My mother used to take me to the ROM when I was younger. I had a fascination with all manners of fauna, but especially the prehistoric. She tells me now that it was an hour and a half trip on the train from our GTA suburb, and I would spend ages on the second floor, peering up at skeleton models and likely blasting her with words like carbon dating and Hadrosauridae. I’ve seen hundreds of photos of myself with dinosaur-related museum exhibits on the family desktop. I have little recollection of these ROM trips, but I certainly don’t remember being born here, and so these forge my earliest memories of Toronto.

As I write this article, I’m in an independently owned coffee shop out on Yonge Street. It’s one of my favorite spots I’ve discovered in this city. It’s right down the street from the theater I was sitting in when my life changed. It’s right up the street from the train station I used to step out of when Toronto felt like a stranger. Today is a beautiful day. It is almost the end of first year and I’m reflecting on how my perspective of this city has changed since September.

Toronto is a very residential city. She’s young, approximately two hundred and thirty-one years old now. Compared to other metropolises such as NYC or London, she has a strange and rather convoluted transit system and a plethora of glass skyscrapers. If you see her from a distance, most of this glass reflects the sky. Her streets are wide and open, her cultural mosaic brimming and diverse. At the center of it is the University of Toronto—you might be familiar—established 1829. And here, hundreds of years later, you and I. Innis. Toronto. The world.

When I was a kid at the ROM, I wanted nothing more than to study vertebrate paleontology (this means extinct animals with backbones, of which dinosaurs are a category). This dream did not come true, and it had been associated so much with a particular university elsewhere on this continent that when I was not accepted, I left a dream of thirteen years and chose Toronto as my ‘next best option.’ I’m no god, nor do I believe in one, but something has led me to this city on purpose. 

And so I completely abandoned my academic prospects for a while. I spent orientation week on foot, determined to map the entire core of the campus and city in my mind. To name every TTC station, every street downtown north to south and east to west. After that, it just didn’t stop. I pelted through alleyways, I talked to strangers. I took the subway to a station I had no affiliation with and fully powered off my phone so the only way I’d ever make it home was through street signs and intuition. The CN Tower is always south, always watching over us. The L Tower is her eastern neighbor. The TD Canada Trust logo is visible from nearly anywhere, seated neatly between Bay St. and Front St. The list goes on. I made a playlist. I walked through miscellaneous residential neighborhoods to take notes on the architecture of different areas and how quiet it usually was for somewhere in the middle of downtown. I think I’ve spent more money on coffee (independently owned shops are everywhere here) this school year than I have in my entire life and regret none of it. 

It was extremely strange living in a city I had never envisioned myself in before. I had gone through the application process, paid my residence fees, and told all of my friends where I was studying, but I never recall it feeling like a ‘real’ or ‘final’ decision. The first night of move-in, after my family had long left and my heart felt like it was going to burst from its seams with joy, I called my best friend, who had moved here a year earlier for his schooling, and we took a walk. We started at Innis Residence, and made our way down to the waterfront. We walked an entire stretch of Yonge Street, commenting on all the buildings, new and old. We passed the aforementioned coffee shop I’m writing this from. We passed the theater that my life had rearranged itself within. 

I would like to highlight this building, too. Send the love from me to you. The CAA Ed Mirvish, down on Yonge Street. Have you seen her? A large red keyhole-shaped sign with lights that never seem to stop. This is a building constructed in 1920 and now owned by Mirvish Enterprises, the largest theater company not just in Canada, but on the continent. They operate four large venues here, and you see their advertising everywhere: Les Misérables releasing in May, The Lion King premiering this November. 

I am certain this essay feels somewhat like a stream of consciousness and it is supposed to be. These pieces all tie together, I promise. Here are some things I have learned about Toronto that feel barely describable, but that I must stress to you. 

One: Toronto is bursting with color. Everywhere. The beautiful soft blues of the skyscrapers, the tans and off-whites of older historical buildings. Yonge-Dundas is small but mighty, with billboards and lights. Warm browns and blacks and soft lighting adorn most small neighborhoods under cover of trees, such as Cabbagetown and The Annex. Chinatown boasts a fierce red, our University is navy and sky. There is a forever abundance of things to be discovered here. There is a feeling in the air of standing downtown, wanting to immortalize yourself in the moment. It is real. It is present. It is vibrant and alive.

Two: Toronto is ever-changing. Innis College is still under construction. King’s College Circle has had most of the barriers taken down, and the grass has turned yellow and drab. The Real Fruit Bubble Tea by the ROM closed (they’re replacing it with a Booster Juice, if anyone’s interested). The plays in the theaters are ephemeral and it hurts whenever the signs on the front change. Cranes seem to come and go as they please, planes continue to take off and land. The weather fluctuates. The construction sites across King Street look a little more complete each time I take a look. Assignments whiz by, and I scrabble date after date in my calendar, making every attempt to suck the marrow out of the city before I leave it. The semester changes. It might feel day by day like we as students are living in a routine, but the city around us is breathing, too. 

Three: Toronto is mine. It’s also yours. The city is what you make of it.
Four: You are able to stand at the heart of this city and say, “I love you”. You are allowed to cry. You’re becoming an adult and falling in love with the world again. It is all going to be okay. 

Five: We are only students here for so long.

Back in the days when I went to the ROM with my mother, when paleontology felt like everything I had, and when university sounded like a place where magical things happened, I remember falling asleep in the backseat of the car headed home from school, and waking up in my childhood bed after spending the night at my friend’s house. I was never able to recall the feeling of my mother’s old Tuscon pulling into the driveway of our old place, nor the strength of presumably my father’s arms carrying me up the stairs. But there I always was, the following morning, awake with the cooing of the morning doves outside my window and the summer sunlight casting patterns on the carpet floor, knowing I was home. It’s nearing the end of first year and the house I refer to has become a stranger to me. Yet I feel this feeling again in my lungs and in the sidewalk cracks of downtown. In every way, I implore you to take this final stretch of semester and allow yourself to feel the city. Maybe you will find me out there somewhere. I’m still in that coffee shop on Yonge Street, watching people pass by. All I can feel is that I’m right where I’m supposed to be. I’m home. I’m home. I’m home. I’m home.