On a perfectly clear night, the plane took off at dusk and flew over the city towards the north shore, straight overtop the lodge at Cypress Mountain. A cluster of gold at the base of a bowl, one liftline and then two, and the skychair to the peak. And the line for a new chair that Justin had cut, lugging a chainsaw up the mountain to clear a new face of trails. We went up there one new years’ eve on snowmobiles, armed with food and beer, and slept mummified in down after stomping a clearing for tent-igloos. The next morning we skied down that new liftline, straight down a narrow strip of untracked north shore snow, heavy and wet.

There wasn’t a single day I lived in Vancouver and didn’t feel invigorated by something. By the conversations in boardrooms, by the constant push that contrasted with being one of a few mascots welcomed inside the sanctum of the patrol hut. By kelp forests undulating beneath my kayak, giant waving palms that stroked my hull with jeweled fingertips.

I stared at my past from a thousand feet up, gazing through the window at those lights with my chin in my hand, unsure of what I felt. Was it a sadness, a wanting to live there again? I paused, searched, concluded. I’m too sensible. Vancouver doesn’t add up to who we are now. Or, rather, we don’t add up to it.

It’s a ghost, that whole place, and I walk through it as the only living thing. Every vision I see is an imprint of our unhindered selves, of eleven years of fulfilling modest, spontaneous wants without much in the way of obstacles. An old truck, a basement apartment, sprayskirts drying in the backyard.

It makes me smile, what we had. What we have. For what is now a Friday night in a place that allows for dead houses and dreams, rooted by familiar boots, our children steeped in salt.

We are every place we’ve been.

Can you believe that was us?

Yes, I can.