There’s a ticket with my name on it. My name and two stopovers and 24+ hours of flight. And the date Thursday, Aug 11 8AM.

It is Wednesday night. 8AM on Thursday will find me asleep in my parent’s unfinished basement, my bags still packed from 2 months in Montreal, everything else still packed from 8 months in Vancouver. I survey the small wreckage of half-open luggage at the foot of the bed and feel a flash of perverse, useless pride. My life fits neatly now within every imaginable airline baggage limit.

It’s the first night of Ramadan. These past years, I have come to associate the month not with the moon, or with the athaan, or with hunger or prayers, or any of the things that used to mark this part of the year for me. These years, Ramadan is at its most Ramadan-like when I’m driving, family packed into a fast-delapidating car, nights caught between increasingly scattered iftars and no less scattered taraweeh, too many backseat drivers and streetlights that are never quite bright enough for me to feel like I’m doing anything but bluffing my way through this cement.

The first night of Ramadan. I do more U-turns in that half hour than I have the entirety of my driving history. I love driving at night through Scarborough. The streets are empty enough that I can drive the way I can never speak, 40 over the limit and smooth, one hand easy on the wheel. And this city boasts some terrific potholes, real necksnappers.

“I’m going,” I say. A light turns red behind me.

Ten minutes later, I nearly do a left turn on yellow, but stop in time, fifteen feet from the mosque entrance. I curl over the wheel, rest my cheek on its rough plastic. “I’m not going.” A bus rumbles past, then a truck, large mechanical animals that make the streets shudder underneath us.

I’m not going. After everything’s said and done, the irony of it is that despite everything, I always forget how beholden I am to borders. After weeks of reducing my life in this country to immaculate itineraries of changes-of-address and disgustingly lit passport photographs, I finally grow up and concede defeat. High Commission, you win this round.

But all these things, these larger machinations of exit and reentry, are not why I take a break at a stoplight to not pretend I’m not disappointed. The thing is, I told you, what I like best is leaving. Reorienting myself, when the goodbyes were on the tip of my tongue, is dizzying. I put my head down.