I very rarely get lonely anymore, but it does happen. In those moments when you’re not expecting it. In the little things. It comes in the moments when I realize that there is no one who knows the small but intimate details of my life, no one there to remind me to make appointments I should have made months ago. No one who will be there automatically without every giving it a second thought.

Loneliness happens when I realize I haven’t experienced a warm and intimate touch in months, and if it weren’t for a fling in Europe, it would be more than a year. The lack of touch means so so much more than simple sex. A hug with both arms that lasts for more than 2 seconds.

Yes, loneliness is when a 15 second hug seems like a truly foreign luxery.

Although just because I am sometimes lonely does not mean I am sad. There’s a purity to it, an awareness of being alone, but necessarily wallowing in it. Being alone certainly has its very good points. For instance, I can:

• Sing as loud as I want to
• Stay up as late as I like
• Sit around in only my underwear
• Leave dishes on the coffee table

Solitude certainly seems to be my natural state these days, with friends moving on to different stages of life and trying on the new locales that come with them, being somebody’s “ex” in the real meaning of the word, even cherised & familiar colleagues are gone. It’s hard, but 30 is approaching and with all these changes life seems to be screaming and flashing a neon “PHASE THREE!!” sign at me. Childhood far behind, the excitement of youth & young adulthood past, but not so far past that I can’t see it on the horizon if I look over my shoulder.

Solid, everyday, worn-in-shoe-comfortable, regular, old Adulthood is mere steps ahead of me. And while she beckons with friendly gestures, and doesn’t capitulate her pace like Youth, I have to say, she dresses drabbily.

“Nothing endures but change.” A truism if ever there was one. I’m not sure if I’m protesting my own changes or everyone elses, and are not the two a cause and effect pair?

For now I can just be glad that this change no longer precipitates an angsty, keening wail, but comes with only a slight, acceptable, ache.

“Summer has come and passed, the innocent can never last. Wake me up when September ends.”

It’s been a very long time since I’ve trained it into Toronto, although I used to do it so often it felt like second nature. I’d forgotten so many things about riding the train. Like the fact that they keep it so bloody cold it’s like riding in a refrigerator car. I’ll have to remember to find a sweater for the way to Montreal.

I’d also forgotten the almost preternatural sense of not-quite-melancholy that the train brings on. I’m not sure why it has that effect, I don’t think it’s just me that it works its grey magic on. Maybe it’s something in the motion of the train itself, seeing the world wizz by, slow in the middle distance, much faster close to the track. You travel just slowly enough to get a hint of the lives and the stories of the towns and cities you pass through.

And the closer to Toronto I get, it’s just – indescribable. And suddenly the soundtrack on my ipod is “Wake me Up When September Ends”, like the thing can read my mind. It feels like the most profound years of my life, my youth were continually punctuated by train trips. That first trip back to Ottawa after being home at thanksgiving. Seeing high school friends at the station (back when flying was too expensive for anyone for that short of a distance), thinking about the girl, the friend, who had written me my first “train letter” and thinking of the one I had written her. First love blooming on separate train cars.

The grin she broke into that first Christmas she met me at Union, running up to me and enveloping me in a hug. The last train trip to my hometown, a place I would rarely return to in the future. The seemingly never ending trips to visit the next girlfriend while she was in school. One train ride through the province to be followed by another through the city.

The eternally familiar feeling of Union station, the smell of the subway tracks, the vendors that seem to be there no matter how many months or years have passed between your last steps there. The announcement guy who tells you “All aboard! En voiture!”

I think if a part of me is in my hometown, and a part of me in that small room in Stanton, another is definitely on a train somewhere between Ottawa and Toronto.

You are my best friend and my father figure,

And now my boss.

One more male role model shot to hell.

I don’t want to disappoint you. You called me “kiddo” today, and I almost cried. I just — I’ve always wanted that.

I’m going to fuck this up.