"These are the days that I've been missing/Give me the taste, give me the joy of summer wine/ These are the days that bring new meaning/ I feel the stillness of the sun and I feel fine/Sometimes when the nights are closing early/I remember you and I start to smile..." --Jamie Cullum, "These are the days"

I've been back for a week, and it's funny how so little time can change so much. I came home to Montreal with every intention of spending the week here and then slaving away packing up my apartment, heading home to Ontario, stashing everything in storage until I could find an apartment/job in Toronto and then moving to the big, bad T dot. Well, it's very easy to make such huge decisions from the other side of the world from which persepctive is totally different, but come home, come back to Montreal in summertime, sit in sidewalk cafes drinking bols of cafe au lait, hang out on friends' back patios laughing, reminiscing and eating waffles, get back to your beautiful apartment with its washer and dryer, dishwasher and pretty flowers scattered all around, and then try to leave. Is not possible madam.
This week I graduated from McGill, got my B.A., my exciting Latin diploma in its exciting mahoghany frame, got to wear the robe and the hood and the mortarboard, so now McGill isn't my excuse to stay in Montreal anymore, and so here I am, trying to find a new excuse to stay here (aside from the obvious: friends, I hate moving etc.). Anyone who knows me at all knows that I've been having a torrid love affair with this city for the past four years, and it seems that we're still in the honeymoon phase. Who can turn down the shopping, 99 cent pizza after drinking, Darby's shala and Fairmount bagels? Who? So, you're asking yourselves, if Andrea is so in love with her city, why did she decide so quickly and easily to move to Toronto while she was away? Well, when you're not actually in Montreal it's easy to believe that you can escape from its clutches, and furthermore, it was an issue of practicality. I need to make money for grad school and there is not much money to be had in Montreal. People keep telling me, "Andrea, follow your heart, do what your instinct tells you." Well, my instinct tells me to stay put, and if my instinct had a bank account with $50 000 in it that would be great, but it doesn't, thus pragmatism. But I was sitting with friends the other day, having fallen right back into the grrove with them, feeling as comfortable as ever, new copper highlights in my hair and thinking, screw pragmatism, what about quality of life? What about fun and joie de vivre?
I walk around this city with a huge grin on my face, smiling at the squeegie kids and the wealthy elderly women from Westmount and the pomp and circumstance of convocation and I think, 'I fit here, this is me, this place makes me happy.' I have the greatest time doing the most mundane tasks, like going grocery shopping, just because I'm doing those mundane tasks in Montreal and there's something in the air here, in the water and now its in my bones and in my heart and I don't want to go, and if I have to it will be with regret and anger and I'll be kicking and screaming and thinking about that first day when I got here and I all I wanted to do was leave, thinking about how far I've come and how I want to continue on that path. When I first moved here I hated it, I wanted nothing more than to go back to Ontario and hide under my sheets, but now, now this is my place, I've built a life here, a home and I'm not quite ready to forfeit it to the powers of money and practicality, why should I start being practical now?!?
- posted by Andrea @ 9:07 a.m.