it’s just past 1AM here. 4AM by other clocks. i don’t know which clocks my body follows, i haven’t been able to sleep earlier than 5 in any time zone for the last 3 months.
so because it is, in whatever relevant timezone, some small hour of the night, this email seems entirely reasonable, when i know full well it will seem anything but in the starker light of day.

i’ve moved to this city whose soul evades me, has evaded me for a year now. yet i love place. when my relations with people are questionable, i can say with full confidence that a certain thing i love unquestioningly is place — the way streets meet, how signs light up or don’t at night, how strangers move amongst each other on subway cars, what alleyways do to notions of travel, what the sky feels like on the back of my neck.
and i’ve lived in vancouver for a year, and the soul of this place evades me. lost somewhere between the strange aloofness of this city. i don’t know how to explain it, but when i think of living here, my throat constricts.

i’ve moved into this apartment that belongs in the kind of magazine my mother refers to when she plots how she will decorate this final house my parents have moved into. they’ve been moving for decades, and finally they have a semblance of physical home. you couldn’t see in last night, but the entire ground floor, with the exception of my brother’s bedroom and the den, is unfurnished. strange empty spaces, with bare walls and ugly gifted lamps. it is unsettling seeing my parents go through this process. in their old age, building a homestead, a slow and painful process, at one and the same moment a collapsing of past present and future. it is unsettling and it breaks my heart.
this apartment i’ve moved into has a ladder that leads up into an attic. wooden floors, a sloping roof, an empty ceiling space with windows in the roof. and it has a wide balcony that looks north to the mountains and the ever-bright downtown core. the windows in the other rooms face variously into the sun and open onto the roof of the patio below, seating wide enough for a coterie. the kitchen has deep red walls, the bathroom light blue. one of the bedrooms has french doors.
it is overwhelming, and i am not sure where the sadness comes from, except the deep-rooted sense that i do not deserve this.

i digress, but i’ve forgotten now from what. so this is probably a good place to wrap up.

oh, a story. some girl forgot her wallet on the bus. i was exhausted from not sleeping last night, from flying this morning, then moving furniture, then trying to pretend the costs of moving in weren’t terrifying. and because i was exhausted, i ran after her with the wallet. that causality makes no sense, but instinctively i know if i’d been more conscious i’d have faltered a moment longer. so i picked up her wallet, but she’d already left the bus, and the doors had closed, so i called to the driver to open them. one of those accordion buses, and i’m at the last door, and i never call to bus drivers to open doors. a couple of other people chime in, and the driver opens the door and i call after the girl, who doesn’t hear me, so i have to run after her again, and mostly i’m just very tired and very hungry. i’m supposed to be home right now, not doing this dumb shit. the girl turns and i thrust her wallet at her, turning to the bus even before she’s done saying thank you. and the bus is pulling away from the curb. so i howl please don’t leave at the sky and scrape my hands through my hair like a crazy person. some guy walking by turns around to stare, but the bus is stopping again for me. i run to the door — for consistency, i suppose, since i could have just walked, since he was waiting.
then it’s another three stops to home and my first night here.