Nine years ago I wrote an essay for The New York Times’ Modern Love about the implosion of my first marriage. I received a firehose of emails. Strangers all over the world sent me their own stories and a couple propositions too. Dozens of well-intentioned people assured me I would find true love again, but all I wanted to do was leave Edmonton.
I wanted to leave because my marriage had ended in the way that many marriages end — slowly at first, then all at once. Suddenly we were standing in the lobby of the court building with fresh divorce papers. I once loved how Edmonton’s hot summer days would sometimes end in a chorus of thunder and lighting. How winter days were an opportunity to watch the falling snow and eat food by the fire with family and friends. The sky was still familiar, but the city stopped feeling like home. The city of champions, the city of abundant parking lots and potholes, the city of broken promises and a failed marriage, only reminded me of endings.
The west coast greeted me with its humid embrace, and I fell in love by the ocean. Céline was everything I needed in a partner: smart, compassionate, fiercely loyal, kind. Sharing life with her was like being born into a fresh world. We got our hands dirty in our first garden, pricked thumbs on blackberry brambles, made love under the evening stars, swam ourselves clean in the nighttime ocean as bioluminescence shot sparks all over our naked bodies. We got married, and I felt like the luckiest goddamned guy on the planet.
But even good things are complicated.
At first I thought I’d pinched a nerve playing basketball. My left leg was doing funny things. Seeing a neurologist in the middle of the pandemic wasn’t easy, and I shrugged the pain away. Then the pain got worse — spasms that felt like grabbing an electric fence on my childhood farm, but stronger and unavoidable. Bladder issues, blurry vision. The doctors eventually found lesions on my brain, lesions on my spine. Under this new reality, Vancouver was simply not a place we could afford to stay. There was much we would miss. The friends whose lives had blended with our own, the cherry blossoms in springtime, sandy beaches in summer, the snow-topped mountains, the Japanese maple leaves.
In Edmonton, you have to look a bit harder for the beauty, but moving back wasn’t as difficult as I thought. My spouse and I were both prairie-born and lived our early years under the shade of birch leaves and trembling aspen. I moved back because I wanted to cut firewood with my dad and make pottery with my mum while I still could. We moved back because we craved time with family and the stability of the familiar. I moved back with a partner who cared for me in ways I had never previously experienced.
Not one of us knows how many days we have left or what tomorrow will look like, so carpe diem. Today we are living a good life — running a small bookstore and cafe in the neighbourhood we love, in the land that raised us, in the city that still has potholes and abundant parking lots, sure, a sad bright city with short summers and long winters, a place where good things still feel possible and the wide-open skies never seem to end.
This is a new series of essays by Edmontonians reflecting on human connection. Pitch your little love story to [email protected].
This article appears in the June 2025 issue of Edify
