Nonfiction by Emma Russell-Trione

“She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.”

—Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

I push open the door to the theatre, searching frantically through my pockets for my keys. The panic that gripped me as I left my seat loosens when my fingers touch metal, buried deep in the folds of my coat. The keys, time-stamped by the palms of dozens of undergrad students, unlock a small, dark, noisy room on campus, into whose boxy contours I’ve stretched to fit.

Relieved of my anxiety, the wonder of the play returns. I see the stage spread like a blueprint before me; I hear the actors again, the pointed beats when the theatre goes silent. Someday, my plays will be mounted on that stage. The possibilities of my future make me perpetually giddy—since starting university, my passions have become an all-consuming tug-of-war. I want it all, immediately, or at least I want the dream of it, this uplifting happiness in which I imagine that the words are already written and that they mean something great.

The street outside the Young Center is deserted. The crowd of theatregoers is already gone, and the Distillery District is quiet. Their absence lifts pages of In the Skin of a Lion into my mind, and I see long-dead men reenter their history. They emerge lurid from vats, dripping red and yellow and green into the grooves between the cobblestones. I tuck my chin into my coat and start walking towards the mouth of Tank House Lane. The clack of my boots echoes off the walls, fades, and recedes into the black sky. A sheet of plastic pinned to the building flaps in a sudden gust of wind, revealing crumbling red brick. I want to rip the plastic off and find ghosts imprinted underneath. Did Patrick lean against that wall as he tied his boots back on, leaving handprints on the brick?

The lane ends and I’m in the present again. The overpass at Lake Shore East is closed for construction. A GO train rumbles across, its windows glowing yellow in the dark, and I stop to watch, the wind off the unseen lake whipping my hair. Revelling, for as long as I’m home again, in being here and not there, pressed against one of those windows.

“[T]he luxury of such space . . . What country exists on the other side?”

—Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

The Bloor Street Viaduct was completed in November of 1918, in the beginnings of what would become the Spanish Flu pandemic. The opening ceremony was reduced to a few well-known faces, and the movement between east and west the viaduct was intended for restricted for the next two years. A century later, the viaduct and the city went silent again.

The bridge was a grounding force, an unnoticed constant in the tornado that became high school. Whether I hated my school or loved it, the bridge and the ravine pulled me towards it. My final year, which straddled the boundary of pandemic and “normal,” was a careful reconstruction, a reawakening to the world and to the people around me. It was the first inkling of a life beyond the pandemic I didn’t run from. By my second semester, I had leapt into the world again with fervor and wrote, in contrast, slowly, carefully, critically.

In the Skin of a Lion, my grade twelve novel study, takes 1920’s Toronto and shatters it like a plate, then rearranges the pieces into a mosaic. In the second chapter, Ondaatje takes us to the unfinished edge of the bridge, halfway across the Don Valley. The sky is black and pricked with stars; below, a man moves silently in the darkness, knowing already what is there. I wrote between the lines as I stood, breathless, on the rough concrete—the breeze lifting stray hairs from my neck, the silence, the expanse. The striking of a match.

Each time I take the subway across the viaduct, I stare first at my high school, standing on the edge of the ravine. Then I watch the black trestles rush past and absorb the men who built them. You’ll never cross the bridge without thinking about it, my English teacher said of the book, and she was right. When I cross the viaduct, I’m alive to the past and slipping out of the present. This is why men build bridges. This is what I am seeking: a midnight ravine, a flight in midair, a permanent moment.

“[T]he other languages making their way to your ears, plus the language of the air itself . . . all sums up into a kind of new vocabulary. No matter who you are, no matter how certain you are of it, you can't help but feel the thrill of being someone else.”

—Dionne Brand, What We All Long For

The summer before starting university, I sought out books about Toronto, in what was perhaps an attempt to drown out—or amplify—my doubts about leaving the city. The characters of Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For brought familiarity. They sleep, breathe, bicycle minutes from my home in Kensington Market, though their version of the place belongs to twentysomethings, to a future I was unwillingly accelerating towards. I took the book with me to Nova Scotia, and when I was homesick, I made space for this reimagining of my neighborhood, a vibrancy of life and color that I missed, even amidst the wordless beauty of the South Shore.

I chose a small city over a big one, a weekend bus ride through southern Ontario over the alluring possibilities of Québec. I expected to hate it. I expected, by the end of my first semester, to have thrown up my hands and fled without looking back. Instead, the small things kept me there: the sprawl of the arboretum; the copse of pine trees at the edge of the park, which I lay under during blizzards to watch the sky; the bunnies I would spot when I sat on a bench alone, studying in the twilight. I met people and began to feel an attachment to this new half-life and the unexpected possibilities it held. To leave would be a waste, a betrayal to my friends and to the ancient pine I leaned on while standing knee-deep in snow.

Toronto, with its unspeakable poverty and its vendetta against beauty, breaks my heart over and over again. And yet I love the movement of the city, the expansiveness of it, the ways I can disappear. At the end of that long, stop-and-start bus ride, when Toronto street signs begin to appear and the suburbs to transform into a landscape I recognize, some catch in me releases; something recognizes home, and opens itself to it.

“Could I find a graceful way to work and be in the world that might still pull me up and forward?”

— Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

Full of possibly misguided ambition, I undertake an independent study course in creative writing, working on a novel. I submit a draft to my professor at the beginning of my second year, feeling raw and naked. My drafts are my truest self; revisions are my armour. I can rewrite and polish and perfect my work until what I want to say is clarified, until it becomes something that people read and are impressed by.

The professor is kind. Her feedback, and the work that results, is concentrated and challenging, a saviour from my underfunded English courses. As the year ticks past, I begin to wonder what will happen when this course is over, when I’m once again the only one reading this manuscript, when there’s nothing standing between me and the fact that my postsecondary education is not what I thought it would be.

My professor puts me in touch with a former student of hers after I read her book and exclaim over how much it inspires me, how much it resembles what I want to be writing. We meet in the back of a coffee shop in Kensington Market to discuss books, writing, the MFA I’m considering and that she’s already completed. The writer is kind; she asks me about my project and I explain, growing more comfortable with this space, with the way my speaking fills it.

When people ask what I do, “I’m a writer,” always catches in my throat, held back by the fact that I’m nineteen, that I’m a student, that this is something I’m still learning how to do and how to be. Yet language is in my soul and always has been, and I feel myself shifting towards the fact that writing is work—that even if I have a day job, my life can be dedicated to this work and the literary world it takes part in. I’m beginning to chase it. Through my courses, through the relationships I form with other students and with my professors, through the streets of my own city and the things about it that have yet to be said.

“Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life.”

― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

Walking up Cherry Street feels familiar in a rare kind of way. These are streets I took after seeing shows with my mother and streetcars I rode at age twelve, swaying on matchstick legs with the practiced swagger of a downtown kid. The streets in this part of the city are wide and empty. The streetcar tracks, excavated from under the never-ending traffic, have a presence. It’s a rare thing, the convergence of past, present, and future, but it exists here.

The 504, my easy way home, is behind me, but I don’t turn around. Instead, I head west, past the empty lots under the King Street overpass. Two women embrace in the parking lot of a car dealership as their dog runs rings around them, spraying mud against the chain-link fence. The streetlamps cast eerie shadows. The concrete looks ghost-white, the sky Toronto-black—which really means the colour of rusted train tracks, but it’s my city, my sky, and so brown can also be pure darkness.

Three eastbound streetcars are stopped at Cherry and King, and at the sight of the lineup, I feel fully submerged in the city again. My lungs stretch to accommodate the smog, my soul slips into the nightlife. I’m awake to everything—alive to some deeper undercurrent, to the hum of history and fiction under the sidewalks. Toronto is more than home. Here, my senses crack open; I become omniscient.

his is what being a writer feels like: to live in and love a city over which a web of letters hangs. To read what the words say, to inhale and remember them. To be driven by the knowledge that someday my work will be tied to pieces of this city. It will slip into the literature of the place, so that Toronto becomes both half-fiction and better than anything I could ever write.

Emma Russell-Trione is in her second year at the University of Guelph, majoring in English with a double minor in Creative Writing and Theatre Studies. Her short story “Love Songs” was published in Apprentice Writer’s Fall 2022 issue, and was longlisted for the Wilbur & Niso Smith Foundation Author of Tomorrow Contest in 2021. Her work has also been published in Sandpiper Volume V (2021) and Toronto Public Library’s Young Voices magazine (2017). Emma is a member of Geist’s Reading Collective. She is currently working on a queer coming-of-age novel set during the COVID-19 pandemic.