I don’t know why turning twenty is something that is daunting to me. In reality, it’s just like any other birthday — you age one year, you have some cake, and you spend time with the special people in your life. But this one feels different, kind of like how turning 10 felt like such a big deal when we were 9. New decade, double digits, maybe a faster bike or better toys. But 20, for some reason, feels like an even bigger deal than that. While the fact that it marks a new decade is the same, the possibilities of this decade feel different. There are just so many doors, and behind each door, still so many paths that one can take. To make it even more intimidating, the stakes seem higher because we’re talking about big life stuff — finding the person you’re going to marry, landing that…

I have been commuting to work (in Midtown Toronto) for exactly two weeks now, and each and every time I find myself on the TTC subway, the same Ezra Pound poem, titled In a Station of the Metro, comes to mind: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.” I had an English teacher in Grade 12 who pulled up this poem during our poetry unit and she talked about how Pound meant to capture how fleeting the glimpses of the faces in the subway were, as each train rushed by him on the platform. I didn’t understand what the poem meant at the time, but now it is all coming back to me. I now think about it each time I commute. As each train comes roaring into the station, I would watch the faces in each car blur and blend together, to…