[kool maudit]

I was derailing the downtowns thread and thought better of it. But what was your Canadian city for you, in that moment?

I came to Montreal in 1996. I remember my dad driving me over the Cartier bridge, exiting onto Ontario Street. I knew from that moment that everything I saw, was what I always wanted. It was the new baseline for life.

Mordecai Richler has a passage in Barney's Version where, after many years in London, he returns to Montreal and sees Ste-Catherine. What once seemed the world's crossroads now appeared as a seedy, provincial thoroughfare. And I had Ontario... but what a thing it was, all those shoddily-painted old commercial buildings with their turrets and follies. It was noir in its way, everything I wanted to be a part of.

Not even fifteen years later I was grinding my teeth in the dawn, coin de la Visitation, reading Heather O'Neill and fending off an old transsexual who looked like Fred Flintstone doing Lucille Ball.

But you can't make it all about the easy ironies. In between the highs and lows is daily life, the friends you had who you met every day at the Egyptian guy's restaurant on St-Viateur and St-Urbain, those $5 lunches. You had your balcony on Jeanne-Mance, or that room with the view of the Aldred building, and all those visions of what making it in that town might mean.

I left in 2012. I always thought I'd come back, but it seems unlikely now. There are so many cities, so many countries. But even though you might add dawn in Karakoy to your suite of seen wonders, even if you thought that you caught a bit of that old Plateau feeling on a warm May afternoon in Vesterbro, these are other people's lives.

Now I am in a rented Airbnb cabin on an island near Trosa, Sweden, and thinking about how I used to draw the brickwork above Montreal windows in my 2003 sketchbook because of course I had that. Where I once rode early-morning Greyhounds to visit my cousin from Luceville in Spanish Harlem, where he was trying to become an actor, I now think of the lovely balconies of Sodermalm and ask, "and then what?".

The impressions that these places make on us are fragile and fleeting. As they once came by simple observation, they must one day be actively conjured.

It was hot that day on Bernard and Esplanade, reading The Red And The Black because Bell hadn't come for the wifi yet. If I got excessive, the former Hong Kong model would sell me wine at 3 a.m. from her flower shop. To this day, every model of urban completion looks something like that, a half-ratty overlay on an expanse of perfect houses set in rows.

I had a vision that I went to great efforts to make permanent, and it was of Montreal. Others had theirs in Vancouver, or Toronto, or Calgary. I am now in Stockholm and there is no vision left, only real estate. These things happen.

This is the thread in which we can discuss the cities of our dream-worlds, and how they sometimes kind of haphazardly aligned with places that actually existed, and still do.

Even if you're not there.