In the diaries entries I wrote growing up, it was customary to include—alongside the date and day of the week—the weather. Today, it is overcast.

This time around, I tell myself I’m used to the cold, now.

The last time I was here, I was eighteen. The last time I was here, I didn’t know any of the things I know now.

The first summer home is absurd. I feel the air as soon as the plane lands, dense and heavy and hot, and I breathe like I haven’t breathed in eight months. Heat falls through me like a stone. No time has passed at all. I see my cat, and my dog, again. It takes them a while to place me, but they remember. My friends and I go to all the places we’ve missed, displaced from home, displaced from the cities we chase our educations in. Convenience store cheung fun, the build-your-own-bowl noodle restaurant, the cinema next to our high school, the bookstore in malls that sprawl up instead of out. Because although Toronto sprawls up too, it’s different here. Everything is different here.

We sit, the eight of us on the floor, my dear, best, high school friends, and take turns sharing about our lives. We are all the same, barely a year from when we last saw each other—my hair is still pink, they still wear glasses, her smile still sends a rush of lightning all the way into my fingertips—but we are so different too. He rock-climbs, now. Someone has a crush. One of us, one of us isn’t even here, working in a research lab over the summer. We miss her. We’ve missed each other, too.

Even now, there is a small pang in my chest knowing that the seven people I grew up with are apart now, sent far and wide across two sprawling continents. But, now I know, there are great things across the sea, too.

The little heart flutter I get when I receive a text from someone from home and they end the message with la, a particle I hear only in Cantonese—a tiny additive familiar to them and endlessly fond to me, all the way across the Pacific. We are both on this continent now, but for barely a moment, we sit homebound.

Seasons change. I fly back for the start of term, and move, tumultuous and doubtful, from one home into another.

The jolt in my chest when I respond to our landlord in Putonghua, naturally, unthinkingly, and he asks me, 你講中文嗎？You speak Chinese? and I get the privilege to answer, 是的！Yes.

His face shifts into a smile; he tells me to go to the plane show. It’s cheaper after five in the afternoon. It ends tomorrow, I should really go.

By proxy, the contractors hired to fix up the house also speak Chinese. I hear them speaking Cantonese, and hear how they switch to Putonghua after hearing me reply. I tell them hello, tell them goodbye, they ask me about school; one of them catches me sleeping-in, spots me wandering sluggish to my afternoon classes, and he laughs whenever he sees me trudging in and out of the house.

One day, my landlord asks, 你開學了嗎？學什麼？Have you started school? What’re you studying?

心理學！I respond. Psychology!

所以你可以學Psychiatry，是嗎？So you can study psychiatry, right? He asks, code-switching in a way that makes me giddy and eager and so reminiscent of home.

I laugh and tell him yes.

那你一定要，Psychiatrists賺好多錢咯！美儒，你一定要記得，世界上第一就是錢，什麼事情都需要錢。如果有錢，那什麼都可以做！你一定要記得！Then you have to! Psychiatrists make a lot of money. You must remember, the most important thing in the world is money. Everything needs money. With money, you can do anything! Remember this, Meiru.

He sounds just like home. Really, all I want to do is sing, but he’s the only person in this city of three million that uses my Chinese name, so I happily tell him yes.

I make a friend a block off of campus, a chance encounter in the hour between my lectures. She tells me about herself, and we revel in being a three-hour flight away from each other compared to the fifteen hours it takes us to get here. She has habits, mannerisms, that I only see from home. She starts to tell me about her Korean parents; I stop her and tell her where I’m from. She giggles, covers her mouth, and says from behind her hand: so you know. We bond over talk of home, of how East Asia prices its soju, of our thriving metropolis’ ever-steady transit systems. I walk away with a new contact in my phone. I walk away with a heart full of home.

The world evens itself out. Toronto settles itself comfortably into the hollow of my chest. Sometimes, it even waves hello. I wander from city to city, coasting, landlocked, and find that there is a piece of home everywhere I go. I have a key to the front door of a house that is mine. God, I have a postal code.

So, my body has never been very good at regulating temperature. I have always been more susceptible to the cold. I have always been resistant to change. Yet, with so much life, so much of my life, in and around and teeming through the city, I think that it’ll be okay. I come home to my best friends every night. I think I’ll be alright.