a part of the city where i never go

my dentist works up the street from where i went to high school. every nine months i come back for a cleaning. i take the 41 from keele station, up old weston road to eglinton, and step into a throng of northbound commuters outside the coffee time on the corner. i have only a vague idea of where they might be going; york university, for some, the old hospital on keele street. there is a plaza at lawrence with a walmart, and a few government offices further north at the 401, near the centre where i keep failing my driver's test.

the murals we painted on the side of a portuguese sports bar are still here. in the first, a ttc bus - one with parallelogram windows - speeds around a corner into a blue abyss of sky. in the second, a figure on horseback rides across a yellow-brick-road bridge. this one is on the side of another building, formerly occupied by a furniture liquidation centre. now its called "image beauty supply products."

the sidewalks have been repaved, but they're mottled with flattened wads of gum again and don't look much different. the school still hasn't managed to grow a lawn. it stands on the northwest corner like an aging monolith or a gravestone, and gives the impression of being seen in perpetual timelapse, clouds zooming by overhead.

the same jamaican papas sit outside their apartments, outside doorways tucked between the shops. their plastic lawn chairs bend, gleaming in the sun, slanting on the eglinton hill. on this hill we are closer to the sun, they are, and their dark skin is slick in the heat. from the top you can see forever, to what seem like the city's outskirts but must only be the beginnings of another city: mississauga, brampton. traffic moves at ten kilometres over the speed limit, like the buried water through the valley, past the panzerotto pizza and the jitz bar, the arena, the remains of the kodak plant.

i remember standing at all of these bus stops, and how different the buses smell here - like burnt, bleached paper. i remember the pride we had pulling into the rear parking lot in tyler's parents' bmw. the smoking pit, whose excavated earth reveals decades of cigarette stubs and fossilized potato wedge boxes. lunch at the court house, ketchup and mayonnaise, the sticky smell of chlorine from the centennial pool, and how all of the streets are named after world war II battlegrounds. the one girl who went to yale, and how everyone pretended they knew who she was.

the in-between, where no one is ever poorest but they've got no money to speak of. where no one seems to stay for long, except for the dentist, i guess. where the sky is bigger, and the houses and trees aren't new or old, but somewhere in the middle. where it was never as bad as it could get, and never good enough to stay for.