It’s strange, how much I love this city. It’s not like I even know it very well, or have called enough others ‘home’ to justify how much I love this particular city, but the snow is all gone outside, this weekend the temperature is flirting with double digits, and the thought of spending my summer here wandering these sticky streets gives me butterflies. I will disavow socks for the next six months, and come home with the city grime lacing my feet. The heat will give me pounding headaches and my windows will be perpetually open. Yesterday, they were doing construction across the mall and the air was thick with dust.

“Toronto is,” said a friend, “where I am when I’m nowhere else.”*
Which sounds dismissive, the way you’d talk about the people you know will always wait for you, and therefore you leave.
Except I don’t think he’d meant it that way.

I wouldn’t have described my love that way. And though something about them makes his words stay with me so many months later, I sill can’t describe it to myself in those terms.
For me it’s this simple, in this many words: Toronto is home to me.

It’s strange, how much I love this city. How the thought of it gives me butterflies in my stomach. Is it possible to have a crush on a place? I love: the lake in winter; the stalking geese; the sheep in the Village; the squat, dark lowrises; the brooding ravines; lowslung cars with tacky paintjobs.

suns

It’s strange, that I go so far as to even call this city ‘home.’ I must love this place very much, more even than I know, to have reached this level of comfort, to forswear all the other cities I have been and have not been and one day will be. This city occupies pride of place in my heart. And why? I don’t understand. Not even the lists I construct – public transit; concrete bridges; graffitied cement; vast and empty grey skies – capture fully, justify enough how deeply in love I am with this city.

I haven’t left yet, am still here, which is another reason this love is strange, because it is also deeply nostalgic. What does it mean to miss the place you live in, the place you call home even as you live in it. It’s as though my definition of ‘home’ requires a temporal disconnect, as though I practise diaspora in ways that permeate even my stasis, and therefore, the only way I can both be here and be home, is if a part of me has left already, is always looking back, is always aching for a return to something straight-forwardly beautiful.

And meanwhile, there is a part of me that never arrived, that is awestruck again and again by the newness of this city. It isn’t just that there are parts of this city that I have never been, that contain within themselves their own self-defining logic that I’ve never learned, but that these streets are forever self-creating.

The first night here, over eight years ago, I peered out the windows at the skyline rolling by and I could not see anything except the city we’d left behind the day before. Literally: my memories of Jeddah obscured the view of the downtown core so convincingly that I had to forcibly remind myself that we’d spent the last two days flying.

I love this city, and I love it into being something above and beyond its material reality. There is something here, in the gravel and the grit, that catches my breath, but the thing I love is not exactly this. It is my belief in this city, my sense of this city as always beyond my reach, as something I’ll never fully know, something that forever escapes me. So there is no end in sight to my love, and my love becomes a verb without a conclusive limit: this city stretches further than my knowing and my loving is a movement towards that always moving horizon.

Maybe that’s another facet of choosing to forever be a piece of a diaspora, that the only place I can call home is a place that internally has no limits. When I go back, it is to here, to this city that changes from year to year, that changes me as it does so, that is in and of itself a series of changes. When I go back home, it is to a place that has always moved on.

Toronto is where I am when I’m nowhere else.
And when I’m elsewhere, and even when I’m here, Toronto is and separate of me.

I love this place. I don’t know why. The reasons are mundane and do not add up to very much. The arithmetic fails and the language is cliche, but listen, I love this city.

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* I wrote that first as Toronto is where I am where I’m nowhere else. That works, too.