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I'm writing again...

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It’s been over two years since I left the country. With the pandemic, a breakup or two, staying home constantly, I think life had sort of lost its vivacity for me. When I started going back in person to work again, some things just felt different. Toronto had always been this bustling, big city for me that was like a promise. At twenty-two, fresh out of school, it represented everything I’d always wanted— a career in Canadian Lit, full of culture, new opportunities, and art all around me. But after two years of doing that dream job from home, postponing things, it was different. There’s this Hemingway quote, kind of cliché, “I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it,” and it’s been eating at me. I hate to feel like I’m spectating my life. I began to feel awkward on the subway. I didn’t want people looking over my shoulder at what I was reading, I was scared to ask for directions when I got lost. For fucks sake, I never even took an uber alone befor
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Sight Seeing

Sight Seeing by Nicole Lambe   I woke up on August 2nd, 2018 at 3:05am to bright lights being thrust on by my mother. Hastily, I dragged myself out of bed, conscious of moving my luggage off the floor and into the hall before it got in the way, and slipping on my new Birkenstocks. We had a flight to catch soon, and at 3:15am it was difficult to see, even for someone with full vision.  Grasping my father’s hand, I lead him through the dimly lit hallway down into the lobby. We counted the steps as we went down like we had for the entire week we spent in Sorrento. There were fourteen steps. Not more, not less. Remembering this could mean very little to the common traveller, but to us, it meant that the day would go by smoothly—with no obstacles or injury. He had become familiar with the place and now we were about to move to uncharted territory. New steps to count, new voices to learn, new rooms to get accustomed too.  “Ready to go, Frank?” Our driver asked my father
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Sea Legs

I hope you have sea legs , my father said to me as we got on a fishing boat in a small town  in Newfoundland. Sea legs, I thought,  how peculiar that person can measure  their ability to stand  while the ocean waves crash against the sides keeping us afloat In Italy, as the dock swayed  while l loaded my luggage onto the water-taxi  with a bald Venetian man Sea legs, I thought  that's why I can stand.  My mother smiled over, as I stood up and breathed in the Adriatic  In Toronto, the subway jerks to a stop Sea legs,  I thought, that's why I can stand.
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What is a Writer?

            The other night, a poet asked me if I was a writer, and I stood there and froze at his simple but complicated question. The word hit me with the force of a mass of bricks. I suddenly stopped and thought, am I a writer? The word felt too good for me, like it was insulting of me to call myself that considering all to the great living and lived writers, authors, poets. Am I a writer? Well, to me no, I didn't think I could call myself that, it felt too good for me.             I once read this book, "My Salinger Year" by Joanna Rakoff to be exact, and one of my favourite quotes from it explained that being able to call yourself a writer takes one thing —   you must write. It's been a while since I picked up that pen, and I'm sitting here with the question lingering in my head, can I still call myself that? I want to, but life just gets so busy and it takes all the time it can get. So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I want to feel like
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