Notes from Toronto

These two stones are the two of us, he said.
This one is you and this one is me.

I spent the weekend in Toronto. Of all the cities I've lived in or traveled to, it's the one where I've felt most at home.

Perhaps it was foreordained, then, that I would feel at home in his arms as well.

We went to an Indian classical music concert, and found a moment of dance amid the packed crowd; that is, we both found ourselves tapping softly with our fingers against the other. His was the heightened additive rhythms of the tala, an arrhythmia against my heart, and mine breathed the quavers and semi-quavers of a childhood spent on the opposite side of the world.

Later, we went in search of books -- and between us, amassed about fifteen. We gulped hungrily at the pages in the corner of a filthy Second Cup, admiring various translations of Neruda.

We stared at swirling shades of blue first in a museum and then at the water's edge, as the evening stretched endlessly and the sun, behind us, obliged by holding up until we became too hungry to sit anymore and went in search of food.

And, laughing, we invented couplets:

"You should try to learn how to cook rasam."
"Yes; that would be totally awesome."

(Note from the editor: she doesn't usually write about her personal life outside of its intersection with the artistic, but... everything about this interaction was art, in its own way.)