10.03.20

Sometimes I think about how different the landscape of my life would be if Coronavirus – that omnipresent spectre that now haunts everything – had never happened.

At around this time on a normal Friday night, I’d probably be leaving some emptying club with a handful of likeminded friends, looking for somewhere to grab a late night bite to eat, laughing and groggily spilling over sidewalks while taxis wait idly by, hoping to pick up the regular clientele.

09.09.20

Whenever the seasons start to change – specifically going from Summer to Fall – and the air begins to chill and everything seems to be a little more consistently grey outside, my mood shifts downward and I find myself in prolonged states of sudden and lasting melancholy. If I wake up and see that it’s cloudy and dim outside, I get a sharp feeling of having returned home from somewhere far away and finding nobody there to greet me.

I feel like I miss something and I have no idea what it is, or maybe that I’m somehow missing out on something. There is a dull and persistent ache; some inexplicable but poignant longing that I can’t shake off, and it distracts me for the whole day.

06.07.20

I’ve been thinking a lot about loneliness and the nature of relationships lately. Being stuck in my apartment all day and not being able to see any of my friends or spend any meaningful time with anyone has me feeling pretty alone, I guess.

I wonder about the push and pull of deep friendships, and about how you can so easily allow loneliness to pull you into a trap of assuming the worst in the people who you know truly care about you.

04.26.20

I caught myself putting off writing again today, but as soon as I turned on some chill music (“Raining in Osaka” from the bootleg boy on YouTube), I felt myself getting excited by the prospect of it again.

I want to fold these moments into my own words – these moments of quiet and stillness and of being alone in my lamplit room at midnight on a Saturday when I’d normally be drinking at a friend’s apartment or prowling the downtown streets.

04.25.20

I haven’t written anything in almost a month, and there’s not really any excuse for it since the city has been under lockdown for the last several weeks, so it’s not like I haven’t had the time. Every day I tell myself I’m going to write, and every day I end up sketching too long, or watching too many YouTube videos, or finding other ways of putting it off until it’s too late and I reason that it’s okay to just push it to the next day. “Tomorrow, for sure,” I think to myself, the doubt already a seed budding in the back of my mind because the habit has already made itself so clear.

02.09.20

I alternate between elation and heartache and the push and pull can be exhausting. I’m left somewhat winded, looking at myself in the mirror and wondering if this is how it’s always going to be – me, stuck with my reflection, not knowing what to do.

01.15.20

It’s been months since I last wrote here. I took a pause in November because I tried to write a novel, but I only made it about 12,000 words through before the whole endeavour began to unravel all around me. I guess I felt a little emptied after that – a little exhausted by the mere thought of trying, once again, to put any coherent thought to paper. It turns out writing a novel – even one grounded in your own actually lived experience – isn’t an easy undertaking at all, and I was naïve to think I was at all prepared for the onslaught of uncertainty and doubt that the process of seriously writing makes you inevitably and totally vulnerable to.

08.29.19

The air is starting to get chilly here. I was walking to my dentist in a t-shirt, a pair of linen shorts and a pair of flip flops and it seemed decidedly too summery for the weather I’d stumbled into. I’m excited for the fall to come though; it’s my favourite season, even if it always seems to last only a few moments. Toronto is a city with two seasons: winter and summer, and a couple of stray weeks of spring and fall sprinkled here and there.

04.16.19

I have so many unresolved feelings for so many people that sometimes it’s hard to keep track of them.

I can see how people might so easily feel lonely in quiet moments in the dead of night night, scrolling through manufactured and perfected photos of stranger-couples on instagram feeds everywhere, seeming to be living their best lives, all smiles and sunshine and tender, easy touches. Bliss, without a second thought or worry, effortless and all around, never asked for yet freely given. Lives made up of only golden moments shared for all the world to see with the simple click of a button.

02.19.19 – An Excerpt

Living is always letting go, and not being afraid of the prospect of it. It is to face the day by stepping out of fear and allowing yourself to take everything in – to love as much as you can and give as much as you have, even if it will break your heart in the end, because you have enough faith to know that somehow, you’ll eventually be put back together – maybe a little different than before, and maybe little changed, but whole nonetheless. And all those moments of quiet shattering will be worth all the shining flickers of joy.