to trace a nameless landscape

Meeting new friends, I always take care to warn them that I am directionally incompetent. If you look to me to take you to a cute new cafe or an alleyway ramen store, you receive a complimentary walking tour, sans guide, of the surrounding streets.

I move through the world guided by familiarity, treading only well-charted waters. 

Yet this charting has nothing to do with formal cartography. I consult subway routes, library floor plans, and Google Maps directions with the utmost care but I still somehow manage to lose my way.

(I’ve once circled a block over and over because I couldn’t recognize the route I’d first taken from the back.)

Driving downtown in the early hours of the morning, my dad tells me to head towards Mount Pleasant – this means nothing more to me than a grassy knoll or a snow-capped cliffside smiling benevolently down a village.

Let’s go down Laird, or Turn right on Bayview – I’ll be at Yonge and Wellesley – in my mind, these are filler names for empty terrains.

I look instead for meaningful memories to tease out the locations and am thus easily misled. Even as physical storefronts break down and die out, overtaken by new faces, and even as people try to instill street names into my navigational lexicon, I can’t erase the associations they have as backdrops to small, specific moments.

I listen instead for

let’s meet in front of the basement bookstore with the orange cat and the shelves stacked high to the ceilings, or

it’s by the Michael’s where we bought those crochet kits and balked at the two hundred dollar mug-making machines, and

look for me by those condos where we worked on our English group project and you tried ma’amoul for the first time.

It’s by the park where you fell into the snow and soaked your socks and your toes, alongside the cement expanse where I’d ride my bike seven summers ago, near the ice cream store where I declared pistachio was I’d been looking for all along; we’re coasting along the road pitted with potholes and that crosswalk where I nearly ran the red light.

There are no winding instructions to follow here. It’s the emotional architecture of buildings and street lights and cityscapes as they are mapped in my mind.