The house is a part of a co-op renting only to students. As a result, the rent was astonishingly affordable for a house located in the heart of downtown Toronto –– within walking distance to several subway stations, grocery stores, dog parks, cute cafés, Chinatown, the best banh mi in town, and 4 of our favourite bookstores.
It is an old house, in danger of crumbling at any moment –– some of the doors are always a little jammed, the basement is always damp, and we once had maggots falling from our light fixtures. Yet at the same time it emanates a certain warmth only old houses can. The room I lived in has beautiful wooden panels, wooden floorboards, large windows, and a door to the back garden ornamented at the centre with intricate stained glass. At sundown, light would pour into the room, showering the entire space with blots of yellow, pink, and green. Leaving my room and into the common area, one sees copper pipes and radiators weaved throughout the entire building, giving the house a distinct, old-fashioned feel.
I first visited this house when I started dating my bf (he moved in one year before I did). I spent many nights over in his room, and when the room next to his became available one semester into our relationship, I felt it only made sense for me to take a page from the u-haul lesbians book and move in. As such, this house is where I started my first relationship, where I had my first kiss, and where I first shared a life with a partner. But more than that, this is the first time I lived in an environment where I can really figure out who I am. Before moving here, I lived with an older family friend couple who, like my family, are evangelical and conservative. Living in this new house, then, is the first time in my life when I felt comfortable enough to try doing my own thing, without restriction, without worry of inconveniencing my benefactors, and without the need to be an upstanding Christian youth. It is here that I became a halfway decent cook, that I became a reader of Freud, Marx, and Hegel; it is here that I found out how I like to do things and how I like to live. In a sense, I became a real person in this house.
During the time I lived at this house, I made many life-long friends and I invited them over. I cooked them potato and leek soup, butternut squash soup, carrot cakes, Japanese mushroom rice, tomatoes and zucchini cobbler, almond and raspberry thumbprint cookies, red braised tofu and potatoes, and vegetable miso soup. It was in this house that we played Animal Jam together, we blogged together, we ironically (wink) watched Kuroko no Basuke together, and we chuckled and yapped for hours on end. We also met amazing friends because of where we lived –– our cool and sweet housemates, our neighbour and her dog who recognized us and always sprinted over for a pet, Toes the neighbourhood cat (so called because she has extra toes), the owner of the pizza place we frequented, and the barista at our favourite local cafe.
I think my bf is right to say that if leaving this house hurts especially deeply, it's because the four years we lived in this place are all some of the happiest years we've experienced, and by leaving it feels like we are leaving this good part of our lives behind. Yet as the great Japanese philosopher Hachiware said, even though we might lose the objects that symbolize our past,"we'll always have the memories." For me, these would be the memories of enjoying biscuits and tea in the front porch with Toes the cat, of PowerPoint night with our roommates, of walking around Chinatown and Bloor street...
Thank you, our little home.
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