there's no where else i'd rather be

 

I’m sitting at my desk overlooking Lake Ontario in front of the fan blowing hot air on my face in the midst of a Toronto heat wave. It’s hot as hell outside, but I don’t care, because there’s no where else I’d rather be.

One year ago today I packed up my life and left a city that held me during some of the most painful, heartbreaking, and transformative years of my life thus far. I cried happy tears all over my carpet this morning in the humid air thinking back to that moment, thinking of the woman that I have become in the year since I’ve left, thinking about how there truly is no place where I would rather be than right here in this dreadful, sticky, and glorious heat because I am home. This is home.

Here are some things about this city that have sparked home in me as I’ve rooted deeper into my life here:

  • Seeing my first monarchs as I pranced around the city last August buying used dishes and furniture for my lovely apartment

  • Kissing my baby sisters cheeks in farewell and getting to say '“see you next week”

  • Watching my parents faces light up in recognition as I walk off the GO train to greet them for a weekend visit

  • Cackling with my fellow early-morning-bird loving best friend running through Bickford Park at 7:30 in the morning prior to our gluten-free croissants

  • The hours spent studying in the OISE library with my puppet-loving friend

  • Mario Cart and potlucks and escape rooms with school friends

  • The rumble and rattling of the tracks in my chest as the subway approaches and comes speeding down the tunnel preparing to stop so it can take me to where I’m going

  • Learning how to step over the streetcar tracks as I cross the street from campus to home

  • Learning how to not get pooped on by pigeons

  • Learning how to sit in certain places on the TTC so I can watch the stations change and the city pass by around me

  • Learning how to rest at home in my body

  • Learning how to float along the waterfront path on my bike while the sun shines clearly into my eyes and the wind blows strong brushing my hair back behind my ears

  • Watching the full moon rise up above the lake and being woken up in the middle of the night to see it glowing like a beacon above the water

  • Sunsets on my balcony

  • Dancing and singing wildly in my apartment for no one to see

  • Eyes meeting mine for the first time and knowing in that moment the difference between anxiety, desire, and love

  • Watching the storms roll in and out across the lake

  • Lightning like cracking fireworks off in the distance, dancing in the clouds

  • Belly laughs that regulate my nervous system

  • Friends with a sense of humour and dance moves like feel like recognition

  • Laughter that feels like lightness and freedom

  • Time with my grandmother chatting, eating, knitting, and word searching

  • Mirrors of belonging, confidence, community, and ease

  • Reconnecting with life-long friends

  • Reconnecting with myself

I find myself for maybe the first time ever in my adult life truly allowing all of me to be expressed. This city, this place, this land, these waters encourage no less from me. So tonight, I will take myself down to the water. I will speak my gratitude to this place where I was born on an October morning 10km from where I live now. I will promise myself to give back to these lands and waters all that they give to me. I’m rooting. Spreading my network out long like the mycelium underground connecting the trees and the fungi:

“I’m much more interested in enrolment than ensoulment. I want to have actual roots. I want my spirituality to have fur, pheromones, funk. I want it to live in a specific place. And I want it to teach me intimately how to be dynamically present and useful to my ecosystem. And I want to tell people that healing isn’t about completion. And it isn’t about lightness. It’s about the mixing bowl where nothing is exiled, everything is included. In order to grow a garden, you need manure. You need compost. In order to heal the soil, you don’t clean it, you add to it: fungi, ferment, bacteria, woodchips.” - Sophie Strand

To continuing to “dreaming up a life that feels like living - full, beautiful, free, alive, [rooted] - and chasing and creating it for the rest of my life.”

All for now,

All my love,

Onward.

-m

 
Micaela Yawney