From Toronto, With Love

You spend a solid four years planning to go somewhere, or at least, planning to make a plan. Then it hits you smack in the face. You're eighteen years old, walking to your first lecture and assuming that the nervous feelings in your stomach are those of ambition, not complete and utter mortification. And they're actually neither; they are actually just a pang fear for change. Change is scary and I think it's so prevalent when you waltz into university because you're not allowed to be a kid anymore.  

So there I was, standing outside a lecture room, waiting to walk in and wanting to go back to multiple snippets in time that had left my grasp. One being Frosh week, which I spent with some of the most incredible people. The semi-obnoxious school cheering, painting my face blue and gold, watching new friendships be born and just the experience of careless happiness seemed to be one that I missed. I got to know my school in that week, but now I felt like I knew nothing at all. It was time to be serious. The other moment I wished to be thrust back upon me was high school; I guess it was the ease at which I adapted to it but I started missing the routine. 

8:45-1st Period 
10:45- 2nd Period
Lunch
12:40- Third Period
1:45- Fourth Period
2:45- GO HOME

High school was easy. It was predictable. I had time for myself. Now my schedule was all over the place, as were my sleeping patterns, and my homework habits. It scared me how "up to me" everything really was. They tell you in grade eight that you're going to go into high school and you'll be on your own, but until now I feel that, even though I was as independent as I was, my hand was always held. 

University is one hell of a thing to get used to. You basically only have one or two days a week that you're in a certain class, meaning if you don't understand the material, you better run yourself over to your professors office hours or consult that textbook you spent $150 on. When you start, you read the class over view and you say: "wow, only readings for homework?" but then by week three you're crying because you've yet to find the time for that reading other than the 40 minute train ride back home. 

It's definitely intimidating and it makes you wonder if you made the right choice. Am I at the right school? Am I in the right program? I mean I asked myself these questions one hundred times. (For Christ's sake I loved books before boys and I was asking myself this) Once you're used to it however, that's when I knew. 

Cardinal Ambrozic was never anything special to the outside. I mean sure, to me, and to many others, it was. It has its redeeming qualities. The charming football team that Alessia and I managed...the great yearbook teacher that became like another father to me...the stiff burgundy blazers; however, it has its time that it suits you for. There’s something about emerging from the train platform at Union station and walking along Yonge Street— like young Jay Gatz walking out of the water and becoming Gatsby, I was walking the streets of Toronto and becoming me. You slip into this wonky routine, like you do any other and you find the most spectacular things in it—even if they are only beautiful to you. There's a spark when you're sitting in class and it tells you you're exactly where you're supposed to be. Reading poems in class like Having a Coke With You by Frank O'Hara, analyzing Edna St. Vincent Millay and Shakespeare only validates this more from you. It's the content, the atmosphere, the laughs you have studying constantly. It's the ten seconds staring in awe out the window from Broadview to Castlefrank every Monday and Tuesday. The way you have to read The Present Age seven times before it makes sense. It’s the way you begin to cherish having a tea with your grandmother, or hugging your mom. The way it doesn’t bug you to watch your brother play the sport he loves or the countless good morning messages you get from your father. It's the way I'm writing this post. I'm in love with a city, I'm in love with a lifestyle, I'm in love with the me I'm becoming. 


No matter how stressed I am with work right now. It's worth it. It's worth it because finally, I belong in this. I belong with what I love.

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