HWY sketches: You feel like someplace else

We spoke at length about our sense of places, the way building's facades tell stories about their days, how urban form provides structure or erodes it-
My feelings sprawled over your landscape in an untidy mess, an uninspired mimicry of rurality- cul de sacs and winding lanes- cheap nostalgia for good simple living and dirty calloused hands, two things you've never had.
Staying smart in the city, focused and sharp in all you do (right.) lay out our lives like a colonial town turned metropolis
grids,numbers, streets
Avenues! Boulevards!
(roundabouts to make me dizzy)
Your roadmap is too worn to read the street names clearly

It's like Vancouver, I guess
You're beautiful and lush and alive
But I hate your fucking yoga pants and the way everything's so far apart
And long car rides
And taking the bus
You know I get motion sickness and sometimes just want to lie still, eyes closed, while I wait for it to pass
But that's not how it works, I have to look out the window and watch another block of detached homes with shitty basement apartments go by
And I get claustrophobic just thinking about the low ceilings which helps nothing.

I was staring at a ceiling here at home in Montreal,
Thinking about the 2x4s that hold it up,
The decades old mould growing under the tiles of my best friends's bathroom
About climbing onto the roof to make out with someboy in the early evening darkness of mid November- it seems like years ago
I was thinking about the way the roof of my old apartment building sloped to the center (and how hot it got on the ground floor in January when the radiators were turned up so high that I slept by my open window)
The crooked floors of my 3rd floor kitchen and the basil plant on the balcony I never could keep alive
And at the end of it all I felt your body, rigid like a steel beam holding far more than it's own weight,
I'm feeling more like decorative wood paneling
Or yellowing wallpaper

HWY sketches: it's not the trip, it's the destination

It's not the destination, it's the journey i thought.
Freeways are monotonous, endless things, all asphalt and white paint, concrete overpasses and worn out rest stops. Playlists of 90s pop for road trips we used to promise we'd take play on and you sit still and silent with too little leg room in a late model sub compact rental car with nothing to do but watch farmland and forests and small towns pass by. Blurs in the fog and the distance.
Airports are cold and sterile even as they thrum and hum and buzz with the movements of people and machinery, activate removed from you as you sit, immersed in the NYTimes crossword or a book of sudoku, craving a cigarette to keep your hands busy, and order a bland sandwich to be washed down with a glass of house red.
The plane itself is no better or worse, really. the air is just as cool but now stale from recirculation, the mechanics of the vehicle and the many strangers are closer, nearly touching you, the plane humming lifelessly, your neighbors uncomfortably close.
Take off is a flash of sensation, a brief moment of feeling that is really just a change in pressure, a bit of vertigo when you look out the window.
Trains are nice in theory, there's some romance to the gentle, steady forward movement and the unfamiliar landscapes that roll by but really who takes the fucking train anyways.
No, there's no pleasure to be had in the voyage and no destination really worth getting to is there. Plane, train, highway,all the same stillness-going somewhere and trying not to move your limbs

On going places, or not really

Complacency and stagnation are just the names I call comfort and home's a dirty word too, I think, a place to be fled once it starts to feel too real, too real like this city is.
Whether running from comfort is a courageous act, a challenge, a way of extracting the best in me or a case of my own half assed pop psychology getting the best of me is what I can't quite figure out.
Vancouver, you're different but familiar. Cooler, not montreal's warm embrace but then again I did sometimes say was suffocating in that city's sticky heat. The trees here are greener-like they've been that way for so long without interruption that they've forgotten what it's like to be cold and fall apart from changes in the seasons. the air is cleaner too, or I'm just noticing the absence of Portuguese barbecue's distinctive nose from my surroundings. I walked the city-once, twice- and no one ever felt I was familiar and so I never felt compressed