I've spoken of my love before. Possibly the only thing I've loved in the non-filial sense of the word. Toronto. Not a single person, not particular thing. Just this great, moving, pulsing city. Where dreams are born, where they die and where another can resurrect them and make them into something beautiful. A place of hope and despair. Of great joy and tragic sadness. Love it or hate it; live it or suffer it.
Whatever it is about this city that I love, I cannot say precisely. It's many things. It inspires me and, like a drug, injects me with intense passion. My desire for it never ends. It changes shape and, like the city, pulses through me. It's a vital part of me. What makes me who I am. I haven't been here long, and yet, my life before Toronto seems to sink deeper into the fog of my mind every day.
I think perhaps it's just something about the city in general. Maybe not even Toronto specifically. Its this idea of the "big city" that grips every thought that goes through my mind and every word that slips out onto paper. Out of the hundreds of stories I've tried to focus into writing, not a single one has taken place in a small town. Yes, it seems as though, in my imagination, a population no less than a million will do. Of course, I've mused over big cities in almost every timeframe a "big city" could exist in. At the moment, for example, I'm haunted by the dream of a great metropolis in the genre of Steampunk. Grey, clouded skies, industrial sounds filling the air. Enormous steam-powered flying machines gliding high above. Everything draped in bronze and the smell of hot metal.
The image may change and morph, but the premise is always the same: Big city with a million possible stories to tell.
These images also seem to affect my artwork as well. As the stories I write change, so does the artwork that carries with it so much of my absent minded time.
Sometimes I feel like a character, lost in that big city in my mind.
Oddly enough, it's those times that I feel happiest.
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