October 23, 2019

I'm sitting at Espresso Junction in The Johnston Terminal, at The Forks. I've been coming to this coffee shop since I was 18, when my boyfriend Peter took me here on a date.

I'd never had a London Fog before, and he ordered one for me and told me "they're the best in the city" and I still agree. 

After that I started coming here whenever I had time in-between jobs, or when I had a long wait to catch the 18 bus home to the suburbs. I've started, finished, and cried over lots of books here.

Boys, too, back in the days when relationships were volatile and immature.

I didn't come back here for a really long time because of something bad that happened

or rather, started, here

but enough time has passed that the wound I used to feel has become softer and less raw, to the point where it almost feels like a scar on someone else's body.

Memories that belong to a person who feels like a dream.

Coming here feels like looking through a yearbook, back through years of coffees and London Fogs, layered and blended over the years.

Winnipeg, through the virtue of being a Big Small Town, is full of these spaces.

Places you visited when you were a different version of yourself, that come to mean mean complicated and layered things just by the virtue of existing or staying in business long enough. 

Places that look, sound, and smell the same; that are familiar in a way that almost feels like it's in your bones,

because maybe in some small way it is.