The sky in Edmonton is slightly darker than the rest of the province. At least it feels that way, as if the sun is always about to lower into the evening. Maybe it's just the fall, but they do call this place "the Gateway to the North," given that it's the last major city before the country finally lives up to its reputation as being an arctic wasteland. It gives the city a North West of England feel. The buildings are both Mancunian and Soviet. The multiculturalism here is staggering. It feels like something I've woken up into, but it has never felt strange. Morning train rides with a bunch of other Chinese and Indian kids do feel like a far cry from Sylvan Lake, though.
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On the train from Century Park to University Station, almost everyone is going to be somebody. Their school sweaters - $60 apiece and still fresh unworn from the bookstore - read proudly of their respective departments: UAlberta Nursing, Criminology, Education, Dentistry, Forestry & Recreation, Business, etc. Tuition hikes have led to rallies in the park, but that worry is buried under 8 minutes of the rising sun, the PA and intercom, the smell of shit, text messages, and the combed hair Stonehenge that has propped up down the railcar. The pastel rainbow colours of our class schedules dot the perpetually packed seats. It's morning. All the coffee is iced. Everyone's Air Force 1 trainers are suspiciously clean. Circuitry has become the social logic.
Music sounds like shit through $7 earbuds. You don't mind enough not to be able to wait however long before you can fix your old pair. You aren't listening to a whole lot of music these days, anyway. The city is enough to be occupied with.
You miss your stop because you occasionally zone out into completely forgetting to have to press the button to open the door to your stop, or that your train goes to south to Century Park, not north to Clareview. You rarely have many places to be after 3:20 p.m. most days, so the extra however long these detours take don't bother you much. Riding the LRT over the ancient secrets of the North Saskatchewan River is neat enough. You think of all the modernist poets you have to read for class when a girl with curious hair, pants, and boots walks on, and all the shit about big ideas fall flat against small stuff like this - the stuff you'll probably die caring about when the rest is said and done. You think a lot about her eyes, which are closed right now, looking down and up between the doors, clearly thinking about getting off soon. You wonder if she thinks you're attractive, if she sees you at all. You're self-conscious about your barrel chest.
The last couple of days, you've been thinking about two friends of yours. They have been hanging out a lot - too much for it to be normal. They walk together all ditzy and slightly starry-eyed, like they're sucking each other into their orbits. It's obvious but not definitive. It's too early to call them anything close to a thing. But after a midnight drive from another city, secondhand stoned in his backseat, you bully him into admitting his feelings. He's just as self-sabotaging as you'd be with them. He's just as unsure as you'd be with them. You counsel him like you never counsel yourself, but he acts just like you would, telling you to "Shut up, bitch!" You're secretly jealous of him, and that he likes this friend. You're secretly very jealous of the two of your closest friends right now, something you only attempt to confess in asking if you were being obnoxious at whatever bar you were just at. You think they're lightyears smarter than you are, their taste more refined, unique, sincere; their moral fiber stronger somehow, and worse yet, they're hotter than you. Your teenage feelings of ugliness have come out like a box you find unopened from an unfinished move. It always sits around. You stay up crying to Daniel Johnston, trying to reassure yourself that you're not unlovable. You're profoundly disturbed by the realization that you genuinely think you're unlovable. You feel like Rowley Jefferson when you're supposed to be 21. You feel boyish, fat, spazzy, and stupid to the effect of cruel. You feel like an idiot sidekick. You notice how other girls look at your friends. You stay up all night thinking about how gross you feel. Sleep has become a pain in the ass. I don't want to keep poetically shitting on myself. I have a whole life to live.
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Fun fact: the Edmonton LRT is busier than the Philadelphia SEPTA.
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Your playlist was a total return to form for the ways things used to be. Plenty of Madisonesque crooners to sell the whole thing into daily rotation: "Let You Break My Heart Again," "True Blue," "We'll Meet Again," "How To Tell A Girl," "Let The Light In" (which I honestly didn't expect to like at all). It hit the same highs "I Think I Like When It Rains" used to in our old summers. That's your playlists at their best: whatever longing feels like when it mimics the effects of nitrous oxide, turning your spirit into a haze as it floats to the ceiling. "Picture," "theres this girl," and "Paul" got here. This feeling is the Platonic ideal of a Madisonesque song: soft, wide, smoky, Midwestern, and sweet, like indie rock lullabies sung in dreams. If you had a band, you'd only put out about three LPs, you'd barely tour, and whenever you would, it would be locked in the Northeast. Those LPs would be eventually lauded as bedroom pop classics, traveling across the Internet like Bibles for the righteous teenage lovesick and tired. Vinyl pressing wouldn't come until much later. You would self-release these records until some netlabel inevitably picked you up, but by that time, you would have thrown in the towel and gotten a real job. Rock writers would call you the Whippet Taylor Swift. Your spacey love songs would be hummed to sleep by many kids just like you.
The only song I didn't like was "Sur la planche 2013." Just didn't do it for me. I enjoyed it being funky, though.
