Boxcar Social - Riverside - October 29th, 2024

What makes a city, a home? I prefer to think upon that question to have the same answer, every time – the people. But there is a character to our association in the places where we find each other. A place is like love – it has to make you feel soothed & wild. It’s dimly candlelit corners, always the right song playing underneath, the co-conspiratorial whispers side-by-side, clinking glass, warm-stocking’d legs dipping between yours. A soft mouth. A kind of heat exchange that you will rarely find in this town.

The right atmosphere allows you to take down wall by wall we put up as a bit of an emotional shield to survive this place. It’s Toronto. You have to wear a certain kind of armor, so when the right person finds you in the right place you find together, it’s so nice to not have to wear it anymore, outside comfortable shelter. I appreciate a genuine public display of pure lust. Confess, so do you.

I keep secrets about the people I care for deeply in my life, regardless of our affiliation. Friend, lover, whatever. So it’s not so much the finer details I need to share – our sacred needs to be kept, still.

I can tell you about the delicacy of her wrists, the brief moment I had her hand upturned in mine, navigating an unfamiliar kind of tongue, the exact song that was playing at the exact time I held them. I can tell you about how the light lit her face, redhaired half in shadow, the little whistling hum in her throat when she talks for longer than a few seconds, the yearning.

What makes a city a home? Baby, that was (& is) you. And I found you here.

So, fare thee well Boxcar. I grieve your loss, a story yet to come to its emotional arc, let alone a conclusion, to make amends at a later date, with gratitude.