Pages

Nearing the end of my first sojourn in TO in my new place, and I really do love this perch up in the sky, this 15th floor nest with the amazing sunsets.

I had dinner with Shay the other night, and I brought her up here to see it, and she crowed about the cosiness. It is cosy. I like it. It's pretty tiny, but it doesn't have that sense of echoing, untapped vastness that my loft did. And I don't think I'll ever want to live in a place ever again that doesn't have access to the outside -- even the little balcony here makes a world of difference.

I left my loft in good shape, with flowers for the incoming girls, as I posted before.



I feel a tiny bit wistful about it, but I've really taken to this condo life. I like having a concierge, I like feeling far away from the ground and its many noises, but still being in touching distance of shops, NICE restaurants, plush gelato, good theatre, should I want it. I like the pool and the gym and the sauna, even if I don't use them. I like having 15 flights of stairs to walk up to try to force off a tiny bit of the plumpness that's taken over in the high moving, high stress time.

There are a lot of milestones here as I finish up my move and hie myself off out west for august. I went to Pages today, for the last time, I think. It's closing at the end of August. It's funny -- it was never my favourite bookstore, exactly, but it always made me feel *smarter*. I bought stuff there that I aspired to read, that made me think, rather than tripe.

And over the past 25 years, I've bought an endless supply of notebooks there. I always loved these Clairefontaine ones with the plaidish covers -- again, talismans of hope that I'd write something, do something, make something meaningful, worth recording. Tracey was the one who introduced me to Pages and to these notebooks, and it's a funny little synchronicity that so many of the journals and notebooks I threw away last week in my first purge of all of that stuff were these books.

It doesn't make me wistful, exactly -- although I don't know who else would be such a meticulous buyer of cultural theory, the tables of books that made me think and aspire. But it does feel like another closing point, another click pointing me to the recognition that any aspirations I have aren't really nested here, anymore. Like the realization that I didn't have a single qualm tossing my high school yearbooks down the chute, or unloading a whole bunch of these notebooks. They were me then, moment in time that don't mean much in the preservation. I know what I'm drawing on and taking with me, and holding onto them is more of a weight than an anchor.

I did buy one thing today that I hope will push me forward -- an uncategorizable book called The Importance of Being Iceland. A book that has the inexplicable symbol on the cover. My hare-brained plan to hie myself off there next year needs some kind of shape, and maybe I really need to start to learn something about it. Read in bed for a while instead of yacking online.