Fever Ray – Keep The Streets Empty For Me (mp3)

For going on nearly a year now, I have been writing and have been trying to write about home. I was trying to write about the spaces we construct between walls and behind doors, what we name them, and how we allow specific people into those spaces and call them blood. I was trying to write about the cities that we occupy, the ways we live in them, the way the shape of a particular street can inform a worldview. I needed to write these things because it was, after a certain point, a matter of sanity.

I wrote the post below in July. I’m still thinking about home, but more quietly now, with less of my heart in my throat.

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466 Ossington

The first sentence of the last paper I wrote for school was this:
If we could reduce truth to its most literal elements and if we could be sure of the black and white markings of it, we could rightly argue that it is not so far from “here” to “there” – the distance just a solitary letter, nothing more than a trifling lowercase “t.”

Six weeks after I wrote that sentence, I punched in my final period and emailed the essay off, ending my academic career with a characteristically sprawling and inconsistent piece of melodrama. It was half-decent, just good enough to pass, just insane enough to mark it mine.

When I wrote that first sentence in June, those words meant something important to me. And naively I hoped that I could maybe put that important something down into coherent words, if not in this paper, then maybe elsewhere. In the intervening month and a half that it took me to write that paper, weeks punctuated with long days of sleep and nights of writing every other conceivable thing I could sit down long enough to focus on, that particular obsession faded away. The importance of figuring out how it is that we negotiate change in the cityscape and how and why we continue to love places and people when everything is caught in a perpetual flux waned with the summer heat. I grew nostalgic for the cold and for snowed-in beaches and for the stifling clasp of ill-fitting cheap wool coats, the way those things demand and encourage solitude.

I can’t remember now what it was that I was hoping to resolve when I finally typed up that first sentence after having had it float in my head for days. Naively, I started off every academic paper I wrote this last year with the hope that when I finished it, it would say something to me that I could hear, something important that had nothing to do with the text in question, something comprehensible to me.
Not a single paper ever did end that way.

I think, though, what I was thinking about in June was how people become unrecognisable, how much place means to me, how I let streets and subway lines stand in for the ghosts of the people I knew. I think I was thinking about the stubbornness of love, the insidiousness of it, the way its sly malleability means you’re never free of it. You just learn to know it in another shape, by some other title that seems smaller.

And I think what I was thinking about was memory, the way you can trace belonging on the way someone’s face looks looking at you, the way I externalise moments from private histories onto the curve of eyelids and onto the particular grey of a particular lakeshore intersection. The way this city lives for me, permitting me the liberty of stories I construct around it that exist above and beyond the material details of its reality. The way, so many months later, the careless slap of leaves against a moving train’s window still makes the floor of my stomach cave. I was thinking about the many and strange ways that I set about forgetting things, some ways wilful and others markedly less so.

And now I am done thinking about those things.

What separates “here” from “there” in lived realities is not a fluke of the alphabet. It’s the people you still know, the fabricated memories you call your own, the streetcorners you cordon off in your mental landscape and name home.