When I was little my family would go to the country on holiday weekends. We would escape from the city. All of us would settle into the old car, which was hardly ever used. My sister and brother would fight for the window seats. Only from there would you get a really good look at the cows meandering along the sides of the road. At least that is what Everett wanted to look at. He was always envious of the cows because someone had told him that they had two stomachs. He assumed this meant that if he was like a cow he could reserve one for all of the worthy stuff, cakes, candy, and icecream. Then mom’s argument that he was going to spoil his dinner would never hold up. But being the youngest and the smallest all the years that we took those trips he never got that seat. I wanted it to watch the horses. I always hoped to see them run across all that open space that they claimed. They never did. They were always contented to lazily graze across their fields. I suppose they always knew that they had the option to run, the space, and because of that knowledge they didn’t need to exercise their right. But my hope never waned and they always did when I closed my eyes. How would that feel? I tired to imagine, all that grass and wind.

    The trips to and from the country where always the highlights of the holidays of me. Transitioning between worlds, how magnificent an ability. The perfect place to house fantasies and dreams.

    On the way back into the city everything always looked so different. And everyone had changed, because they too had escaped and returned altered. The chaos and honking that had existed as we had exited on Friday was now replaced with lazy navigation of the streets and an air of nestling away. This was always most apparent as we would pass through Chinatown, close to home now. The entire city seems to have decided to ignore the rules and it changed. Chinatown normally the busiest, most chaotic neightbourhood had come to a standstill. As all reentered the city they turned the street into a parking lot in order to make accessing takeout dinner easier. The entire street was double parked leaving just enough room for one car at a time to squeeze by down the middle. It always amazed me that everyone seemed to have the same idea. And with it on those Sunday or Monday nights the rules of the world shifted, if only for a few hours, in order to accommodate our desires of a lovely dinner of convenience. Such a romantic thing. Now older, a different world, yet still on Sunday night I walk through Chinatown making my way home. But now there are no cars to be seen and many of the shops have closed leaving everything is less noticeably lit up by the signs adorning the street. It is not the Sunday that I used to be so anxious for. Yet it has a different type of romance to it. A different transitional power. One in which by tilting my vision and experience I can flip between then and now. A parking lot of a crazy street and a lone woman making her way through a memory home.