The bus terminal in Newmarket is tiny, and on a day that had turned grey, gusty and unexpectedly cold, nobody seemed very happy.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A man who looked to be in his late 60\u2019s, but was probably younger, sat with a woman. His face was leathery, dark and worn, but he boasted a full head of hair that had likely not changed since 1958. The woman beside him was wearing a jean jacket and was completely bent over in her seat, her colourless hair spilling down past her knees.\u00a0 Gently, quietly, this man rubbed her back. I imagined some sort of sickness or grief descending on their lives, and now on a crappy day they had to travel somewhere they did not want to be, a place where lives change forever and then quietly begin to fall apart.<\/p>\n
Outside by the line-up for the bus sat a clutch of about a half-dozen teens. Too young to really know what it meant, they were dressed for trouble. Posturing, they were dead-eyed gangsters peeling free of school. Listless and bored, they were looking for something to do, for something to change. A girl, probably about 17, had tattoos directly under her chin that led all the way down her throat. She was pale and coughing, like her three-year old son who careened nearby, and she was excitedly telling her friends about a place she knew in Toronto.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s fucking awesome. On Queen Street. You can get a tattoo on one side of the place and then go get completely wasted on the other side. It\u2019s all over Facebook!\u201d<\/p>\n