The Spring of ‘86
Waves crashed on the coast’s dark banks. “White sand is overrated,” I’d heard more than a few times already in my days. Ultimately, there were more wrongs than rights—on the trip, and in life.
The wind playfully carassed my burnt face as I lay peacefully on the beach one day, her fingers draping down my cheek to my neck before being drawn away. How good her touch feels, I thought, even if it was phantom and fleeting. No one stepped in to take her place as she drew calm and left the beach. “Ca va mal,” I responded to her abscence in the spirit of the vacation. But she was already gone, and my words fell to the soft, hot sand below. (more…)
Jakub stood uncomfortably by the door at the end of the subway car. The TTC was never a particularly comfortable ride, he reflected, though it certainly was component enough—compared to the GO Train, at least.
While the TTC served its purpose, he couldn’t escape the feeling Toronto’s line paled in comparison to his native Métro. He laughed to himself as he remembered his home. Ironic, he found it, that the only thing he really missed about Rue St-Denis and his old haunt was the damned subway.
Nevertheless, the ride home remained as medicinal in the Anglos’ world as it was in the Francophones’. He’d grown to love public transit in the city, if only because it gave have time to collect his thoughts and afforded him an ever-shuffling array of people to watch. He relished the short break from the workaday world.
He was not afforded the same luxury today, however. He’d come to realize he had an ailing condition. The disease he suffered from became clear as he was soon confronted by a sea of striking, suited business-women and gorgeous university girls who frequented the Yonge line.
He felt malnourished. (more…)
I have a problem.
This realization dawned on me first when I was lying on the beach in Cuba a month ago, but I felt it again this weekend past after a night out with some of my coworkers past and present. Sitting with a group of happily married and newly-engaged couples who all seem so well-to-do in life left me wondering about what I have to show for my (soon-to-be) 25 years.
I thought the same thoughts as I stared out into the sea, and a difficult problem to solve had arose—one that I fear has become an increasingly-recurring hinderance exaserbated by ye old quarter-life crisis.
For whatever reason, nothing that I do or accomplish ever feels real. (more…)
The following is one part of a two-part record of my trip to Cuba in July of the year 2009. This record will serve as a momento for my vacation—a last treasured artifact that will remain long after the memories of the trip have faded to the far recesses of my mind to make way for more pertinent information, such as URLs and passwords.
“Side A” of the record contains a straight-forward narrative of the adventure, documenting the people, places, and play that made the trip what it was. This entry was written in tandem with “Side B.” Additional pictures can be found in my Picasa album for the trip and on Facebook, and videos can be found on YouTube.
Without further adieu, then…
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I saw a man today as I was riding the bus home. A trip with a work colleague to Yorkdale sent me sailing back to North York on a long, lonely bus ride, and for some reason, this man sticks now in my mind. Old and withered by time, he stood atop the world on his high-rise balcony. He stood, staring down on the world and judging it and its residents.
As I normally do, I concocted a little narrative for the man in my mind; I built a fiction to explain his existence in my world. For he must have some great purpose if I picked him unknowingly out of the thousand unknown faces I saw today. Sadly, it was only when I reflected on the narrative I’d written for him that I realized why my subconscious decided to award such attention to just what would otherwise be just another apparition in the crowd, if I may let Ezra speak for me.
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