Four years ago, I drove out to the Ikea in Nepean to meet my best friend for a shameful post-holiday shopping trip. It was something we did fairly often, usually under some kind of influence. This time, though, we were stone-cold sober, the dim twinkle of parenthood in Freya's eye growing brighter by the day.. "I don't want to chance it," she told me. "Fair enough!" I replied gamely, having no idea, not really. Later that night after an embarrassing spree of Billy shelving and cheap bed linens we went back to her house for dinner. Dinner involved a lot of wine, at least for me and Greg and Greg's friend Tom. It was one of those nights when one things leads to another, one of those nights you try to dismiss the next morning, with limited success. A few days later, Freya called me to tell me she was pregnant, that her weekend of sobriety had not been in vain. I screamed into the phone and then asked her for Tom's number. It was January in Ottawa, and I was spending a lot of my time skating up and down the canal, trying to embrace the cold, embrace the wind, embrace the silence.
Three years ago, my favourite thing about my job was that I could usually sneak out early on Friday afternoons to drive out to Tom's place, two long and lonely hours from my Glebe hideaway. I'd just come back to Ottawa after two weeks in Hamilton at my parents' place for Christmas, and Ottawa felt less like the right place for me than ever. On New Year's Day when I'd told my brother I needed to change something, he said "So, then, make your move." He might be younger, but he's often wiser.
Instead of making a wise move myself, I made the same move girls in love always make, and spent that January running away from our nation's capital every blessed weekend, over and over again. I came back from the lake every Sunday (or sometimes Monday, as I perfected the delicate art of calling in sick) with my tail between my legs. No, that's not quite it, I kept thinking to myself. That's not quite what I meant to do.
Two years ago, Tom picked me up from work at the library in Kingston on a snowy Tuesday night. We drove to the Montreal airport (he adamantly refused to fly out of Pearson, even though all of our flights stopped over in Toronto anyway, adding an hour to our travel time; stubbornness can be endearing in a certain light) and took off for the Oaxaca Coast in Mexico the next morning. Our flight itinerary was an incomprehensible milk-run that involved a three-hour stopover at the Mexico City Airport, where we sat in the Mexican equivalent of a TGIFridays and drank bottle after bottle of Corona. When we finally got to Huatulco and wrestled our way into a sketchy taxi into town, I rolled down the window of the car and breathed in the warm, ocean-dampened air.
"I love the air here," Tom said. "It smells like bonfires and garbage and trouble." He was right, in the best possible way. We spent the next two weeks on deserted beaches and half-empty bars, eating avocadoes by the fistful, feeling like extras in a low-budget surf movie. It was the coziest January I've ever experienced.
One year ago, I was rattling around my Kingston apartment. Tom and I had broken up before Christmas in an epic split worthy of a teen novel, and I was homesick for my family, newly truly on my own. Sometime around the first of the year, I did 108 rounds of Sun Salutations. My teacher talked about creating new energy for a new year, and I thought long and hard about just what I was going to do with all the crazy heat zinging around my body. The next day, I got an email from the library in Hamilton inviting me back for a second interview and I broke down in tears. It didn't seem right to go back yet, even though it didn't seem right to stay put either. "I don't know what I'm doing," I told my mother on the phone. "Sure you do," she replied. I drove back to Hamilton a few days later, called in sick to make it to my interview (again, a fine and careful art). After four hours of questions, answers, and Powerpoint insanity, my dad and brother picked me up, and we went skating at the Dundas Driving Park. That night as I drove back up to Kingston, I watched the thermometer on my dashboard as the temperature dropped, slowly and surely, the further I got from Hamilton. Well, I thought, that can't be a good sign.
I moved home a few weeks later.
So, here we are, then.
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