Not for a vacation. Not for the weekend. Leaving.
I’ve been here for a year. A year that wasn’t part of “the plan.” I took a gap year to work at Cohere, thinking it’d be this chill detour before starting at UofT. Now, I’m not doing school either. The detour became something else entirely.
And now I’m packing up an entire year of my life into boxes and bags. It’s such a strange feeling—how do you compress all the things that happened, all the people, the nights that turned into mornings, the routines that quietly became rituals?
This past month, I got closer to people than I ever expected. It always happens like this, doesn’t it? You start feeling truly in something just as it starts slipping away. The city starts to feel like home, and then suddenly you’re scrubbing the corners of your home, basking everything in for the last time, and saying goodbye in a way that doesn’t feel real yet.
There’s a version of me that existed only here. Someone who lived in this in-between space—past the original plan, before the next one formed. Someone who figured out how to survive a winter, who found new people to care about, who was more lost and more grounded than ever at the same time.
Leaving now feels like I’m abandoning something I finally started to understand. And honestly? I don’t really know what’s next. For the first time, I don’t have a polished answer. The path is less of a path and more of a fog right now.
But I guess this post is just a small attempt to hold onto it—to say: this year mattered. This place mattered. These people mattered.
Thanks, Toronto.