February 1–June 30, 2004 — Starting fights

Most of the time I want to leave wherever it is that I am. I can’t seem to live somewhere for more than a few months without wanting to move, if not to a different apartment than to a different city. As early as last summer I had started planning to leave Toronto, and Montreal was at the top of my list of cities I was hoping to move to. I had gone so far as talking to my friend Liam about how hard he thought it would be for me to find a place to live there in the spring and whether I could stay with him and Tracy for a night or two if I needed to look for an apartment.

And then things changed, and a lot of it began with E        : We had started to see each other in September, and I had decided then that were our relationship to work out, I would stay in Toronto at least through the next summer. If not, I would move in the spring, when Amy went back to Goderich for the summer.

We were still seeing each other in December when Matt visited from Ottawa and decided to move to Toronto in January. He, Andrew and I talked about working full-time on Doublenaut, the design company we’d been halfheartedly trying to get off the ground since 2001. We decided to do it.

By the end of December, E         and I were no longer seeing each other. I didn’t really feel I’d been trapped in Toronto, though. I knew if I really felt I had to leave the city, I could; my blood wasn’t on any contracts, and I didn’t think any friendships would be destroyed if I backed out before we’d so much as registered Doublenaut as a business. Still, I wonder if I would have committed to staying in Toronto for the foreseeable future if I hadn’t believed at the time that I would still be with E         six months or a year later.

But decisions were made and business names were registered. Andrew gave notice to his employer, and we were all working full-time on Doublenaut projects by the beginning of March.

It was very difficult for the first few months. None of us was making very much money, and working from home was not as productive as we would have liked. We made sure we met once or twice a week to talk about which projects we were working on, but it sometimes felt like we were succeeding more in learning to live off of credit and borrowed time than we were in starting a new business.

The turning point, I think, came in June. It was becoming increasingly difficult for any of us to work from home, and we were beginning to take on more projects than we could handle with weekly meetings alone. So we started to look for an office.

And somehow it only took one phone call and no references. Andrew signed the lease — 13 months, beginning on July 1, 2004, and ending on July 30, 2005 — and we began shopping for furniture.

It really felt like it was going to work from then on, from the moment the lease was signed and we knew we wouldn’t be working out of our bedrooms forever. And now I will have 13 months: 13 months to establish a business worth staying in Toronto for. Or to find a person worth staying in Toronto for. Or maybe even both.

And I’m glad I didn’t leave. Montreal will still be there in a year or two, and I think now I have a better chance to figure things out from here.

But for all of this, there is little to be proud of. If not for the constant postponement of the end of my relationship with E        , I would likely have left Toronto, too worried and too much a coward to risk failing with so many friends and family members looking on.

Nonetheless, I understand that sometimes these things can work themselves out in the end. It’s just strange to think that I might have E         to thank.