Now it is October and the air no longer holds us in humidity but sweeps dry across our skin. This September was the warmest September, like we say every September, but something about this year's feels more true than the others. Perhaps it was the five days of frosh week, perhaps it was the sweat-slick frat parties, ones where the windows are damp with condensation from the inside, but what I know as fact is that this September was significant in some way or another.
The University of Toronto spans just over a square kilometre. It's located in downtown Toronto and you can always see the CN Tower looming southbound. There's something illicit-feeling about walking campus after 11 PM. I am a girl from the suburbs: my mom drops me off if my friend's mom can pick us up before 7, and so it feels slightly revolutionary to meander past McDonald’s and Myhal on my own and when I want.1
There is an emphasis on on my own. UofT comes with a certain flavour of loneliness. Most of the students are commuters, for the university only has so many residence buildings available. Few people are in the same program combination and fewer still have the same schedule. People seem fungible because they are ephemeral and unknowable.
I lucked out. I'm on campus in a single room. It's nice, mostly. I like to look at the tall buildings a couple blocks north of Bloor Street as I crawl back to my dorm after an evening stint at Robarts Library. My favourite rooms are the led-lit windows, serendipitous blips of colour amidst others that glow yellow. I cannot see their residents but I know that they exist and that they do not know I exist.
Olivia Laing writes about the innate voyeurism of apartment buildings in her book The Lonely City:
Inside, strangers swim to and fro, attending to the business of their private hours. You can see them, but you can't reach them, and so this commonplace urban phenomenon, available in any city of the world on any night, conveys to even the most social a tremor of loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure.
I keep my window cracked open at night. Sometimes I hear the raucous laughter of a group of students taking the shortcut behind one building to get to another. And then I wish briefly that I could seal myself into my room, hermetically insulated from the camaraderie I observe, for one cannot participate while observing and cannot observe while participating.
I've felt this desire at various parties and afters. Ones where "something intangible washed through me like a wave and i suddenly felt so hollow and lonely that i forgot how to breathe for a second, like all the air had left my body at once." Sometimes I see another person in the mix of bodies experiencing the same thing, and I have to look away for fear of intruding on on their intimately public melancholy.
Now it is October and I no longer smell like summer. But sometimes if I look outside at the precise time before dawn, when the sun has yet to bisect the sky and everything hangs a pale grey, the transition between night and day and adolescence and adultness is still tender and the wind still smells warm.
It is 10:59 PM and it is Wednesday and I am sitting outside alone and I feel this way right now and I am reporting to you live on scene.
Subtitle is a quote from The Torn-Up Road by Richard Siken.
last paragraph is very sylvia plath-esque. in other words i worship ur prose
sitting alone in a dining hall at UBC as i read this and it hit man