Letters to Toronto
By Patricia Gaviria
Dear Toronto…
March 18, 2008
Someday your lines from above will account for memory and its momentary lapses. The memory of a woman who posed for the fictional eye of your tacit gaze. The memory of a man who defeated your unnamed purpose. The lapses of a man and a woman that stops pretending for you to emerge.First I saw a network of evenly spaced horizontal and vertical lines. The next day I walked a grid of intersected squares within squares in an effortless north, south, east and west. I later discovered the specified interval of concrete sidewalks. At some point Toronto became a flat escalator – crisscrossing bars, cables, lines, pipes and electric wires – at that moment my crumply map lost its purpose. It took a broken heart and a pair of scissors to penetrate your cityness again. Just the day before there was no me-in-Toronto.
Words die as purpose expires. At this deceasive intersection a new glossary materializes. Some-night, whichever night, you will at last read what we engraved with the ephemeral existence of our slang. We would probably have departed by then.
One morning (a dark morning) I discovered the nakedness of Kensington Market: men lined-up outside St. Stephens waiting for their breakfast, the man in a yellow raincoat that sleeps at Brunswick and College, fresh fish unloaded from the back of a blood-leaking truck, some of last nights’ punks, graffiti defeating their temporary nature to insist and persist (here graffiti are tattoos)…Kensington market resurfaces at 6 am right before dying in its own ironic trendiness.
You don’t have a red carpet instead; you stroke our soles with salt, pigeon crap or cigarette butts. Sometimes your guise brags foreign sumptuousness to disguise your scattered universes. A gentle gaze will remove your make up and reveal your multiple facades. But you will still expect for something to happen.
Everyone appears to know where to go everyone except for those who laze at Coffee Time and the Hotel Waverly squad and the “spare some change – for pot” guys at Queen West and the old man who pets rats and ferrets at Nathan Phillips Square and the woman that cries at Euclid and College and the woman playing her fisher price keyboard at Yorkville and the swollen legged woman that wonders the Annex strip and the man from Richmond and Spadina that lost his leg and the all-seasons shirtless Santa and the man that lost his dog at Dupont and Spadina and the roller blades guy around the Drake and the late country song singer at Yonge at Bloor and… Toronto happens in the exceptions.
You become smallerer with time: from main intersections to a street with a name. Once sized as a peppercorn your geometry ceases to be immediate and subsumes to a narrative. Before language you are a landscapeless horizon.
I tried to learn Toronto’s turns and in the process its predictability undifferentiated the streets from my feet as if this city would rather have me elsewhere. That same Toronto would land me all of a sudden on an alleyway connecting to another one leading nowhere but to the same place of my departure. Turning – landing - departing - returning that is the tempo of my spinning-in-here. Toronto is like the click-clack CD flipping sound at “sonic boom” (Bloor St.)
I think I will miss you. But then, I always do.
Patricia Gaviria