I just woke up from a dream in which: 1) A flying shellfish with real human teeth clamped on to my hand and could only be detached by smashing it gruesomely against a wall several times, 2) a childhood friend who died a few years ago showed up to a social function and I had to ask him if he had really died, to which he replied, “yes,” and 3) a group of Lovecraftian monsters made of 80s prosthetics raided a house I was in, self-exploding in order to eradicate another group of Lovecraftian monsters who were the result of experimental breeding between the first monsters and humans.
This dream covered, as far as I can estimate, three of the four different types of eerie and creepy and scary that can exist in a dream, all one after another in quick succession. That’s quite impressive! The middle part was perhaps not creepy or scary at all, but only bittersweet, as my childhood friend and I were able to reminisce about the past in a way that we likely never would have if he was alive (we hadn’t spoken in a long time). However, it was certainly off-putting that he seemed so carefree about being dead, and that he didn’t feel the need to offer an explanation as to how he was also alive.
I transition now from this dream to another dream, or perhaps more accurately, to an alternate reality. As I write this, there are nine days until I abandon this apartment and begin an extended journey toward my new town, the Town Where I Am Going to Live: Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. As you read this, however, the count will only be three days. I’ve written before about how I don’t think travel is real, and I don’t think goodbyes are real. I can’t write anything about missing Vancouver, because I don’t miss it yet. I’m still here. As long as I am in this apartment, it is where I live and where I will always live.
Last month, my wife and I paid a visit to Saskatoon. It was our first time there. A lot of people have been surprised by the fact that we are moving to a city we had never been to. To my mind, that’s the only way to do it. By the timeF we visited, we were already committed: my wife had quit her job and accepted the position at her new one; we had hired movers; and we had given notice to our landlord. Nothing we saw about Saskatoon could make us change our mind. In fact, we were heavily disposed to find things to like about Saskatoon. Our friends kept telling us that we had arrived during the ugliest time of year, when the snow starts to melt and re-freeze each day and night, leaving the sidewalks covered in ice and the street-sides covered in mush. But we liked it anyway. It was something new.
More than anything, Saskatoon reminded me of the town I grew up in, about 40 minutes outside of Vancouver. It was like they made a whole city out of that town. There were cars on the streets — but not many. There were people on the sidewalks — but not many. Immediately upon leaving the city proper, there were large empty fields. We saw a horse. We drove on a road that didn’t show up on the car’s GPS. We turned from that on to a gravel road. This was not five minutes from our new apartment.
(I’d like to get out of the way here two things that I did not like about Saskatoon: 1) the trees are too small, and 2) it’s very windy.)
When we tell people in Vancouver that we are moving to Saskatoon, we are most often met with incredulity. Of particular note is when it somehow inevitably comes up that there is no IKEA in the city. In point of fact, there’s no IKEA in the whole province. Let me tell you something: there are only 7 IKEAs in all of Canada. Two of them are in Vancouver, within half an hour from each other. That’s an abnormal concentration of IKEAs.
The IKEA situation is representative of a larger phenomenon. Many people would write something here like, “People from Vancouver simply can’t imagine there being other parts of Canada.” This is true, but belies the greater point. You hear similar tropes about other large coastal metropolises such as LA, San Francisco, and New York City. There also exists an inverse trope about people who have never left their small nowhere town, but think it the greatest place on Earth. By combining all this data, we can make a general claim that casts no aspersions on any specific party: “People find it hard to imagine living in a place that isn’t the place where they live.”
Sometimes this lack of imagination expresses itself in derision or shock — “How can people live in a place like that??” I’ll tell you what: people live in Yakutsk, where the average annual temperature is -8C. December, January, and February have average temperatures of less than -30. That’s quite cold! And yet people there are able to have a pretty good time. They wear big coats.
People live all over the place! People live in places you’ve never even heard of.
I also find it hard to imagine living in Saskatoon. The reason is because I’ve never done it. However, I have now been there. And being there was remarkably odd, because I was both there and not.
Being on holiday somewhere is quite different from living there. I’ve written previously about my time in Mito, Japan, where I was both on holiday and also living there. Visiting Saskatoon was similar, because we were, for all intents and purposes, on holiday: we were living out of suitcases, we were driving a rental car, and most importantly, we didn’t really have anything to do. However, we were there for the express purpose of finding an apartment and learning about the area, because of the fact that we were going to be living there quite soon.
It did feel like entering an alternate reality. One version of ourselves still lived in Vancouver, while we were creating a new version of ourselves that will live in Saskatoon. Instead of mountains, towering trees, and skyscrapers, there was a lot of sky. Instead of rain and clouds, there was constant sunlight.
There didn’t seem to be any connection between the world we had left and the world we were in. Nothing had moved with us. It was as if we had been implanted in an alien ecosystem.
During our visit, we stayed at a friend’s house. My wife went to university with her. They’re going to work together at my wife’s new job, along with another friend who we didn’t get to see as much because two days into our trip, she had a baby. I didn’t see the baby; in fact, I can’t remember the last time I ever saw a baby. However, I didn’t need to see the baby to understand that we had entered a very different world from where we had left.
I’m twenty-eight years old. (Believe it or not, I’m no longer twenty-seven, etc.) I know several other twenty-eight year-olds, and even some people older than that. None of those people are anywhere near having a baby. We don’t talk about having babies. One of my friends talks about buying a house, but he makes ten million dollars a year and only eats ham sandwiches on white bread. Vancouver is just not the kind of place where you buy houses and have kids at 28 years old. Or at least, not among the company I keep.
These two friends in Saskatoon, both of whom are, I believe, basically the same age as me, own houses. They either just had a kid or are planning to have a kid within the year. This is redundant to say, but they have mortgages. They buy furniture from real furniture stores (remember, Saskatoon doesn’t have an IKEA.) These are all neither good nor bad things; they are, however, things that my parents have/do. They are things my parents have had/done for as long as I’ve known them. I kept thinking the whole time: I am hanging out with people who have things my parents have always had, and are doing things my parents have always done.
Up until now, I have been living the life that my parents lived before me or any of my siblings existed. We live, we get by, and we save some money here or there. We go on dates, and we hang out with our friends. We’re far from irresponsible, but we’re responsible only to ourselves, and only to our present moment. We’re just recovering from the age where you assume you’re going to die young simply because you can’t imagine anything else.
The weird part, of course, is not that this new phase of our lives is approaching. That’s bound to happen. Maybe it’s a little delayed here in Vancouver because of the dire straits every young person is experiencing RE: money and housing, but it is still bound to happen. If we had stayed, our friends, siblings, and cousins would’ve started getting married and having kids1, even if the housing dream might never have materialized. All this would have started happening somewhat gradually and then probably all at once, and it all would’ve fit pacing-wise into the narrative of our life so far.
What it feels like right now is that we are jumping ship from this Vancouver-pace and landing feet-first a few years in the future, among people I don’t know particularly well who are involved in an entirely different phase of their lives, and who expect us to keep up. The friend we were staying with kept trying to teach us about mortgages. It doesn’t matter that I already know about mortgages; I certainly don’t talk to anyone here about mortgages. What would be the point? Houses in Vancouver aren’t real. They’re entirely theoretical. If you own one, you’re either stupid rich, or conversely, you have no money anymore.
And children! Children! I can’t remember the last time I interacted with a child. They’re funny little creatures that run around on TV. I certainly don’t know any. There’s not a single child in this whole city who might recognize me.
I’ve written lately on this website about the impending feeling that I will soon have to start a “real life,” but never has that life felt so imminent as when I was in Saskatoon for those five days. All anyone talked about were houses, kids, settling down. I’m not necessarily afraid of any of those things. I dare say I like the idea of all those things. But only hypothetically… only as a distant dream… maybe in a book…
And then we flew home, and it was all gone. As quickly as it had appeared, it had disappeared behind us. Back to the day-to-day existence: going to work, writing essays, working on the novel. Reading books and watching competitive Starcraft. Gradually, the packing starts to begin. We buy boxes. We start putting stuff in them. We sell a few things. We take down a bookshelf or two. My “study” is now just a desk and a chair. All of this preparation, but none of it feels yet like a goodbye — it’s just something to do.
There’s no transition period between one life and another. There’s just one, and then there’s the other. Ten years ago, I drove from the house I had lived in my entire life to another house, and then I lived in that new house. Eight years ago, I got on a plane and I was in Japan. Five months later, I got on another plane, and I was back in Canada. A few years after that, I got in a car and drove to half a basement. A year later, I drove to another basement. A year after that, I drove to this apartment.
In nine days, I’ll drive somewhere, then drive from there to somewhere else, then from there to somewhere else, and then from there to Saskatoon.2 And then I’ll live in Saskatoon.
Related Essays:
- The End of a Coastal Man
- A Retreat to the Customs Office
- Irreconcilable Distances, Permeable Boundaries, Overlapping Memories
- My wife’s cousins are almost all married, and many of them have kids, but that’s primarily due to a cultural difference. And also, I’ve never met most of them, so their situations don’t make much of an impact on my life. ↩︎
- Perhaps I’ll end up writing about this trip, but more likely is that I’ll start writing about this trip and then accidentally end up write about something else. ↩︎
Balckwell Rising! 
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