There and Back

Toronto to Montreal. Montreal to Toronto. He refuses to make the trip himself – your city is boring, he says - but he’ll let you come visit as often as you want. Right now, all you can manage is a weekend every month or two. Six hours there on Friday, after a long day at work. Six hours back on Sunday, with hardly any time to rest before you have to be up again. All the girls at your office think it’s just so romantic.

On the bus, you never see the same person twice. Each week it’s a new assortment of unfamiliar, unfriendly faces. Sometimes you try to chat with the person sitting next to you. English or French, they never seen to want to talk; you wonder if they can sense your desperation. You bring a book that you don’t read. At the halfway stop in Kingston, you buy a crappy sandwich and eat it on the bus. You’ve noticed there’s a Tim Hortons in the same plaza, but for some reason you’re a little scared to do something different.

Every week, you arrive at Berri-UQAM station. Of course, he doesn’t come to meet you. You take a taxi to his place. Looking out of the window, the city’s beauty makes you feel inadequate. The women on the street are fashionable; you wonder if you’re wearing the wrong thing. When you get there, he doesn’t hug or kiss you, but he fucks you. Twice. He comes; you don’t. He’s always gone before you wake up in the morning.

While he’s out working at his tiny, trendy art gallery that the Mirror once called a “gem,” you sit around. You sip coffee. You smoke cigarettes – something you never do at home. The phone rings; people are looking for him. You wonder which of the callers he is fucking when you’re away. And which ones while you’re there.

When he gets home hours later, he is either ecstatic that he made a big sale or despondent because he couldn’t get an artist that he wanted. Either way, he takes you out to a nightclub or a CD release party. He gets you drunk off dark rum and liquid cocaine, and you remember why you fell in love with him in the first place.

Sunday mornings, if he isn’t busy, you both sleep in. You read the paper together and he mocks your lack of knowledge of Québécois affairs, calling you an ignorant anglophone. You eat. He touches your breasts, but not your face; he fucks you again. You vow to yourself that you won’t come back, even though you know that you will.

This can’t go on forever, you are aware. The longer you drag this out, the more it will hurt when it ends. And yet something keeps pulling you back to Bay and Dundas, back onto the grimy intercity bus, back into his bed.