There, and Back Again
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
Søren Kierkegaard
They say you can’t go back—and yet, I seem to keep trying. This has been a year of returns. I returned to Copenhagen, to find a city I still longed to call home one day. I spent six months in my childhood hometown and carved out a new sense of what it meant to me.
Recently, I returned to Toronto—a city I left a little over two years ago with no intention of coming back, maybe ever. Certainly no time soon. And i’s not forever, even if the particulars of what my life looks beyond the end of the year are still foggy. But for right now, for this season, it’s home. Again.
It feels an odd chain of fate to even be here at all. If I hadn’t submitted an application for a working visa, almost nine years ago, on a particularly dull day at my dead-end job in Edinburgh. If I hadn’t ended up going at all, when by the time it processed I had a full-time offer in a job I cared about, even if it was in a city I didn’t, really.
If I hadn’t applied for my citizenship, even though I had every intention of leaving. If I hadn’t applied for the writing residency—if I’d given into the part of my brain that said, well, you won’t get in, and instead of the part that said, you won’t know if you don’t try.
If I hadn’t written that script last year. If I hadn’t seen that video about the cosmetic surgery industry that brought the whole story to me. If I hadn’t, if I hadn’t, if I hadn’t—
But that’s life, I think. A series of decisions and serendipitous moments that somehow lead you exactly where you’re meant to be.
And, so: Toronto. The first 24 hours were the worst. I was tired, jet-lagged, in a new apartment with a new roommate in a new part of the city. Everything was familiar, and yet not at all. The view out of my window was different. My closest friends were no longer in the city, let alone a handful of blocks away. And I wouldn’t be hopping on the subway come the morning to my old office, with a coffee from my old spot, to see all my old coworkers.
I couldn’t think of it as returning, because it wasn’t. It was like moving somewhere new—it just happened that I knew the place quite well, that’s all.
I went to my regular spin class on my second evening—still tired, still jet-lagged, still nursing that wonky angle from my accident—not so much for the class, but for the familiarity. To walk into a place I knew and that knew me. To be greeted like a friend by the instructor I’d known for years.
These little pockets of the Toronto I used to know are what helped to ground me back to myself, but it was the new that helped me to appreciate my next chapter here. Conversations with my new roommate, in the backyard I’d never had before. My new daily routine to campus, and the cohort of new people that brought into my life.
Peppered in are snippets of the life I had before. Old friends, warm and familiar in a way that I sometimes crave amongst a sea of new faces. Bars where I don’t even have to open the menu, or routes I don’t need to look up.
And some things that are just familiar of this place, that has been my home for a large part of my adult life. The smell of pine after rain. The ding of the subway doors before we leave the station. The staggering jugs of maple syrup for the price of what a tiny bottle costs back in Scotland.
I’m not the same person I was when I first moved here, eight years ago. I’m not even sure I’m the same person I was when I left, two years ago. But this country, this city, will always be a home to me. And I think some part of me knew that, when I filled in my paperwork to become a citizen. When I swore an oath, and sang the national anthem on a hilariously out-of-sync Zoom call.
To be so lucky, to have so many places to call home.
