I Don’t Love You, Toronto: On Books and Cities

The first time I saw the apartment building that I live in, my heart crumpled. I was moving in with my partner, D. We’d fallen in love in my hometown, Kathmandu, and had kept up a long-distance relationship after he moved to the U.S. Then he’d moved to his hometown, Toronto, to be close to his children, who lived here with their mother. We decided I’d move, too, and we’d set up together.

I didn’t know Toronto, and its name evoked nothing, though my family had lived in Ottawa when I was a child, and I had fond Kodachrome memories of snow and sunshine and the Rideau Canal. When I landed in Toronto, at Pearson Airport, I noted with bemusement how very flat the surroundings were. D assured me that I’d like the city, but when we turned off at Allen Road and drove up to our building, the sheer ugliness of that pile of brick-and-mortar shook me. D had rented an apartment here for its proximity to his children.

A decade on, we’re still in this building, a low-budget rental in a stretch of other low-budget rentals on Bathurst Street, which stretches north from Lake Ontario through the entire length of Toronto, ending in the farmlands of Holland Marsh, 57 kilometers away. I find it helpful to remember that and once lived in our neighborhood, since there’s nothing to say about our building. Built in the 1930s, it is squat, with not a single folly or flourish. Whoever painted the doors and windows didn’t bother to use masking tape. The windows are grimy with age. The backyard is cluttered with the lawn furniture of tenants past. Inside our apartment, the paint is chipping, the caulking is cracked, and all the fixtures are shoddy. The building has always struck me as a teardown, best suited to young, transient populations, such as students; yet everyone who lives here