Last evening, coming in alone from dinner with my former McGill flat mate, her husband and two other university friends from those days long past, I poured myself a small whisky and sat on the balcony in the dark. It was just warm enough. Other than the hum of the large air-conditioning unit belonging to a business just down the street, all was quiet. The other apartments were dark, the strange neighbouring cats who often come to visit, were absent.

I stared at the outline of the massive maple tree, its leaves and branches silhouetted against the sky, and thought about that naïve, bolshie yet somewhat lost young woman that I was when I last lived in Montreal in the 1980s. It’s as if I keep bumping into her around my old haunts: in The Word, a used bookstore that still exists in the ‘student ghetto’, along the edge of the mountain which she had to cross through wind and blinding snow to her second year apartment, sitting on the steps of McGill’s Art Building which lay at the heart of the campus. She felt insecure yet masked that with a false bravado, and lacked direction, not realising that wasn’t an uncommon feeling.

I wish I could go back in time, to give that young girl a hug, to tell her that she was loved and that things would work out if she would just explore what it was to be herself. But I can’t. And perhaps if I could, I wouldn’t yet. I’m not ready, as I don’t believe that I have really made my peace with that past persona. This is an aspect of self-reflection, all part of my untethered year, that is difficult to manage – the regrets that bang on my mind’s door in the middle of the night. Maybe that’s the reason that I ended up in Montreal; to look more gently on who I was then, to put that piece of my past to bed. Because if truth be told, all her decisions – the good, the bad, the foolish – made me who I am today. And even with my questions, my foibles, my uncertainty as to what comes next, I do like and enjoy the person that I am now.