Some nights, my own skull is a dangerous place to linger. Thoughts circle, not like dogs, but like starving wolves, tearing at the raw edges of my memory. Every mistake, a fresh wound. Every misplaced trust, a splinter driven deeper. Every lost chance, a phantom limb aching where something vital used to be. They gnaw until the air grows thin, until breathing itself feels like a betrayal of the silence they demand.
When the pressure builds beyond bearing, there is only the outer dark. Only the walk.
I grab my jacket, hear the click of the lock behind me, and step into the sudden void of Erb Street East.
Cold air strikes my face, less a slap than a sterile blade. It carries the ghost-smell of burnt rubber – the scent of wreckage, arriving only after the damage is immutable. Waterloo has folded into itself, a city collapsing inward. The daytime torrent of faces and voices receded, drawn back behind silent walls. Streets stretch, skeletal under the sparse, weary lights. Emptiness populated only by the stubborn glow and the shadows of equally stubborn souls adrift in the late hour.
The silence is not peace. It is thin ice over black water, humming with a tension that resonates deep in my teeth. Far off, the groaning drag of the goods train, wheels screaming once against the steel track – a brief, metallic cry swallowed by the vast quiet. The city breathes, but it is the shallow, troubled respiration of uneasy sleep.
I pass the Bridgeport Plaza. Police cruisers idle, their presence a low thrum in the stillness. Officers stand in the pooled shadows, words exchanged slow and low, voices worn smooth by hours of witnessing. No urgency, no sirens. Just the quiet hum of endurance, of lives lived too close to the fray, with miles yet to go before morning.
Near King Street, I see a figure wrestles a garbage bin toward the curb. Plastic wheels shriek on the frozen sidewalk, a sound that rips a seam in the cold fabric of the night. His head stays down. Mine too. Two solitudes, acknowledging nothing but the weight we each drag behind us.
A runner flashes past, encased in headphones, a reflective vest briefly igniting under a streetlight. Moving not from the night, but from something unseen, something that chases even when the world is asleep.
Further on, orange vests cluster around the ION tracks. The faint, cold clink of tools – steel striking frozen steel. Nearby, another crew battles a drainage issue, steam rising from their efforts like ephemeral spirits escaping the city’s gut. The city is not dead, merely subdued. It mutters, it shifts, holds its breath between small, persistent heartbeats of unseen labour.
But inside me, the storm rages without pause. A relentless machine, grinding bone and dream into indistinguishable grit.
A whisper escapes me, involuntary: “When I trust, I trust all the way.” The words fall, brittle, shattering unheard on the pavement. A confession swallowed by the indifferent night.
I pass the place where the car overturned months ago. The asphalt still seems stained with the phantom wash of red and blue lights. Cold air bleeds from the memory of blocked lanes, seeping under my jacket, coiling around my ribs. A shiver takes hold, born not of weather, but of resonance.
Left onto Margaret Avenue. The houses here hunch inward, their darkened windows like closed eyes, their posture that of bracing against an invisible, crushing weight.
Inside my skull, the conveyor belt never stops. It carries the wreckage of hope, the shards of broken faith, dragging them round and round, grinding them ever finer. A fear surfaces: that one day, it will grind me down too, leaving nothing but fine, grey dust.
Another left, onto Bridgeport Road, bending into Caroline Street. Old foundation stones crouch by the curb, half-consumed by earth. Dust lifts with my steps, weightless, insidious, like the past attempting resurrection only to collapse back into decay.
Images surface: wagons bogged in mud, horses steaming in frost, the groan of wooden wheels. Abraham Erb built here, the wind seems to sigh. Built on mud and cold and broken ground. Built anyway.
The thought lands like another stone on my heart’s conveyor belt. Build anyway. A command heavy as penance.
Leaves whisper overhead, dry and brittle. Streetlights hum their weary, anemic song. Somewhere, a bin lid rattles. A single dog barks – sharp, desolate – then silence rushes back in.
I try to imagine my doubts falling away, dissolving into the dark grass. But they cling, fused to my skin, to my blood, to the very act of breathing.
The pain is a filter. Like the jaundice patient whose eyes see yellow tinting everything, my own hurt bleeds onto the world, staining the night, the streetlights, even the pale stars with its own sickly colour.
A warmer current of air drifts past, carrying the faintest scent of pine. A memory flickers – the man at the RV lot, planting small trees for unseen animals. Hope, perhaps, smelling of new wood, of beginnings. But tonight, that scent is from another country, behind a door bolted from within.
Could I plant something? Could roots take hold in this internal frost? Maybe. Maybe not. Some seeds lie dormant forever, entombed in barren ground.
Left again. Back onto Erb Street East.
Home looms ahead. Not a beacon, not a comfort. Just a shape against the bruised twilight sky. A familiar structure, suddenly alien.
The burnt smell has dissipated, but the cold has found its way inward, lodging deep in my bones.
I stop at my doorway – a threshold once crossed by laughter, by easy trust. Now, it resembles only a closed mouth, withholding speech, waiting.
“There is still hope,” I whisper again, thinner this time, instantly lost to the wind. Barely audible even to myself.
Still, I touch the thought. A tentative brush of fingers against the idea of it. Like testing a newly set hinge on a doorframe that stands alone, the door itself unbuilt, uncertain. A potential that might solidify, or might simply remain an empty frame.
The wind stirs again, colder now. Sharper. Impatient.
And because stillness feels like suffocation, like being buried alive under the weight of it all, I take another step.
Not from belief. Not from bravery.
But because tonight, movement is the only defiance left. The only thing that still belongs solely to me, this relentless, onward placing of one foot in front of the other, into the unyielding dark.