If you enjoy ambient music, I suggest listening to Homesick and/or Stick Season, both by Noah Kahan, while you read (my roommate recommended the latter song to me, and whether close or far from home, a certain solace can be found in not being there, together).

Toronto is the fourth biggest city in North America, the signage in my elevator tells me, and I certainly feel it now. A city built by British colonizers on the bones of Seneca and Huron-Wendat villages, long streets and networks of buildings and people and languages; when I squint, I can almost pretend that I’m back home. Frequenting Chinatown, lingering on Dundas and Spadina, letting Cantonese and Putonghua float through my ears and feeling something deep in me rewarded, a reminder that still I’m on the same planet as what feels so far away now. So many people I love are deep down in the ground, all the way through the earth.

If I close my eyes I can pretend the TTC is the subway back home, but the loudspeaker announces two languages too little and I don’t know what corner of the city I emerge from when I clamber out of the station. My roommates and I tell each other we’re coming home to the apartment, but when they say they’re going home for Christmas, we all know what that really means. Could I go home for Christmas, true home? Is a flight halfway around the world really worth it? I’ve heard that Toronto is fun this time of year. I’ve also heard that my cat is waiting for me to warm her bed, all the way across the Pacific.

I watch people walk their dogs, step from concert halls, watch their lives unfold and wonder how it must feel to be a local in this sprawl of a city. I walk along the streets pretending I have a life of my own, trying to prove my place in this city to absolute strangers; the woman I passed on the road, the girl who complimented my hair, the waitstaff who made me a sandwich, the streetcar driver. I am not lonely, I have made friends and brought friends with me, but I am certainly alone. I whisper Chinese to myself in my bedroom, worried I’ll forget it. Worried I’ll forget it all.

I meet people from home at a frat party, of all places. They went to a high school ten minutes from mine. Now we live in the same building, all the way across the world. Exchanging greetings across a crowded living room with someone who, upon learning where I came from, dragged me across the dance floor and introduced me to his friends as if a place would be enough to bind us, to link us across the ocean. It did. Their phone numbers weigh heavy in my pocket. It is refreshing to know that the difference of a postal code can mean absolutely nothing sometimes.

I remember walking around campus, around downtown with new friends, talking, stumbling through the darkness. Unfamiliar streets, awkward landmarks like breadcrumbs marking our path and laughing all throughout—I had forgotten the thrill of exploring, the thrill of learning to lay down new roots. I chose Toronto before I had even visited: some gut instinct told me that this could be my city. Sometimes, I really feel like it can be. Sometimes all I want is a flight itinerary.

I flew home for winter. The first few days back I was missing Toronto as if my homesickness no longer had a place to go. I suppose aching for a place to lay myself to rest follows me wherever I go—am I torn between two places, or do I have no place at all? Sometimes I feel that I belong everywhere, anywhere I put my mind to. Sometimes my homesickness spreads something frantic, growing up from my feet into the rest of my body whenever I step to new lands, heels crunching into snow, sand, and whatever may follow. Sometimes my urban heart beats tenderly, incessantly. Sometimes it doesn’t beat at all.

Could I fall in love with this city? Have I already? Or am I just aching for it to be home, aching for it to be something I’m not even sure I miss anymore? Sometimes the difference of a postal code means nothing to me. Sometimes the numbers stretch an expanse I’m afraid I might never be able to traverse again.

It is cold, this night in Toronto. I think I could get used to it.