My boyfriend dumped me precisely two weeks into the first term of our first year of university. We were both at McGill. I’d been so excited—because Montreal. My boyfriend. An apartment with a roommate I’d just met, and really liked. But he dumped me, two weeks in, and when I phoned home afterward my mother could barely understand me because I was crying so hard.
I went back to Toronto the next weekend. Hadn’t intended to be home until Thanksgiving—but no, there I was on a train in September, struggling against yet more tears because I insisted on listening to songs that I knew would make me even sadder. I listened to these songs on cassette tapes, played on a Sony Walkman. I didn’t yet have a computer, let alone a laptop (o unimaginable miracle thing). So it was just me, my Walkman, some text books and novels I can’t remember paying any attention to. I was raw and wrecked, and the only thing that even vaguely comforted me was staring out at fields and towns whose names I didn’t know, full of people I’d never know, who were nonetheless living their lives.
I loved that train. Through heartbreak and school stress and new love, in daylight and darkness, I loved the hours I spent speeding between Montreal and Toronto. (In the rain was best.) I did a lot of scribbling in journals, when I wasn’t scribbling out essays. I was pretty consistently consumed by the idea of my future self—the one who would have to be happier, or just as happy, depending on my emotional state at the time. I wondered, longhand and at length, about novels and children and jobs. About whether I’d still be yearning for things, both effable and not, when I was this future self.
And now here I am again. Across from me is my 16-year-old daughter, whose father was my first husband—that new love I scribbled about back in 1992. (I think, glancing surreptitiously and maudlin-creepily at her, that she looks a bit like me and a lot like him.) Her boyfriend’s beside her. All three of us are tapping away at silver laptops with bitten apples on them; all of us have earphones (theirs FAR higher quality than mine). It’s dark. We’re nearly at Dorval. My fifth novel will be in bookstores this week; the file that may become my sixth is open on my silver laptop, along with submissions by a couple of my writing students. There’s a magical little house back in Toronto, wherein lives a man who definitely loves me and some cats who might.
And yearning? The kind I used to feel on this route is an echo I can hear if all the conditions are right—if I’m listening to the very same songs I once knew would make me sadder, for example. But it’s not a longing for what’s to come. It’s for what was, of course, on those other days and nights between Montreal and Toronto. I’m looking back at the young woman who was looking ahead at me. It’s so dumbly, painfully Narcissus-istic, this reflection-seeking—but that’s where the yearning is now.
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