So, Toronto…

What’s that all about?

Well, I mean, it’s a little cold. Certainly colder now than when I first arrived in the throes of fall. Snow has become a semi-regular occurrence, which is an adjustment for my Californian bones, but an adjustment that is welcome and exactly the kind of shake-up that I felt I needed and desired in my move to Toronto.

Other than that, it still feels very much like a move that is still in progress. I’m settled a little more now than I was when I first landed, I know my way around the city generally, and I have an apartment that is still in the process of being unpacked (don’t mind the handful of boxes still in the corner full of books that I have no idea where I’m going to place). I’m still getting random things for the apartment itself, still have artwork to hang on the walls, still have some miscellaneous items to sell.

When will it all be done? I’m not sure. Perhaps someday I’ll look around the apartment–look around my life here–and feel that I have truly and finally settled into living in Toronto. Or it’ll sneak up on me like a cat positioning itself to pounce, and one day I will be going about my business and then realize, finally, that I feel like I’ve done it. The move is complete. The proverbial cat has lept.

For now, though, it’s not that. It’s ongoing. It’s all in motion, a dozen different items up in the air; I work to catch one and launch another.

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“It’s been busy–but good,” I said to everyone who asked, the relatives and friends I saw back home during Thanksgiving. A general enough answer to get the ball rolling, to give someone some insight into my experience but not burden them with the true highs and lows. Sanitization of the simplest form.

That, of course, avoids lots of the different and tough moments that I’ve had here. It ignores the moments when I felt homesick, or when I felt lost in attempting to meet new people, like a sprig out of place on a clean lawn, practically begging to be torn up by the roots, removed from the scene.

It avoids the week after I had just moved into my apartment, still working to sort everything out, bone sore from hauling and heaving a heavy shelving unit up a flight of narrow stairs. I lay collapsed on my bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering what I was doing, and if I had made the right choice in moving across the country. Such a big leap, and here I was, leg bleeding from my roommate’s vindictive cat who I so desperately wanted to be friends with but who so desperately felt I was an invader in his space.

I felt I was in those moments, an outsider. I felt that I had not made the right choice, now removed from my previous home and not at home enough to call this new space one. And I lay and cried and wondered why I had done what I had done.

It also avoids the moments when I’ve really loved it here. When I experienced my first snowfall walking to work and felt like I was possibly the only Torontoan (Torontonian? Torontite?) that was excited about the snow, eyes wide and smile wider as I watched it drift. Coming from the endlessly varying days of sun and slight clouds to days of snow and rain and overcast and sunny and windy and foggy and everything in between has been an experience that I never thought would be as amazing and invigorating as it has been.

It ignores the gorgeous brilliance of fall, the wonderful colors and vibrant hues that ran from tree to tree and were far more widespread than anything that I had previously seen in California.

So, at the end of the day, I’m enjoying it. This is the first move I have done since moving to college or moving into the off-campus house at the beginning of my senior year, and this one feels much more like a capital-A Adult journey. I’m on my own and entirely financially independent. I’m working every day, I’m going into the office most days, and I’m attempting to create some semblance of a social life here–attempting to create some semblance of a life here.

So, if you ask me how I’m enjoying Toronto or how the move has been, I may still say “busy–but good,” as a standard response, but know that there’s a lot more there. And as much as it sounds like I’m trying to convince myself that it was a good idea to move here (even when everyone from Toronto says that the logical thing to do is to move from Toronto to California), I genuinely think it was and is the right move.

It’s a new journey, a new place, and I know that California is always waiting with open arms. It will always be my home, even if I’m not living there at the moment.

It’s hopefully going to be a little busier here soon, and I’ve been working on some other longer pieces for this space so keep your eyes peeled for those. In the meantime, here’s one final photo (of me) during one of those better days in Toronto which, not to worry, far outnumber the bad days.