hear it striking thirteen someday.. We couldn't skate there, though - the freezing rain ice had been broken and marked up by other people, and it was too rough and bumpy.
From there, we wandered more, encountered a man who liked my Elvis-record-cover bag and was on some kind of drug. He was friendly, nice, and eating a green lollipop. He walked with us for a block.
We encountered Dave-From-Northern-Ontario outside the radio station, just after the song ended. He asked us if we were having fun. We said yes, and laughed a lot.
It was cold out, that kind of bitter cold where it sinks through your skin and makes your bones ache, though our smiles just widened. The freezing rain made our hair go solid, and our coats and bags. Neither of us could help but laugh.
Toronto, the city, it never gets dark. There are always lights. It's perpetually just after sunset, grey and bleak and beautiful.
When you're out on the streets, Toronto is the city in which the world could end. We would smile while it happened. This is our new year and our future: night life and sunrises, stumbling to nowhere with feet so cold that they burn and go numb, perpetual good feelings and comfort in friends. And really, what else matters?
The city never gets dark.