I said previously that we generally prefer to carry value with us rather than leaving it behind in places we can no longer access. I meant this in reference to places we rent and live in, but I got to thinking about what this could mean in places like old schools where we’re maybe more inclined to try leaving a mark. These are settings where we know future cohorts will pass through, trying to interpret the traces of vernacular history they find.

Some of my fondest memories of my high school, Etobicoke School of the Arts, relate to the utility tunnels under the school. (If a current student happens to be reading this, there is a trapdoor in the courtyard-side art studio, in the corner of the exterior wall and the wall with the chalkboard. Another entrance is in the drama department costume room.)

Ten years on the whole thing seems fake when I think back to it. It was so free yet constrained in a way that encourages the fun kind of conspiratorial thought and behaviour. Even at the time I didn’t quite believe the tunnels were real until I was down the ladder.

When there was no one watching the art studio during lunch hour or spare periods, we’d pop the trapdoor and go explore, trying to map out which part of the building we were under. Figuring out what was going on (but not who was behind it), the school’s janitors ramped up efforts to secure the entrance. I watched them across the room chuckling about our persistence as they replaced the lock we’d managed to cut within days of installation. Lockpicking was less conspicuous, so we spent our time fiddling with padlocks, pen clips, and bits of bent wire in the back of class and on the subway to become proficient.

There was a sort of shrine way in the depths that wasn’t accessible from the main tunnels, requiring traversal of a low crawlspace. I don’t even remember the specific offerings that were piled there, but it had clearly been constructed across generations of students. (Annie’s friends Yolsun and Paris, a year or two older, showed us this spot: we borrowed roller boards from the gym supply closet to get across.)

Anything left there became an artefact adding to a mythology. I want to say there was a papier-mâché animal head that was part of a 90s senior prank. I must have left something there too but I don’t remember. Yolsun had given me a roll of the little stickers he used for tagging so I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d come up with something to draw on those. If anyone finds whatever’s there, it has probably accrued more meaning now than it had to me at the time.

Annie and Yolsun have both passed away. Thinking back to that extended summer, I feel like my close group of friends was together with Annie for practically the whole time between her marriage to Jack up to the night before she succumbed to her illness, and through the aftermath. I have the photos on my hard drive to look back at and check the timeline against my memories, and everyone else who was around is thankfully still out there.

Yolsun I didn’t know nearly as well, and I found out just now that he died a year after Annie. I had been trying to find him on social media. He had already gone on to university and to work in restaurants and had an entirely separate group of friends in mourning. The last time I saw him was at an exhibition in the old Lever Brothers factory, a hulk I’d drive by with my parents every time we headed home on the highway when I was a kid. The encounter was totally unexpected and it really was cool to talk with him for a while. I heard the factory had been recently demolished, and I was so disoriented by how absolutely little was left at the site when I went by on the eastbound train the other day.

It’s always hard being back after a relatively long time away and noticing new gaps in the landscape. You can’t keep track of everything shutting down and disappearing, gradually or suddenly, so you don’t even know which voids are new and which just stand out more this time for some reason. When most of your experience of the city is through memory, it can be hard to branch out beyond the places you know from before, so it feels like things are shrinking.

A lot of people in Toronto want to revert whatever land they can get their hands on to the ugliest stages of the colonization process. Depopulated and spoiled, made featureless so whatever gets slapped together there doesn’t have to suffer comparison to the presence of memory. I was born here but I left, and I’m not even really from here ancestrally, so I don’t know how much of a right I have to object to these changes.

It’s hard enough seeing the sprawl smother new countryside every year when I drive up north, but seeing sites of modernity destroyed is somehow the worst. Maybe this reflects my identification with only the relatively recent history of this city and country, or maybe it’s just an affinity for a lost stylistic-political cause. I haven’t been to the Ontario Place site since its obliteration by bulldozer one night earlier this year. I think often about how the thick, fragrant atmosphere of the rainforest room in Raymond Moriyama’s Science Centre must have evaporated with no one allowed in to operate its life support system. These are just things I heard about and didn’t want to see for myself.