Stories from the Post
Friday July 1, 2005
4:30 - 5:30pm
My Mom and I talked about it, and we decided that it would be a lot less stressful if we spread my move out over a matter of days. In retrospect, I think moving drains the life out of you, no matter how you frame it. After two days of packing, driving, cleaning, lugging, loading and unloading, we were exhausted.
We were in the home stretch - almost everything I owned was sitting in my new apartment in Waterloo in boxes. All that was left was to finish cleaning my apartment near Yonge and Eglinton and throw my bike and a few boxes into the back of the station wagon. I was looking forward to saying good-bye to being a Torontonian.
But first, my Mom and I planned to stop by Markham so I could take down the last of the posters, marking the end of not going anywhere any way. My Mother is quite supportive of my crazy art ideas, but she wasn-t very enthusiastic about walking the streets of Markham with me. "Maybe I could drive along next to you in the car…" she suggested. In the end, we decided to fairly divide the duties in order to lessen our workload: my Mom was in charge of napping and listening to the radio and I was in charge of walking in the heat and other art-related tasks.
It only took me half as long to finish, since I didn't have any new posters to put up. It was a relatively uneventful walk. I ran into the owner of 18 Franklin, who just wanted to tell me that the poster in front of his house had been destroyed by the wind and weather. He was concerned that I would become upset because it didn't survive the last week of the project. I was also invited over for a swim by a half a dozen guys who were dressed in swimming trunks, holding beer cans in their hands.
As we headed back to Toronto, my Mom and I decided to drive by the old apartment one more time. "It looks pretty much the same…" she said, which is exactly what I thought the first time I saw it on April 1st of this year. It still seems strange to me to think that someone else is living there. Thinking about it now, I'm glad that I didn't run into whoever currently inhabits their apartment during these 14 weeks. In this instance, I'm content to live with my memories instead of facing the reality of the present day.
