(no subject)
When I moved here from Singapore, I was already in Vancouver when my mom went back, packed and freighted everything over. So this is the first time that I am packing for a big move myself. It's very different from packing for a vacation, or even for an interview trip. Instead of picking my best clothes, I'm packing almost all my clothes, plus awfully home-y stuff like a rice cooker. The fact that when I leave there won't be much of a home left behind doesn't help either (which explains why I inherit the rice cooker - no one is going to be here).
Still, this is the only place I've really ever come to call a permanent home. I am attached to this place for reasons too numerous and personal to relate here, and it will remain so, even as an empty shell - it is under this roof that we will all rejoin, hopefully.
There are too many things to remember - the balcony, the white umbrella, leaping up from a nap one windy day and furiously trying with my brother to keep said white umbrella from flying off said balcony, the mountains in the distance, both dawn and dusk framing the mountains in the distance, counting car headlights from my window on long nights, just my window itself...
I know many of these things will be forgotten, or at the least they will become obscured by the many new things that hit me in the next while. The one image that I am desperate to remember though, is the long, beautiful curve leading to our roundabout. It is a wondrous length of road, that rare, wide lane of asphalt that quietens the soul. It is minutes from home, yet the sweep of the curve evokes an eternity - as I explained to a friend once, it stretches out like a Friday afternoon, Saturday and Sunday still intact and pristine. The forest hides the city to the right, and the concrete mass of a university on the left - a green sieve that filters all but the most mischievous rays of sunlight, along with the few brave mountain bikers crossing through the hiking trail. I have hurtled down this stretch on a sunny day singing to the radio, or crawled through during the summer rain when the trees seem, impossibly, more lush than ever. I have laughed, argued, cried, and simply sat silently. It doesn't matter - each time, I have ridden a shape that must be as elegant as the outline of Zerzura described by the english patient Almasy. I have dived into the bosphorus and resurfaced. At 80 kilometres an hour, I have stopped time.
It is this liquid millisecond that I will remember, whether Toronto be joyous, chaotic, or bitterly cold.
Still, this is the only place I've really ever come to call a permanent home. I am attached to this place for reasons too numerous and personal to relate here, and it will remain so, even as an empty shell - it is under this roof that we will all rejoin, hopefully.
There are too many things to remember - the balcony, the white umbrella, leaping up from a nap one windy day and furiously trying with my brother to keep said white umbrella from flying off said balcony, the mountains in the distance, both dawn and dusk framing the mountains in the distance, counting car headlights from my window on long nights, just my window itself...
I know many of these things will be forgotten, or at the least they will become obscured by the many new things that hit me in the next while. The one image that I am desperate to remember though, is the long, beautiful curve leading to our roundabout. It is a wondrous length of road, that rare, wide lane of asphalt that quietens the soul. It is minutes from home, yet the sweep of the curve evokes an eternity - as I explained to a friend once, it stretches out like a Friday afternoon, Saturday and Sunday still intact and pristine. The forest hides the city to the right, and the concrete mass of a university on the left - a green sieve that filters all but the most mischievous rays of sunlight, along with the few brave mountain bikers crossing through the hiking trail. I have hurtled down this stretch on a sunny day singing to the radio, or crawled through during the summer rain when the trees seem, impossibly, more lush than ever. I have laughed, argued, cried, and simply sat silently. It doesn't matter - each time, I have ridden a shape that must be as elegant as the outline of Zerzura described by the english patient Almasy. I have dived into the bosphorus and resurfaced. At 80 kilometres an hour, I have stopped time.
It is this liquid millisecond that I will remember, whether Toronto be joyous, chaotic, or bitterly cold.