Through Your Eyes

“I already regret not kissing you at Times Square,” he said as he dropped me off at the front door of my apartment building.

“Yonge & Dundas Square. Very different.” He was from halfway around the world, and sometimes he got confused between North American landmarks.

“Same thing, practically,” he scoffed. “It would have been such a cliché romantic moment – boy confesses love, they make out for several minutes underneath the flashing bright lights of electronic billboards while onlookers cheer them on, thinking, ‘Ah, young love…’”

“Yeah, except it wouldn’t have gone down that way at all,” I laughed.

-

Even though it was getting late and the sun had set hours ago, the world here was still very much alive. Toronto is certainly not the city that never sleeps, except in this one little area, where the lights don’t turn off and the streetcar never stops running and the crazy people never go home. We were about to make a diagonal crossing - walk sign is on for all crossings…walk sign is on for all crossings… (someone once told me that the automated voice sounds like ‘Walk like a dog at all crossings…’ and now I can’t stop hearing it) – when a pamphlet is shoved in my face, nearly giving my nose a paper cut.

“BELIIIIIIEEEEEEVE IN THE LORD,” the old man yells abruptly. I wave him off and we continue on our way. Even though this guy has been there for years, he still startles me a little. There’s something about people screaming in your face that you just never get used to.

“You have no idea how much I wish that I could make this work,” he brings me back to reality – the reason why we’re here at all. “But I’m leaving. There’s nothing I can do about that. It would just end horribly. Just another sad story.”

“I know.”

We arrive in the center of the square and he takes a look around. “It’s so beautiful. Don’t you think?”

I take a look around too. I see piles of garbage, and a lonely, underpaid city worker pushing them around into bigger piles of garbage. I see teenagers completing a drug deal in the shadows behind the stage. I see the homeless people lying on the subway grates, hoping to catch a warm gust of air. I see a place that has seen countless protests and demonstrations and even a shooting that one time. But I don’t want to tell him that. I don’t want to burst his bubble. So I close my eyes for a moment, and when I open then again, I try to see through his eyes instead – new, innocent, and still full of wonder.

I try to remember what it felt like the first time I was here. I would have been in high school, on a date with my first boyfriend. I look up and I marvel at how big everything is compared to my hometown. I remember being picked up and carried down the steps to the subway, right over there, because my feet hurt. And it was romantic, and anything seemed possible. No one was judging us or paying us any attention at all like they did back home. I think about how much my life has changed since then. All because I moved here.

“Yeah, it is,” I say, and in that moment I’m not even lying.

-

“Well, maybe it would have,” I acquiesce and smile. “Moments are what you make of them, and you have a way of making everything special, somehow.”

“Is that why you like me?”

“Yeah, something like that. Even if you didn’t kiss me at ‘Times Square’. Even if you’re leaving. But hey, there’s always a second chance, right? Like right now,” I say as I reach up to kiss him, and despite the fact that we’d just spent an hour discussing why we should not do this, he pulls me in anyway.

We had our first kiss on a cold and windy fall night, with hair blowing in our faces and cars honking all around us, and it shouldn’t have been special, but it was.

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A/N: Well, clearly there are a lot of specific Toronto references in here. T-Dot represent!!! Holla if you get it :P It was for a creative writing class, that's why.