By Keertan Somasundaram
Editors: Jessica Liu and Alloe Mak

This is a letter to no one in particular.

I wake up on my disorganized sheets with one of my blankets on the floor. I can only ever sleep with two of them on, even when it’s hot out, but I don’t melt to death since I keep my fan on and don’t ever sweat when I sleep.

I turn my head to look out my window—the sky’s filled with an aqua hue. I’m mad at myself for not waking up earlier; I missed the vibrant purples and yellows that make up the sunrise over the cityscape. Oh well, I think, it’s not like I’d ever get up on time anyway.

I would lie and say that I can’t remember the last time I set my alarm to wake up, but I know that I stopped doing that around 15 days ago. I would also lie and say that I can’t remember the last time that I went to class, but I know that it’s been around a week and a half. I can’t remember the last time I watched a movie, though, which sucks since I have nothing better to do anyways.

My stomach grumbles and I realize I forgot to eat dinner last night. The music playing softly from my phone that’s been charging overnight has been looping since I went to bed. There’s a mostly empty bottle of vodka and three glasses that are sticking to my desk, sure to leave some residue when I eventually lift them. All of these fleeting thoughts exist in the small moment before I make the trek from my bed to the washroom, but it’s not what’s on my mind.

I love the guttural rumble of the streetcar as it passes by me on the sidewalk, I love the pretentious art majors who ride the subway with their dusty books, knit scarves, and big boots—scoffing at anyone who stands too close to them, and I love the preachers at Yonge-Dundas square with an endless collection of biblical pamphlets which they offer assertively whenever I walk by them.

I love this city.

I greet my roommates as I get out of bed, and get ready to eat breakfast with them. I take long showers which confuses them since my hair is so short now, but most of the time that I’m in there is spent zoning out. I have the same song on repeat—one that I’m sure I’ll get sick of in a week or two.

I go out with my roommates to grab breakfast. I need some semblance of a schedule for my day to make it feel real, which is why even if it’s midday, I can’t skip a breakfast-like meal. I cloud my mind with whatever my roommates are talking about or what I’m going to eat in around five minutes. I think about how cold it is and how hot it was only a few days ago. I think about the assignments due too soon for me not to worry about them. I think about how I need to call my parents. And I end up thinking too much.

This always fucks me up. I wish I could just live in this dense city, going about my day like nothing ever matters. Sometimes I see people on the street who seem like they have nothing going on behind their blank eyes, and even though I understand some would say that isn’t “fulfilling”, I can’t say that I’m not envious of that ignorance. I only write–or really do any productive work–when I feel absolutely shitty. But if I feel like this all the time, it doesn’t make sense why I get nothing done.

Even then, I don’t understand why I feel so dead so often, especially when I love it all so much. Living here is a privilege and it makes me feel even worse when I realize I’m wasting what I have by sulking around all the time. I try to think of reasons why I feel like this, but I never come up with anything concrete. Sometimes, though, I think it’s because of the love I hold for people.

I love you, and your long, curly hair.
I love you, and your little laugh you do every time you see me.
And I love you, with your leather jacket two sizes too big that you wear everywhere.

The fact that these people exist in my life is what scares me because it brings me back to the ones that I loved before—the ones who aren’t there anymore. Even though you were so important to me when you were here, all I remember about what we went through are the reasons I had to leave. Why can’t I just remember the good things?

The other night, I had a dream about you. It wasn’t anything special—we only sat down and watched a movie together. The runtime of the movie didn’t matter to us—neither did the content. We just kept talking to each other the entire time. Whether it was about how your favourite actor’s new movie was doing, how your chemistry midterm was going to kill you, or how your favourite football team just lost horribly, we talked and talked and talked. While we were in those seats, watching that movie with no name, you were the person who I loved. When I woke up, I realized almost instantly that the person I dreamed about was just a persona I made up—one that disregarded everything that made you awful for me. But that was so, so, so hard to accept, because I don’t think I’ll ever find somebody who makes me feel like you did in that dream. I wish I could just cut these buried feelings out of my subconscious so I could stop caring about you. When I look back, I realize that those moments we shared were wholly unique. Although I can try to replicate them in the future, I don’t think there’ll ever be a person, thing, or place that could make me feel how I felt with you back then—the warmth I felt around you was indescribable. I really wish I could say that I still wanted you here, but the fact that I depended on you for my happiness was too unhealthy for me to deal with. Maybe we were destined to fall apart—but then why does it feel like it’s always me who has to end things? I feel wrong, completely awful about it, even with friends and family telling me cutting things off is the right thing to do. I did too much for you, worried too much, wasted too much time, and lost my mind, but if I had the choice to do it all over again, I can’t say with much certainty that I’d say no. I’m trying to do better for myself now. I think I need to worry about myself as much as I worry about other people—as much as I worried about you. At least, that’s what my friends tell me. That doesn’t mean I hate you, or I don’t want you in my life anymore. I just don’t think that I can be there like I was there for you before. God knows how much I wish that wasn’t the case, though. All of these thoughts get jumbled up in my head and I wonder if I’m going to feel this way about all the people in my life that I love right now. Am I an awful person? If I worry about this too much, is the love I have for them even real? My mind is a mess—I can’t string together a coherent thought without feeling the worst I’ve ever felt in my entire life, I don’t know if this is ever gonna stop happening in my head, I need to get away, I need calm, I can’t find it, there’s sirens and neon lights and steam rising from sewer plates wherever I go, fuck, I think I might finally be losing it.

I need to get out of this city.

As I drive along the bumpy concrete road with my mom, I take a look out the window while I’m riding past my old middle school.

There is no man I’ve gotten used to seeing outside the campus pub who smokes a cigarette every day at around 9 pm. Instead, there’s my neighbour’s little brother playing soccer in the cul-de-sac.

There is no crane outside my window that gets increasingly higher, threatening to eclipse our view of the city. There are only construction workers in neon orange vests filling a hole in the narrow sidewalk next to my mailbox.

There is nothing here, and in the nothingness, I feel calm.

I wake up every day at around 3 pm, and when I walk downstairs and greet my dog, my mom always asks me what I’d like to eat. She doesn’t work on weekends, so besides cooking for us or watching movies with my dad, she really doesn’t do much on these days.

I haven’t eaten this well in a while. I don’t think about school. I don’t think about you. Weirdly enough, I feel like when I’m home I don’t think about anything. I feel as if I’m in a perpetual state of drifting through my house, sleeping at odd hours, and waking up just before the sun starts to set.

I like going on walks outside and looking at the expansive greenery near where I live. I know when I go back to the city I’ll miss it. The glaring yellow sign says to keep an eye out for coyotes when it gets dark. It’s 2 a.m.

There is nothing here.

I visit my childhood friends, and for a second, none of my worries exist anymore. Is it healthy to avoid my problems like this? I don’t care.

I do what I want to do, which consists of avoiding my work, sitting near winding streams, walking to the Shoppers near my house, or just sitting down buried under the sheets of my bed.

There is nothing here.

Fuck. I still feel awful.

I visit my best friend to try and feel better. We skate. We walk. We talk about everything we’ve been through together. We loiter around the mall where we spent countless hours skipping class when we were still in high school and it feels surreal, almost like we don’t belong there anymore. We shuffle past stores we hadn’t noticed before, and new additions that have replaced the ones we miss. We realize where we have to go now.

We walk to a convenience store, through an uneven dirt road, an obsolete playground attached to an elementary school, and down toward our destination.

We had walked this path countless hours for four years straight. We both don’t know why it feels so significant now.

We see our high school.

It all comes back to me in waves. Is everything that happened to me here why I feel the way I do now? If so, it’s irreversible. I just have to move on.

We talk about this, and how weird it is to be around this place again. The janitor left the front door unlocked, so we sneak in. As we skate down the hallways and run up the dark stairwells illuminated by the exit signs, we realize something almost simultaneously.

This is so small. Why did something so minuscule affect both of us to the degree that it did? When we were here, it felt like everything we had—we couldn’t imagine moving on to other things. I know for a fact that I didn’t love this place, so why did it hurt me in the same way that the things I love do? Why did I care so much?

Going back there, I think deep down I wanted some form of closure that would’ve made moving on easier, but even though we spent the entire time running through what happened, at the end of the day when we rode the bus back home I felt nothing different.

I know I felt awful for the four years I spent in that place for a reason—I hated the people, environment, and connections. It felt as though there was nothing there for me.

I hate that place.
I love this city.

But I don’t know why the feelings of distress I had when I was in that place carried over to the city I love. And now I’m really scared that the feelings I had for the people there are going to carry over to the ones here.

At the end of the day, I realized that away from the city, I still feel the same at home, which is kind of discouraging. I thought going home could just be my way to recharge completely without putting any effort into it—or at least I would find some “answer” that would magically make everything I was going through disappear. I don’t know if there’s a place where I can be really happy now, and I don’t know if I deserve the happiness I get. I really don’t know if I know anything for certain, but I think I know this:

I am someone who cares.

I love this city, with its quiet rivers, coyotes you rarely see, and defunct railroads.

I love that city, with its blaring sirens, a subway that’s never on time, and people who are as insane as I am.

I loved her, and her crooked glasses.
I loved him, and his toothy smile.
I love you, and your glowing eyes.

I know it’ll hurt so much if my love for these things ends up faltering, but that’s already happened before. What hurts most is when I forget about it ever existing completely. Even then, I feel like if I forget about you, someday I’ll see a movie poster, a book, or a jersey that’ll make everything rush back. The good and the bad. I hope that day comes soon.

I don’t know if I will always care. I don’t know if I can. I love the city, the people, the places, and the stories. But I don’t know if that love will last forever.

This is a letter to no one in particular. But, I hope it reaches you.