“What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-bye. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it.”

—Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye

I have moved.

Monday was my last full day in Montreal. I rode the 80 Parc bus through an ice storm one last time and taught my final classes at McGill. Tuesday I watched movers carry all of my worldly goods onto a truck, ate one last St-Viateur bagel, and bid farewell to the city where I lived for nearly nine years—just shy of a third of my life. And last night I slept for the first time in my new apartment in Toronto.

How does one “feel some kind a good-bye,” as Holden Caulfield put it? Even if it is possible to know you’re leaving a place when you leave it, how long does it take before you truly understand the meaning of everything you’ve left behind?

**

A friend of mine recently proposed that maybe “Montreal” is “a time of life” more than it is a city. “Maybe we all have a Montreal phase,” he suggested. I think there’s something in this.

My Montreal phase began in September, 2009, when I started a Master’s program at McGill. One of the first significant things that I did when I arrived was to read, voraciously, two short story collections and two novels by the (wonderful!) Newfoundland writer Lisa Moore. In one story, “Mouths, Open,” Moore’s narrator explains that in order to “capture likeness,” the seventeenth-century Italian sculptor Bernini “suggests drawing the face just as it is about to speak, or after it has just spoken. That’s when the face is most characteristic of itself,” she says: “We are most ourselves when we are changing.”

I feel as though I have spent much of my Montreal phase open-mouthed, inhaling—just about to speak.

**

Two days before my MA program began, on the last Sunday in August, 2009, I was in Penticton, BC, doing an Ironman. It took me fourteen hours and forty minutes to complete. The next day, I flew to Montreal, with a stopover in Edmonton. I was reading Leah McLaren’s The Continuity Girl. I arrived late at night and joined my old friend and new roommate in our big, empty Plateau apartment. The next morning, we walked together to McGill. (That walk, which I have done hundreds of times since then, seemed interminable on that sunny September day.) I had some extra time, and I spent it surreptitiously tailing people with Tim Hortons cups in an effort to trace them to their source; my jetlagged, post-Ironman body was sleepy and starving and numb with first-day-of-school jitters. When I arrived, early, in the third-floor classroom where my Canadian Modernism course was to convene, I found two people already there. When they introduced themselves as PhD students, the floor fell out of my stomach. I hadn’t realized that Master’s and PhD students took classes together. And then, when the professor came in and told us that his name was to be pronounced “as an iamb not a trochee” (a what?), my stomach, already floorless, evaporated like a cartoon thought bubble.

And so I began life in Montreal in a state of mind-numbing exhaustion and towering fear. Happily, both dissipated as I settled. Nine years on, I am pleased to say that I now know what a “trochee” is (my name is a trochee). The professor with the iambic surname became my supervisor. And although I still find PhD students a little scary at times (being one for five years did little to alleviate that), the two I met in the classroom that morning became good friends.

**

How have I changed since I moved to Montreal? I have better clothes, I can drink coffee without sugar, I can appreciate a gin and tonic, I am less able to stay up all night, and I watch fewer MTV reality shows. What else?

When I moved to Montreal, Barack Obama had only recently come into office. iPhones were considered a novelty. Instagram didn’t exist. My cats, now decidedly middle-aged, had not yet been born. Aside from ten months in Switzerland, I had barely lived away from home.

How have I changed since I moved to Montreal? Maybe, on a considerably smaller scale, as much as the world has. I have become more myself.

**

I never quite felt at home in Montreal, and perhaps one of the reasons is that I’m just not cool enough for Canada’s coolest city.

Apparently before I moved, my uncle told my father that he hoped I would “not just stay at home but get out and take advantage of the city.” By this, I think they meant St-Laurent at 3am. I felt indignant.

One night I was on St-Laurent at 3am, fighting my way home through a blizzard. Taxis trolled serenely through the untouched snow like fishing boats in calm water. It was one of those muffled, swirly February nights that leave the world looking brittle and tired the next morning. I was walking with a friend—a significantly cooler, more fun friend—and we were chatting about coursepacks—those spiral-bound, exorbitantly priced selections of miscellaneous class readings that professors assign and students must purchase (and then dispose of; though I have kept all mine: sorry, movers). I can’t recall how we alighted on this topic while walking up St-Laurent in the middle of the night in a blizzard. But there it was: we were discussing coursepacks, when suddenly out of the darkness a snowplow, one of those golf cart-sized sidewalk plows, was hurtling towards us, engine labouring, lights blazing. If you have lived in Montreal, you know this hazard well: sidewalk snowplows travel at breakneck speeds and stop for no one. The drivers seem to have made a collective decision to ignore approaching pedestrians as though we are of no more consequence than a few rogue snowflakes. We leapt out of its path, mid-discussion, and it rumbled by like an affronted old woman in a grocery aisle.

“Oh God,” said my cooler friend, “if we had died discussing coursepacks.”

We laughed. But I was alarmed—not at our brush with death, but at the fact that here, living out the quintessence of “Montreal fun,” I had somehow (I felt responsible) sunk the conversation to the most boring and bookish depths imaginable. My friend was laughing at the irony in this, the unexpected coincidence. I was disconcerted by the predictability of it.

I have moved or changed schools just often enough in my life to know that even new surroundings do not allow for total self-reinvention. I have lugged my lack of coolness around with me like an unattractive but necessary carry-on bag for my whole life, and even in Montreal I didn’t manage to forget it under the table in a bar one night.

Don’t count me out, though. I am always game for any city’s equivalent of St-Laurent at 3am. And I had lots of fun in Montreal. I just occasionally found myself discussing coursepacks while I did it.

**

The other day I went for a farewell run around Mount Royal. It is an 11km round trip from my apartment, up through Outremont and the cemetery, around the summit by the cross, past the lookout, and back down towards the Plateau. It was an uncertain sort of day, filled with a dramatic grey sky and the rich, springy smell of wet earth after rain.

Partly due to lack of fitness and partly due to pre-emptive nostalgia, I stopped for a short break at the lookout. Fondness for the city and a bold poetic mood overtook me. Leaning over the parapet like Holden at the edge of his field of rye, I tried to “feel some kind of a good-bye.” Good-bye, I whispered audibly to the sumac bushes immediately below. Good-bye, I whispered again to the river in the distance. And then, having caught the attention of a pair of tourists loitering uncertainly nearby, I transformed the word into an exaggerated cough and continued on my way.

Possibly, although I am nearly twice his age, Holden Caulfield and I were trying to say good-bye to the same thing.

**

There is much I will miss about Montreal. The proximity of warm bagels and the mountain. The quality and price of bread and cheese in nearly every grocery store. The McGill campus at sunset during the first week of September (such hope in the air, all that beer and innocence!). Grey stones and spiral staircases. The slightly annoying and yet lovable CBC “Daybreak” personalities, whose voices accompanied my morning routine every day for nine years. Most of all, how walkable everything is; I could get nearly everywhere I wanted to go on foot, and I will mourn the loss of this freedom in sprawling Toronto.

There is also much I will not miss. Passengers staring with unabashed unkindness in the bus or metro; drivers filling a moment’s hesitation in traffic with a honk. The litter and general dirtiness of the streets. The poorly cleared sidewalks, which are covered with slickly packed snow or large lake-like puddles for at least half the year. Managing the electric heating in my badly insulated apartment. Parking rules that read like Faulknerian sentences. The awkwardness of not ever really knowing what language I should speak, accented French or just plain English; regretting my decision either way; especially feeling guilty for speaking English, wondering whether I’ll be judged or whether I’m troubling a salesperson or server… Although I love and probably took for granted the presence of French in my everyday life, this tiny drama saturated every encounter for me, and I often wondered if it was possible to be truly comfortable with the odd dynamic unless you were born in Quebec.

I wonder how this forecast sense of loss will morph and spread, as time sweeps me onward?

**

Above all, Montreal has been the city of my student-hood. For better or worse, McGill was the centre of my universe there, geographically and emotionally. I spent at least a day or two on campus every week that I was in town. I nursed a magnificent obsession with the oatmeal-banana muffins from the student-run snack stand in the Leacock Building. I shivered in the over-air-conditioned library. I have a favourite bathroom stall in at least four buildings. I grumbled at institutional injustices and strove for the approval of professors and students alike. I experienced epiphanies, and in between, wasted reams of time. Phases in my Montreal life are inextricably linked to phases in my scholarly life, years and months and seasons characterized by what I was reading or writing or trying to read and write.

But by the end, I felt no more space in Montreal for personal growth. My closest friends have all moved on, and are scattered now literally from coast to coast. I felt cramped and stifled in the city, despite all its quirky energy and charm. I had nothing more to say there. My McGill bubble had burst; my Montreal phase had come to an end. It was time for me to go.

**

I have never been great with uncertainty. My impulse when I feel it starting to pool at my ankles is usually to build a life raft of plans, answers, solutions; this is why I was so good at school, where all I had to do was follow the instructions and—thanks to a healthy dose of instinctive diligence and a dash of innate talent—someone would praise and appreciate me. “Real life,” as they say, doesn’t work that way. For the first time, I don’t know in any concrete way what will be next. I have not moved to Toronto “for” anything, except forward progress. The possibilities are endless, and yet at the same time none of them feels within my reach.

But I have moved to a city for which I feel profound affection, where I have old and new friends whose worlds I am eager to explore: these things count for something—or maybe, after all, they count for everything. And I am certain, at the very least, that I have something to offer, to that place and to those people, and to others, and that I will find ways to fill my heart and my time.

And so, armed with questions, chasing courage, I say good-bye, and move on.