I was 24 when I first fell in love with Taylor Swift. I was living as a “grown up” for the first time, sharing a two bedroom apartment in Toronto with Tiffany, who I’d met when we were both shy Seventh Graders, and been friends with for exactly half of my life at that point. I’d been working in “the city”, for a year or so, and doing a crazy commute from my dad’s place in Port Perry, and it was finally time to make the leap. I’d been planning to get a place by myself, but then Tiffany was moving back from Ottawa to take a job at a radio station in Toronto, and all the stars aligned.
We met at Union Station one rainy night in May of 2008, and took the subway north to check out places at Yonge and Eglinton. A good friend of mine from university lived in that neighborhood with her boyfriend, so I knew the area somewhat, riding the subway north from my job downtown to take a 6pm Pilates class and sleep on Paulina’s couch every Thursday night. Each Friday morning as I made my way downtown from her place, I imagined what it would be like to simply wake up in the city and join the throngs of people, well dressed and seemingly important, on their way into work.
The rain slapped against the darkened windows of the subway car as we came above ground between Bloor and Rosedale stations, and I reflexively reached into my coat pocket and pulled out my pale pink flip phone to see if the red light on the front was flashing to indicate the guy I’d been casually dating for a few months had called. He hadn’t.
We went back underground coming into Summerhill station. Did I think of Jamie then? That cute guy from university who lived right across the street from the station? Probably. We’d seen each other once or twice since graduation and there was always a spark there, though I considered him firmly off limits. The doors dinged open and held for a moment, giving their melodic three count warning as they closed again. The train screeched and groaned its way past St Clair and through Davisville station, a place haunted for me by my university boyfriend’s apartment close by, and that ugly year we spent trying to keep things together long after they had fallen apart.
Finally, after buying cheap umbrellas from a vendor in the concourse, Tiffany and I emerged up the escalator at Yonge and Eglinton. Did we stop to get street meat from the vendor out front with the steaming grill? Two sausages, both with extra hot peppers? Probably. We would do that many nights in this era of grown up living, just as we would declare it was “Wine Wednesday” or “Tequila Tuesday”, after one of us had had a hard day, and sit on our little wrought iron balcony smoking countless cigarettes (though I’d officially quit years ago) and narrating the inner monologues of all of the neighbourhood dogs walking by on their prim little leashes.
It was a happy time in many ways, but also a confused one. What did I want to DO with my life? Who was I meant to become, and was I becoming her? Or was I already falling behind in the race I could feel taking shape around me? Would I ever find someone? Or was I doomed to forever be attracted to guys I could never actually be myself with? I’d been in two longterm relationships so far, both extremely unhealthy in their own specific ways, but the common thread, as I saw it, was that there was one thing about me that guys cared about, and it wasn’t my personality.
There were two buildings we’d looked up in advance and were planning to check out, so we headed north from the subway station in the dark. I can see us now, huddled together in the slanting rain, laughing until we cried when a gust of wind blew my umbrella inside out at the exact moment I’d confessed to Tiffany the “impure thoughts” I’d been having about a certain celebrity. In my memory, it’s just after the inside out umbrella moment that we’re walking up the sidewalk on the east side of Redpath Avenue and we see it. A cute little low rise apartment building on our right, at the corner of Redpath and Erskine. It hadn’t been on our list, but there it was, and as we rounded the corner we saw a little sign on the front lawn saying they had a 2 bedroom unit for rent. We looked at each other, wide-eyed and giddy, probably squeezing each other’s hands as we shared the sense of “this could be it!”
We buzzed the number for the property manager and had our first encounter with Grant. We had no way of knowing then quite how kooky he would be, or how loud the karaoke sessions he and his wife would have in the unit just below and to the side of ours, him stumbling around drunk in his cowboy hat on the lawn, so out of place in a neighborhood my parents’ friends still referred to as “Yonge and Eligible”.
I don’t remember seeing the unit for the first time that night, nor how we decided I would be the one to get the bigger bedroom with the two closets. I will always see it as it was the day I moved in, weeks after Tiffany and her boyfriend had painted the walls a cheerful orange and set up the old floral couch in the living room, and the print of Audrey Hepburn in the nook beside the kitchen. How many nights we spent on that old couch, half watching something on tv, like those old episodes of 90210 we got really into for a while, but mostly talking and laughing and making fun of ourselves and each other in the way that only works if you really really love the other person, no matter what.
One of those nights Tiffany told me about a young country singer she had gotten the chance to meet through her work at the radio station. I remember her showing me the album cover, all wild blond curls and piercing blue eyes, and thinking god she’s beautiful. “She was SO nice”, Tiffany was saying. “Just incredibly sweet and shy”. So this girl writes all her own songs, is impossibly beautiful, and is also just a lovely human being? I almost didn’t want to believe it. Surely she must be secretly awful, right? There’s just no way she’s actually as perfect as she pretends to be…