Sonny Smith - "Wolf Like Howls from the Bathhouse (South East Land Otter Champs)"

We're tiptoeing into the glowing edges of my favourite season now, the one where everything really starts to overlap. Past and present, day and evening, sound of rushing water through someone's open kitchen window, chorus of dogs freaking out at a nearby siren, drifts of laughter floating down from everyone's second-floor decks and settling around you as you're walking to the store. Sometimes the best way to remind yourself of the smallness of you is to go climb a mountain or stand in a very still, complicated forest. But sometimes all it takes is ten minutes of true city, the close-together-ness.

Once the night air climbs up above room temperature, Toronto starts to shake off its stiffness and be once more a place everyone uses the same way they use their houses, like to live in. A couple nights ago I was very hungover and also pretty sad so I decided to go for a walk and see if the world outside my brain had anything to offer. I'm not gonna lie: I was not hopeful. It was a full moon and everyone was going fucking crazy. A raccoon waved hello to me as he pawed through my neighbours' recycling, not breaking eye contact as he chomped into the side of an aluminum can. A group of kids drifted across the sidewalk like one of those banners pulled behind planes on a clear day, graceful and unurried and waving in the wind, but also they were all screaming very unkind things at each other. The counterpoint of everything was almost too much for me. Every couple I passed was arguing about something very serious but also kind of new: you could feel that these were exciting, sexy, charged-up early-summer worries sprouting from the wreck of winter's worn-out ones.

It got darker and I was still walking. I was tired and I wanted to go home but I also did not want to leave without discovering some kind of magic. And then I saw something, just as I was about to turn back around, at the mouth of a sidestreet I would not have otherwise looked down. It looked so beautiful and strange and confusing against the bruised sky of almost-late-night that it made me feel as though my veins were filled with glitter.

I can't tell you what it was. Or, I guess, I am not going to tell you what it was, because you would not believe me: it would seem too convenient, too wonderfully strange, too much of a device. But it was there, and as I stood there all frozen and marvelling, suddenly completely alone, breeze and streetlights and distant car-sounds and soft light thrown from people's uncurtained living rooms, I felt not for the first time in recent memory a strong awareness of the fact that my life is shot through with a level of wonder that far outpaces and exceeds what I might necessarily deserve. This song was playing in my headphones.

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