i’ve never slept with my head next to a traffic light before, but there’s a first time for everything: my amazing friend sasha’s living room window is wedged right up against a stoplight on bathurst street, though since i fall asleep with the birds this is less of an issue than one might think. there will be fewer than 20 waking hours to spend in toronto, so i get up soon after to breakfast with sasha and ride the subway around town in a daze.

there are a couple of things about visiting toronto that are weird: one is that it feels like i never really left, that nothing is that different and i should be able to just walk home from wherever i happen to be (sadly, inconveniently, no longer true.) the other thing is that it also feels like i never moved there at all: i truly see the city as i did before i spent that decade there, before the friends and the reading series and the crawling through unbuilt subways and the cancer hospital and the long spring walks and the meandering ontario drives, all of it. it’s a city i see as so new to me again, yet where i know my way around so well. it’s also, by the way, completely fucking freezing.

one way to handle having too many people you want to see is to just turn up at their homes or places of employ unannounced, and amazingly this works all day: my homies are at mercury espresso, sam james is at his new cafe, shawn and sebastian are at home in cabbagetown, peter and chris are at the comix shop, and on and on. i wander with shawn and bus and streetcar around the deceptively sunny toronto day and try to see who i can without being a rushed jerkface about it, settling in for a perfect dinner with kate and nousheen before heading to the garrison (which was a portuguese billiards hall last time i was in town) for the markers show.

nevermind the weird intersections that occur once i get there — canada is a real small country, as it turns out — but the night takes a weird emotional pitch that’s met perfectly by this show, tell me a story where you leave your home, ok.

the morning comes too quickly again, and there’s a little time to sneak out for a baked pancake and some peameal bacon with howie and susan, and pester the shopkeep at the monkey’s paw, the best store in toronto. if you don’t know it’s the best store in toronto, you’re a fool, plain and simple. i rejoin my marker people for the long drive to montreal, for which we will definitely need to lay in a supply of (west) indian burritos from the inexplicable queen west dive called “new york subway” (no relation to new york or any form of a subway, though it is next door to an actual subway sandwiches shop.) have i told you about this place? curried vegetables, roti filling style, topped with shredded lettuce and thousand island dressing and served as a burrito. okay? also, the place is gross, kinda. but the food is so delicious! it’s spicy, though — luckily we still have root beer!

we’re off to quebec, faced with the usual roadside distractions (pingle’s fun farm? nuclear info centre? ZooZ? corn maze? nudist colony? canoe museum? mrs mcgarrigle’s mustard hut?) and along the way we call up this dude adam, who our friend pete in brooklyn told us to contact. none of us remember why exactly we are supposed to contact him other than that we trust our source, and suddenly the friendly stranger has invited us over for dinner in his home, which — though this scenario might socially intimidate even me — turns out to be 100% the right thing to do, and not even because the food is great, just because you’re supposed to take chances like that since sometimes the person on the other end turns out to be completely awesome, which he does. thanks for dinner, adam!

casa del popolo is twice as big as last time i was inside, and the new stage room is great, perfect for magik markers and for a chilly quebec night like tonight (why, why did i think it would be spring here when i packed?) we’re back from adam’s sausage party in time for a petit pre-show chill out; leah quimby, former magik marker, is here, as is john’s bandmate in son of earth, aaron, who thinks montreal bagels taste like sand. the markers set is one of my favo(u)rites of the tour, raw and langourous in that slightly scary way connecting the old style markers vibe with the song-strewn one of now. pete seems to be grinning throughout, an energy only complemented when elisa’s fever breaks in the middle of the set. she’s on the edge of a sickness and her throat’s too sore to go on and on and on, suddenly partway through “bad dream” she’s gone from the stage like a walk-off home run, and nolan and shaw finish up in no hurry at all, a false ending or a false start of sorts that leaves the audience with no idea if the show is over. i like this grey area and i loved that show.

Nighttime rain makes even Yonge Street pretty as you’re driving off in the distance, or rather, making a slow exit in sluggish Toronto traffic after piles of goodbyes and erratic tears (who cries at their mechanic’s?) and days and days of not sleeping enough OR packing enough because you are in total, total denial about the magnitude of all you are leaving.

I’ve focused so much on who am going away from rather than where, but there was no denying that, even though it is the right thing for me to leave, it felt totally absurd and strange to be walking home from College Street (so easy, so close!) for the last last time, to be bending off of Eastern Avenue to Richmond Street tonight, getting gas at a station I have never been to ever, and creeping up on the Gardiner just after deflecting a window-tapping panhandler. (Aw, Toronto — in some ways you’re just like the day I met you.)

I have seen my city (it will always be a place that is mine) change so much in the last nine years, in ways I can barely enumerate and in any case would bore most people who aren’t also in love with it. But what I can point to the most is a way of looking at Toronto, a way of looking at anyone’s city, that has shifted. Rather than seeing a city as a structure in which people live and work and party, I think so many Torontonians (and it’s not just a function of getting older, it’s not just a function of me knowing particular people) have realized their city is theirs to claim, chart, explore, play in, create, mythologize, and boast about. When I moved to the city in 1998 everyone was totally weird about it. “But you could live in the US!” they’d say. “You moved…here?”

I don’t doubt that almost all of those people feel differently right now. From nine years ago to now, it became cool to like Toronto. It didn’t used to be, back when everyone raised outside the city resented it for its (even still modest Canadian) national dominance, and everyone who grew up there just whined that they were sick of it. I felt it immediately to be a great North American city — one I moved to with only a handful of visits under my belt — and tons of my friends from the States did too, telling me over and over again what a great place it was I had chosen to to live. Yet it was eleven months before I met an actual Canadian in Toronto who understood why I would have chosen to abandon my Yankee rights to live in this place. He too loved Toronto and got it like no one else I had, or indeed, would ever meet. I ended up marrying him.

It is important for me to call out some specific people who shaped my experience in and affection for an amazing city that it pains me to leave tonight.

Don Pyle, who adopted me as a pen pal sometime after I started sending letters, cookies, to Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet in 1992, was the first of them. I arrived in Toronto to a legacy of his stories and anecdotes and snippets of people he’d known forever — driving around in his Volvo was like getting the inside scoop on every musician and storefront and charming thing in the city. He knows four million thousand people and when I first moved to town he even took me to his mother’s for Easter dinner in the Junction, marshmallow bunnies standing up on top of pineapple upside-down cake and all. I can point very clearly to a conversation in Ann Arbor when I was living there at the end of my school career and hosted Phono Comb for the night: Don, Beverley and Reid talked me though my fantasy of wanting to move to their city, and during explanations of everything from the weird behaviour of grocery stores to the magic of the Toronto Islands, I realized I was pretty much convinced. It was a pivotal moment and one that was echoed and affirmed in every inspiring and awesome conversation with him I have ever had. (This sounds like we are no longer going to have brunches where he points out things like how EMBASSY cleaners was turned into KEMBASS with a K and a black plastic square and some chutzpah, but they’ll just be less frequent and when he tells me incredible things about Toronto I’ll just be more sad that we don’t share it in quite the same way anymore.)

Jeff Chapman, aka Ninjalicious, who I married and to whom my understanding of to what depths one can truly love a city is credited, came along just as I was finding my own footing. And suddenly I was over top and underneath an amazing city, a place that to Jeff, who skirted around its edges for years in Pickering, romanced and adored in what seemed like every possible spot one could physically penetrate. Through Infiltration, I read his adventures — that you could sneak up and walk through Union Station’s stunning glass galleries, that you could crawl underneath the city through storm drains and map it in your own amazing psychological, three-dimmesional way. I read his seditious and inspiring words for a year before bothering to get in touch to try to make friends, and boy was I not disappointed.

When Jeff died it was much more complicated to love Toronto: I felt like he had shown me so much of it in such an unusual way that he had in some sense painfully inscribed each walk and fountain and stairwell for me. He used to tell me that one of the best things about urban exploration was that you felt you had such a special bond with the buildings you’d seen the secrets of; that you learned about your city in a way that made it so much more truly yours. I resented him for showing me something so beautiful and then abandoning me to enjoy it without him alongside, but that didn’t make Toronto any less grand.

But through the course of those nine years I lived there, things had shifted, not just through Jeff’s kind of influence but that of other people who had made it cool to like the place you live, rather than hip to complain about how everything sucks all the time like in most cities. We loved Toronto together and suddenly there were weird art projects and subway parties and public space initiatives that didn’t seem just political or just fun but part of a way of seeing Toronto as malleable and loveable, as a place whose history and stature could be woven into our crazy dreams.

I found myself walking (not nearly enough, in the end) with a loosely organized bunch who attempted to interpret and proscribe what the city meant to them through wandering. The first time I went, the guy in the fancy scarf didn’t quite have me convinced that the walks were more than just people strolling through ravines and subdivisions talking about Guided by Voices or freelance writing or whatever — but two years later I know I had only scratched the surface, have only scratched the surface, of the ways Shawn Micallef wants people to love Toronto. To re-consider Toronto at a difficult (personal) time through thinking about public space, psychogeography, and simply letting the city tell itself to you in all its many ways, was something I needed dearly. Shawn — whether on a late-night boondoggle drive to Garbage Mountain in Etobicoke or any of dozens of mass text-message harangues to meet him at the beach — continually nourished and pushed at me to take the city’s gifts more seriously, both by surrounding oneself in its stories and by simply not being passive in responding to them. I could not have had a better tour guide to constantly remind me how good we had it, and though I am moving to another city I feel deeply for, Shawn, I have not turned my back on loving Toronto and I will not let you down.

I think what I learned to love most about Toronto in the end wasn’t just that it was charming and liveable and full of culture and pointy Victorian houses and vaulted glitter-lined expressways and secret waterfronts, but that it is of a scale that feels like you can fully apprehend it. It’s a great city with the benefit of being such a humane size (and condition) that you can feel real ownership of it as a citizen — I remarked to my friend recently that the town is so small that I know the guy who makes the recorded announcements on the subway platform. But it’s really not population size as much as it is attitude and availability; whether you’re writing an amazing historical novel born from a love affair with the city archives or simply watching streets metamorphosize, it’s possible to feel not just belonging to Toronto but like it belongs to you. I only hope I can carve out a section of overwhelming New York to feel this proprietary about, this proud, this awed on such an intimate scale, as I have with Toronto. But if perspective is the right place to start, then I think I have had amazing people help teach me to remember what I already know about the greatness of the urban landscape. I have a new place to make mine, and even if 8,000,000 people have already shoved in line ahead of me, I think I might know a few tricks to do it right.

Nighttime rain makes even Yonge Street pretty as you’re driving off in the distance, or rather, making a slow exit in sluggish Toronto traffic after piles of goodbyes and erratic tears (who cries at their mechanic’s?) and days and days of not sleeping enough OR packing enough because you are in total, total denial about the magnitude of all you are leaving.

I’ve focused so much on who am going away from rather than where, but there was no denying that, even though it is the right thing for me to leave, it felt totally absurd and strange to be walking home from College Street (so easy, so close!) for the last last time, to be bending off of Eastern Avenue to Richmond Street tonight, getting gas at a station I have never been to ever, and creeping up on the Gardiner just after deflecting a window-tapping panhandler. (Aw, Toronto — in some ways you’re just like the day I met you.)

I have seen my city (it will always be a place that is mine) change so much in the last nine years, in ways I can barely enumerate and in any case would bore most people who aren’t also in love with it. But what I can point to the most is a way of looking at Toronto, a way of looking at anyone’s city, that has shifted. Rather than seeing a city as a structure in which people live and work and party, I think so many Torontonians (and it’s not just a function of getting older, it’s not just a function of me knowing particular people) have realized their city is theirs to claim, chart, explore, play in, create, mythologize, and boast about. When I moved to the city in 1998 everyone was totally weird about it. “But you could live in the US!” they’d say. “You moved…here?”

I don’t doubt that almost all of those people feel differently right now. From nine years ago to now, it became cool to like Toronto. It didn’t used to be, back when everyone raised outside the city resented it for its (even still modest Canadian) national dominance, and everyone who grew up there just whined that they were sick of it. I felt it immediately to be a great North American city — one I moved to with only a handful of visits under my belt — and tons of my friends from the States did too, telling me over and over again what a great place it was I had chosen to to live. Yet it was eleven months before I met an actual Canadian in Toronto who understood why I would have chosen to abandon my Yankee rights to live in this place. He too loved Toronto and got it like no one else I had, or indeed, would ever meet. I ended up marrying him.

It is important for me to call out some specific people who shaped my experience in and affection for an amazing city that it pains me to leave tonight.

Don Pyle, who adopted me as a pen pal sometime after I started sending letters, cookies, to Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet in 1992, was the first of them. I arrived in Toronto to a legacy of his stories and anecdotes and snippets of people he’d known forever — driving around in his Volvo was like getting the inside scoop on every musician and storefront and charming thing in the city. He knows four million thousand people and when I first moved to town he even took me to his mother’s for Easter dinner in the Junction, marshmallow bunnies standing up on top of pineapple upside-down cake and all. I can point very clearly to a conversation in Ann Arbor when I was living there at the end of my school career and hosted Phono Comb for the night: Don, Beverley and Reid talked me though my fantasy of wanting to move to their city, and during explanations of everything from the weird behaviour of grocery stores to the magic of the Toronto Islands, I realized I was pretty much convinced. It was a pivotal moment and one that was echoed and affirmed in every inspiring and awesome conversation with him I have ever had. (This sounds like we are no longer going to have brunches where he points out things like how EMBASSY cleaners was turned into KEMBASS with a K and a black plastic square and some chutzpah, but they’ll just be less frequent and when he tells me incredible things about Toronto I’ll just be more sad that we don’t share it in quite the same way anymore.)

Jeff Chapman, aka Ninjalicious, who I married and to whom my understanding of to what depths one can truly love a city is credited, came along just as I was finding my own footing. And suddenly I was over top and underneath an amazing city, a place that to Jeff, who skirted around its edges for years in Pickering, romanced and adored in what seemed like every possible spot one could physically penetrate. Through Infiltration, I read his adventures — that you could sneak up and walk through Union Station’s stunning glass galleries, that you could crawl underneath the city through storm drains and map it in your own amazing psychological, three-dimmesional way. I read his seditious and inspiring words for a year before bothering to get in touch to try to make friends, and boy was I not disappointed.

When Jeff died it was much more complicated to love Toronto: I felt like he had shown me so much of it in such an unusual way that he had in some sense painfully inscribed each walk and fountain and stairwell for me. He used to tell me that one of the best things about urban exploration was that you felt you had such a special bond with the buildings you’d seen the secrets of; that you learned about your city in a way that made it so much more truly yours. I resented him for showing me something so beautiful and then abandoning me to enjoy it without him alongside, but that didn’t make Toronto any less grand.

But through the course of those nine years I lived there, things had shifted, not just through Jeff’s kind of influence but that of other people who had made it cool to like the place you live, rather than hip to complain about how everything sucks all the time like in most cities. We loved Toronto together and suddenly there were weird art projects and subway parties and public space initiatives that didn’t seem just political or just fun but part of a way of seeing Toronto as malleable and loveable, as a place whose history and stature could be woven into our crazy dreams.

I found myself walking (not nearly enough, in the end) with a loosely organized bunch who attempted to interpret and proscribe what the city meant to them through wandering. The first time I went, the guy in the fancy scarf didn’t quite have me convinced that the walks were more than just people strolling through ravines and subdivisions talking about Guided by Voices or freelance writing or whatever — but two years later I know I had only scratched the surface, have only scratched the surface, of the ways Shawn Micallef wants people to love Toronto. To re-consider Toronto at a difficult (personal) time through thinking about public space, psychogeography, and simply letting the city tell itself to you in all its many ways, was something I needed dearly. Shawn — whether on a late-night boondoggle drive to Garbage Mountain in Etobicoke or any of dozens of mass text-message harangues to meet him at the beach — continually nourished and pushed at me to take the city’s gifts more seriously, both by surrounding oneself in its stories and by simply not being passive in responding to them. I could not have had a better tour guide to constantly remind me how good we had it, and though I am moving to another city I feel deeply for, Shawn, I have not turned my back on loving Toronto and I will not let you down.

I think what I learned to love most about Toronto in the end wasn’t just that it was charming and liveable and full of culture and pointy Victorian houses and vaulted glitter-lined expressways and secret waterfronts, but that it is of a scale that feels like you can fully apprehend it. It’s a great city with the benefit of being such a humane size (and condition) that you can feel real ownership of it as a citizen — I remarked to my friend recently that the town is so small that I know the guy who makes the recorded announcements on the subway platform. But it’s really not population size as much as it is attitude and availability; whether you’re writing an amazing historical novel born from a love affair with the city archives or simply watching streets metamorphosize, it’s possible to feel not just belonging to Toronto but like it belongs to you. I only hope I can carve out a section of overwhelming New York to feel this proprietary about, this proud, this awed on such an intimate scale, as I have with Toronto. But if perspective is the right place to start, then I think I have had amazing people help teach me to remember what I already know about the greatness of the urban landscape. I have a new place to make mine, and even if 8,000,000 people have already shoved in line ahead of me, I think I might know a few tricks to do it right.

In October 1995 a Canadian guy by the name of Scott Rumble stopped me from punching out a really annoying girl at a Guided By Voices show in London, Ontario. (Her, throwing elbows and hair; her friend, throwing herself inexplicably at guitarist Mitch Mitchell.) Three years later I’d take him up on his offer to crash at his four-square apartment in Burlington, the city where my grandfather died: I distinctly remember crossing the border at Port Huron in a slate-grey fall, and driving round a twilight bend on the 403 near Waterdown where I pulled over and told Scott I was nearby.

“We’ll put some tea on for you,” he said. I was moving to Canada and I really had no idea what I was doing.

For three weeks straight I woke up every day in Scott and Lisa’s spare room next to an enormous weaving loom. I would toast bagels that I bought at the very Canadian store at the end of the street, drink coffee and pore over the pathetic housing offerings in the Toronto Star. Toronto had a less than 1% vacancy rate in 1998 and I didn’t even have a job. I didn’t even have a bank account. But I did have Belle & Sebastian’s The Boy With the Arab Strap on a cassette backed with Saint Etienne’s Good Humour and a new leather coat, and among the growing chill and falling leaves and complete infestation of squeegee kids in autumnal Toronto, I found a beautiful apartment, just by seeing a sign, on the street I wanted to live on. I pulled up to look at it for the first time knowing I had found the place before even peering inside, putting the car in park with my heart in my throat just as the Saint Etienne tape hit the drum break in “Goodnight Jack” and, y’know — sometimes you just know.

I didn’t think I was necessarily going to leave Toronto and I didn’t think I was necessarily going to stay forever. I feel like that first year — the new friends I’d end up drifting from, or working alongside, or being closer to than ever nine years later, the shops and streets and streetcars I navigated — was as much about learning myself as learning a new city, a new country. I find it hard to believe I outlasted Peter Dunn’s Vinyl Museum, or, conversely, that I still rent my movies at the same place I did when I might not have known any better. And when I fell into community eventually — writers, more than the usual musicians I’d gotten used to slumming it with back in the states — it was small and wonderful and inspiring and immediately full of the coincidence I’ve come to accept as natural in my life no matter where I am or what is happening. I made it home and it made me, in spite, or because, of the fact that I was pretty much winging it.

What’s amazing about leaving here at the same time as I arrived is how unbittersweet the sweetness is. If you’re not insane, fall is your favourite season: the sense of renewal that is also wrapped in closure, the feeling of reprieve and bracing for winter both. My house is full of red maple leaves grabbed from wherever in whatever moment and pressed into hidden places in attempts to weakly seize this feeling. This year, I fantasized about fall all summer until I realized it wasn’t just that ache for crispness and cider and cozying-in but the so-obvious-once-it-dawns-on-you essence of new beginning. I literally stared longingly at a cardigan hung on my bedroom closet handle for a full month before I realized what it was trying to tell me. Fall isn’t about hunkering down to avoid the world, I think: it’s about clearheadedness and nostalgia coming to the same point. I wasn’t just restless for autumn’s magic to hasten its crunchy step towards me, I was itching to be right back where I started from, at the beginning of adventure in the total sense. My house is now half-packed and the weather is about ready for me to put on that sweater.

Though I’d expected a shiver of advance regret at loading my last days here with paperwork and ministorage, in almost all senses I know it is the perfect time. The city feels and smells as magical at the end of this chapter as it did at the beginning; I see it with the same fresh eyes, and rather than marking off this month as sad, I feel everything and everyone infused with so much love, my every step kicked up a beat by the excitement of the future and the rightness of all around me, forging the connection between where I am now and where I will be one month from now. And if there’s anything the last years have taught me it’s about how when you love so many places and people you necessarily need to live life more fluidly: I am not ending this, I am not never coming back and walking and talking and wasting days in cafes and driving down to Cherry Beach late at night. I am just going to be doing it with a different frequency and from a different vantage point. And if anyone’s noticed how desperately homesick I am for Chicago all the time and how I just manage to work its charms into my vaguely scheduled cycle, you’ll know I’m confident I will pull off weaving these threads in, too.

So instead of spending the weekend attached to a tape gun and an occluding anxiety, I’m up north in the heart of fall, surrounded by the family that took me then and still takes me now, an ever-expanding brood of tiny nephews who stand on my legs and stare and giggle at me, parents who don’t mind my only-child tendencies around their home of swirling activity, a Great Lakes bay unseasonably warm enough to swim in impulsively with your clothes on, games around the dining room table and acceptance and twisty golden-green drives that put everything petty and frightening completely aside. I was asked for what I might like today and all I could come up with was cheap white bread for turkey sandwiches, a new can of whipped cream, and, if possible, the cryptic crossword. With love and peace already on your side, sometimes a new can of whipped cream really is enough.

And while in a few weeks I may yet be running around the house so eleventh-hour crazed that I’m making lists of things as basic as “eat food” and “brush your hair” in between scrambling to pack — I can’t for a minute imagine having regrets about how I’m spending my last days here, or how I have spent any day of the last 3,238 days in this country so far. Everything will get done in its way, because it just simply does. I for one am going to make a point of enjoying it.

My friend Sean likes to foment community in unusual and interesting ways, and for him this isn’t entirely an outward thing as it is an inward thing as well. “I was thinking,” he said to me last night, “that maybe I don’t need to ever leave my neighbourhood at all?” Naturally that’d short him on the odd opportunity for cornbread and company in the west end, but I occasionally see his point, somewhat like a fantasy, wherein everything is contained and makes sense and is proximal in a way that feels not limited, but full of blessing.

I feel that way about my own city, for the most part (it can only give me what it is, of course, and other places can only give me what they are), and today I imagined for a moment I might get away with the same kind of thing myself—only stay within these walls, shun the last-summer-flingness of Labour Day, buckle down and work before one of the city’s main pleasures—that ten day stretch of sitting in a dark room, I mean—swallows me whole. If I haven’t stayed in town for more than two weeks at a time in four months, shouldn’t the counterbalance be to stay inside all day some days when I am home, reconnect with the pleasures of cleaning one’s basement? But just as I was questioning my motives, I was reminded that you don’t decide these things for yourself: invitations came loudly as four-fisted bangs on the door.

“We’re going to be having a magic show today. In twenty minutes. Excuse me. The next one will start in twenty minutes. And my little sister tried to eat out of your ashtray but I’m not going to smoke until I’m sixteen, because my mother said you should try everything once in your life, and I’m also going to try cola, I’m eight and I’ve never tried it, but I think I’ll have one bottle every four years. We’ll be starting in twenty minutes. I’ll come back and get you then.”

And so of course I went, and even the (other) grumpy widow and the (other) disaffected hipsters on the block straggled over for the 3:40 showing: mostly sleight-of-hand, a pair of rigged dice, some sidewalk chalk and a stolen tampon. Everyone clapped, and everyone left themselves for a moment and joined what was going on around, because, and in spite of them. You can’t fight it, I guess—I left the house and drank coffee and got all my work done, smoked out by the buzz of snowbirds and the trickery of children. And I have a feeling that the full goodness of days can’t often happen in a tiny vessel like my own house. But at the top of the street, where the wildflowers bend and encroach into the sidewalk, and you can almost forget you’re in civilization—well that may just be a portal.