Lessons about Change I Learned from the Condo across the Street

One

We call it Parking Wars.

The YMCA and its adjacent overflow lot fill up by 5:30 p.m. on weeknights. By 6:00 p.m., cars spill into the intersections, signals blinking and tail lights flashing. Dodge Caravans nearly t-bone Kia Sorentos in competition for the last spots. Hyundai Elantras and Ford F-150s park on the medians. Honda Civics whip around corners, skidding to avoid colliding with Toyota Corollas camping at the ends of aisles.

From twenty-six floors above, we know no spots remain, but they don’t. Irony pairs well with a glass of white Moscato, best enjoyed with your roommate on the balcony on Wednesday nights—or the living room, if it’s cold out. The clock tower at city hall glows blue and purple tonight. A ribbon of red and white threads behind a panorama of glittering buildings, and if you squint you can see air traffic control towers just beyond the highway. A few persistent stars pierce the black sky, but most light lives in bulbs here.

I don’t remember when the sign went up at the corner of the overflow lot, but it was a Wednesday when my roommate sent the picture: “Notice of development. The Daniels Corporation will construct a forty-seven storey residential tower with mixed-use commercial space at ground level.”

We sit low in our patio chairs tonight. Our balcony floor shields the development sign from view. We swirl Moscato around our wine glasses and gripe about it. Fuck. Our view’s gonna be gone. 

My roommate closes one eye and holds a hand at the longitude of the overflow lot. “We will lose the Marilyn Monroe Towers, city hall, and Pearson Airport,” she says.

Honda Civics and Ford Escapes skid and honk below. We watch the planes land.

Two

We discuss at length all the reasons why building a condo in that particular spot is stupid.

This isn’t downtown Toronto. Hell, even parking lots downtown haven’t been developed yet, like that one at the corner of Front and Simcoe. Why does Daniels have to cram condos together here? And did you know Daniels owns the buildings behind the overflow lot? Those residents will lose their views along with their property values. Screwed their own people over.

I learn the building’s name is Wesley and my roommate laughs when I tell her. That’s her brother’s name. We lean back in our patio chairs and clink our glasses. City light swims with the Moscato bubbles and for a moment it all glitters the same.

“Fuck Wesley.” 

We’ll drink to that.

Three

Bulldozers demolishing pavement at six in the morning is loud, but excavators dropping fractured asphalt into dump trucks is even louder. Both of those combined aren’t as loud as the drills that bore into the earth once the dump trucks vacate.

As the volume increases, our complaining decreases. We’ve learned this lesson already. Excavators and dump trucks and drills can’t hear us. Our throats would bleed before they listened anyway. Then one morning, I realized I couldn’t hear the drills at all. A glance out my bedroom window revealed an empty hole. I don’t know when they left.

Four

Wood planks and steel beams prop up the walls of this rectangular pit, all right angles and coppery dirt. The foundation takes the longest. The deeper the foundation, the taller the building. We learned that when the condos next door went up. Maybe we’re destined to live in a perpetual construction zone.

My roommate and I perch on the edge of our balcony chairs and peer into the cubic hole. How deep is it? Fifty metres? A hundred? How do wood and steel resist the force of all the earth that begs to cave in? Sometimes, it seems like the walls might give way and the pit will swallow the city whole. After all, depth is only borrowed time.

She suggests we flood the pit and turn it into a giant swimming pool,a public good, instead of a private inconvenience. I suggest arson. We could make Molotov cocktails out of the empty wine bottles in the closet, hurl them from the balcony and roast marshmallows over the blaze. She reminds me of the night last summer when we pitched eggs off the balcony. We were tipsy and wanted to know if we could hit the street, but they splattered on the roof of the short tower in front of us.

So instead, we speculate about which would swallow us first—the pit or the blaze.

Five

The cranes will arrive any day now. We missed it last time when the condos next door went up. She opened her blinds one morning and there they were—two angular sentinels rooted in the pit.

Cranes are mysterious. They materialize in the night with no light or sound to herald their arrival. They grow with the building, and right when you wonder how they got so impossibly tall, you peer through the concrete skeleton and notice that the bottoms of the cranes disappear about eight floors down. Once the condo soars above you and the window glass creeps all the way up the sides, the cranes will disappear as silently and unceremoniously as they arrived.

We never googled how they do it. We don’t like spoilers.

“But we’ll see it this time,” she declares. “This condo is right outside the front window. It’s impossible to miss.”

The next morning, I peek through the blinds of my bedroom window to find two cranes anchored in the foundation below.

Six

Someone who works in construction assured me that it’ll be another eight months or so before the structure breaks ground level, but once it does, it’ll rise by a floor every week or two. There’s still plenty of time to enjoy the view.

That night, my roommate tells me she got the junior accountant job. It’s for her hometown school board two hours away. She’ll move out in December, just before Christmas. I drink Moscato until the bubbles prickle the insides of my cheeks.

“Good to know the view won’t be gone by the time I leave,” she says. “I get to enjoy it till the end.”

Seven

You never realize how much stuff you own until you have to move it. How do stacks of boxes fill the living room when her stuff fit so neatly into closets and cupboards for nearly five years?

We clear just enough space on the coffee table for two coasters and a chocolate cake from the Whole Foods dessert counter. She pulls the Moscato out of the paper LCBO bag, pours it evenly between our glasses and drops a couple frozen strawberries in each. It’s a special occasion.

We watch some baking show on Netflix and follow it with our favourite Lonely Island songs, the ones we sang as we teetered around the coffee table on nights like these, wrapped in blanket capes, laughing till the bubbles gave us hiccups and then laughing some more. I wonder how many nights we spent like that.

Tonight, our blanket capes lie still across our laps. The Moscato bottle is empty. The songs play out while we get lost somewhere on the horizon. You don’t always remember the first time you do something, but you do remember the last.

Eight

THC taught me that I have synesthesia.

A few deep breaths make the shapes and colours in my head that blink along to music explode into kaleidoscopes. They dance among the city lights beyond my bedroom window. Sometimes, the starless sky is a screen onto which my mind projects stories and shapes and ticker tapes of writing. I didn’t question the universality of that experience until I told a friend that a song sounded like twirling blue pixels and he half-seriously asked if I was having a stroke.

Synesthesia transforms the city into a blanket of stars draped over the land. My blanket cape transforms into a cocoon that keeps me warm during my nightly ascent into this kaleidoscopic realm. I haven’t left my room much lately. Unread messages crowd my phone’s notification bar. I swipe them away one by one as smoke leaves my lips and curls around my head.

From my office chair positioned between my Bose computer speakers, I can’t see the cranes below. They don’t exist here. Nothing does on this ritual escape from my body and the world it’s tethered to. Up here, I forget all of it. Except when I can’t.

Nights like these are numbered. Perhaps the smoke clouds my vision more than the snow settling on the windowsill.

Nine

An incomplete list of things I’ll miss when the condos go up:

1. The planes that take off and land at Pearson Airport.
2. The nightly crawl of rush-hour traffic along the 403.
3. The lights at city hall that change colour every night.
4. The white exhaust that swirls around the vaulted roofs of the twin condos behind the construction.
5. The shorter Marilyn Monroe tower.
6. The fireworks that spring up from distant neighbourhoods on Canada Day.
7. The unobstructed sky.
8. The privacy I had.
9. The comfort of the familiar.

Ten

I have more photos of my view from the last five months than the last five years. My new phone’s camera has four lenses but the images that accumulate in my gallery don’t untie the knots in my chest. Goodbyes show us treasures we can’t replace. Time is a train with no brakes, and we’re all just passengers. Photos are souvenirs collected along the way; they cannot change the route.

Endings are inevitable but I don’t think we’re ever ready. We hold on a little tighter for a little longer. We try to forget. We know we can’t. I can throw all my photos to the rails but they’ll never jam the wheels.

Screaming steel will shred them into a million pieces and throw them into the air to fall like ashes. I’m still a passenger. You are too. Window seats, one-way tickets. Just passing through.

Eleven

One floor takes about ten days to build. The elevator shaft goes up first. Then the HVAC and the rebar. Then concrete pours out of a skinny hose that hangs from a little crane like some kind of disembodied elephant trunk. How do they pump the concrete all the way up from the ground anyway? Last is the ceiling—or floor, depending on your perspective.

Layer by layer, two towers rise from their four-story base. Guess that’s where their rooftop terrace will be, like in my complex. One tower is forward to the left, the other back to the right. They’re not as wide as I thought they’d be. Not as obtrusive. Maybe the loss won’t be as devastating as I anticipated. Or maybe that’s just this new mood stabilizer talking.

Today’s progress looks the same as yesterday’s and the day before. And then I realize I can’t see the base of city hall anymore.

Twelve

The cranes rise with the building like they’re racing to escape before the towers swallow them whole. Their cold, white floodlights cast shadows against my bedroom walls at midnight. Concrete is visible no matter how low I sink into my office chair.

The booms of the crane are level with my window. They’ll be here for about a week. Last time, my roommate and I rushed to the end of the balcony to take videos as they swung past. Even with ten feet of clearance, they looked like they’d collide with us on each approach. She suggested we get a beach ball to throw at the boom as it rotated. Crane baseball: the second-best urban sporting event, only behind Parking Wars.

My phone hides somewhere in my bedsheets tonight. Kaleidoscopes on the starless screen get caught on rebar. Tonight’s dose of lamotrigine waits on my nightstand. The reminder passed an hour ago. The crane booms rotate with the wind—slow and steady, like clock hands counting down, keeping time as the concrete tide chases the sea of lights to the horizon.

Thirteen

A friend who loves dinosaurs crashed on my couch last night.

I ask him how he slept and he says, “Great, until the construction started at like six or seven. I don’t know how you sleep.”

I forgot the construction made noise.

“And Christ, the towers are so much taller than the last time I was here. When did they get so tall?”

I forgot they were tall. Are they tall? How tall were they when she moved out? How tall were they when the mania came and went and the depression swung for my knees? When it forced me to drop out of all my classes again? When I stopped leaving the house? When I started taking lamotrigine? When I built my computer? When I didn’t get the job? When the Raptors won? When the lamotrigine stopped working?

Like fossils encased in layers of sediment, my memories stay buried in the concrete. We spend so long anticipating the future that we forget to live now. Maybe photos hold onto things we’re not ready to bury. But by the time the shutter snaps, it’s just another fossil.

He stands at my living room window taking pictures. I sit on the couch and watch the planes take off at Pearson.

Fourteen

I bought my fifth plant today—a ZZ plant with perfect pairs of elliptical leaves stacked all the way up the stems. I set it on the floor next to my television, beneath the market lights I strung from the bulkhead last month.

I grew up surrounded by plants. I used to accompany my dad to the garden store every spring to pick out lilies and geraniums for the flowerbeds. After Saturday morning pancakes, I followed him from plant to plant with a little blue watering can. Somehow, it took me nearly six years of living in a box made of windows to get plants of my own.

My therapist told me to bring plants into my home a while ago. “Looking at green things releases endorphins,” she told me. “They incentivize structure and routine. It does a person good to care for something.”

“But most of all,” she said, “plants remind us that growth is slow. We don’t see change from day to day, and yet water, sunlight, pruning and patience still turn seeds into flowers.”

An electric burst of manic energy sent me to the garden store a couple of months back. I returned with succulents and umbrella plants and a bag of soil, and I know I shouldn’t buy that palm tree right now but wouldn’t it look nice in the corner? I gambled more credit card debt against the hope that the plants would release enough oxygen to keep me from suffocating once winter arrived or the depression returned. Whichever came first. 

My therapist ends every session by telling me in her delicate Parisian accent to take good loving care of myself. I haven’t done well at that these last few months, but I’m getting better.

The setting sun bounces off the glass of the surrounding buildings and fills my living room with rose gold and clementine. I light the candle on my coffee table and water the succulent next to it. As I sit down on the couch, I notice for the first time that the cranes cast geometric shadows on the buildings behind them.

Sometimes, uncharted territory feels like homecoming.

Fifteen

My friend who loves dinosaurs texts me to ask how many of his plants he should bring when he moves in next month.

“All of them,” I reply. “Can never have too many.”

“Excellent. We’ll turn the living room into a jungle by the time I leave. I’m excited for our four-month sleepover.”

The leaves of my new Dieffenbachia plant rotate with the sun. They droop over the side of the pot if I forget to water them, only to perk up half an hour later once I do. We forget how adaptable we are when we stay still for too long. My ZZ plant next to the television balances the umbrella plant and succulent garden box on the other side where the bench used to be. Books that once hid in my closet fill the shelf beneath the television where she once stacked her board games. Slate coasters replace her silicone floppy disk set. Chevron-printed throw pillows cover the old floral ones.

Last week marked a year since she’s been gone. Feels like yesterday. Feels like a past life. As the evening sky darkens, the crane’s floodlights bring forth a fluorescent sunrise. In that strange cold light, my walls seem to exhale their ghosts all at once.

Change doesn’t hurt, resistance does; all that we hope for lives on the other side of letting go.

Sixteen

One floor is left until that piece of the horizon disappears, but my eyes don’t fixate on the window. They don’t crave to absorb every pinprick of light before the concrete tide swallows them.

My friend who loves dinosaurs stood at the living room window taking pictures before bed tonight.

“To remember it in the morning, when it’s gone,” he explains.

I grieved those lights when the concrete skeleton still hid near the ground. When I couldn’t see the fossil layers stacking up before my window. When I didn’t know how I’d bear it once they did.

Plants grow in all the places they shouldn’t be able to, even in the piles of gravel on the construction site. The fern on my nightstand can survive in the shade, so it thrives even in this overcast winter. We too are resilient. Tonight’s kaleidoscopes dance across my bedroom walls, around my fern, and then out over the infinite sky one last time. I make peace with my new normal at the boundary of the old. I learned to live without it some time ago. I can count the passing minutes without the city hall clock tower. I can watch the planes without knowing where they land.

City light swims in the beads of water that drip down the outside of my window. I think they call it a pathetic fallacy when the sky cries with you. The light and the dark blend into a swirl of shape and colour.

I stop the music. I close my eyes. Through the silence, rain taps on the glass like quiet applause.

“Congratulations,” it says. “You made it.”