decade.

I’ve spent a decade in this city. Twice as long as I’d ever imagined myself to be anywhere. An anniversary that flew by in haste. Something that I wouldn’t have recalled if it weren’t for a conversation in passing over an overdue dinner. I would have baulked if you told me ten years ago, that I would call Toronto home. Home was always, and has always been abstract; a construct. An intangible thing that I had perhaps grew weary of. Something everyone else had, but not me. Yet this has been home, a space that I have learned to call my own. I can say wholeheartedly perhaps that I have proven something unthinkable to myself. That I am capable of spreading roots deep. I am capable of creating community that endures. In complacency I have learnt, to be planted. 

Commitment has come a little easier to me now. Yet, I am still terrified at the prospect of being chained, by relationship and expectation. Perhaps I have learned to love a little more the wrestle of it all? Security is something I never imagined myself to have in 2022, and still, I continue to pinch myself if this were a dream still. I’ve accomplished much of what I pressed myself to do in the years of wrestling, with the digging deep and pressing in. A new identity, a new experience and perhaps in a little while more a new vocation. I am thankful for the spaces that have come and gone. The relationships that I have inadvertently destroyed and tested in angst. The closure that I have always run from. 

The city has seen the very best and worst of my being and I have committed myself to a quiet denouement. A planned withdrawn exit from a space that has found me with love and a heart full. I am expectant for the next decade and if I am lucky, it will come blessed with a journey well lived. By His grace, with whatever that is to come, I will continue to prove to myself that whatever adventure I chose, it will be worthwhile.