Return to Pearson

On my last trip to the airport, I wanted to die.
I had just said goodbye to my girlfriend at the time—unknowingly, for the last time. A lot of tears were shed, mostly from me. I was waiting for my dad to pick me up, standing alone. I even thought about jumping off the Toronto Pearson parking garage. I remember calculating how high it was, wondering if I would die or just end up horribly disfigured. I figured it wasn’t worth the risk, so I went back into the terminal.

I was reminded of that moment recently, returning to the same airport after coming home from a week in Santa Clara, Cuba. The trip itself was fine—except for the brutal flight back—but walking through Pearson again, for the first time in nine months, was surreal.

After being discharged from the hospital, I avoided even looking at the airport. That’s no easy feat considering that to get anywhere remotely interesting from my house, you have to drive right past it. I feel like a completely different person now—new experiences, new clothes, new losses. And contrary to what Dr. House says about how people never change, maybe they do.

There’s this one hallway that leads to the Uber pickup area. The moment I walked through it, memories hit me like a brick wall. That was her favorite pizza vending machine. And my favorite: This was the exact spot where she first FaceTimed me and I realized—she was actually in Canada.

That memory still gets me. We were so oblivious, in the best way possible, to everything that was about to unfold.