summer songs, volume 3: the rolling stones.

I'm a fan of the early days in a relationship. Those nerve-racking, gut-wrenching times when you wonder when he's going to call you back, think about him casually putting his hand on your back as you wait in line at the movies, lose ten pounds by sheer virtue of your heart beating ten times faster, always. There's an incredibly exhilerating quality to that uncertainty, especially when your gut tells you that things are heading somewhere wonderful, wanted, and strange. In hindsight, I've come to realize that the best relationships I've been in had protracted, far-reaching early days, courting periods of sincere shyness and endearing reluctance that lasted months.

It was like that with Stefan. We both knew and didn't know where we were heading in those first funny months: walks of shame back and forth between the boys' and girls' residences at Trinity, long nights out getting into trouble on the ledges of the music faculty building with our friends followed by turtle-slow walks back home, holding hands. School finished just a couple of months after we became a couple (because you didn't date back then, not really; you just flirted and became best friends and went out with each other's friends occasionally and then finally stayed up all night this one time and admitted that you really, really liked each other and then suddenly, there you were, boyfriend and girlfriend. Magical thinking is an important cornerstone). This meant the prospect of a summer apart, Stef in Oshawa and me in Hamilton (following my brief sojourn in Moscow, the details of which shall be the lynchpin of my memoirs one day). We left Toronto with an emotional question mark hanging between us. I cried all the way home in my dad's car that last night at St Hilda's, overwhelmed by the year behind me, the summer ahead, the deep-heart knowledge that I was falling in love with this goofy, literary, mix-tape-making guy. It was still too scary and too secret to reveal.

What followed was a summer of counting down Friday afternoon, the kind of summer where you do not give a fuck about anything else but your precious Saturdays. I spent my weeks working at the library and my weekends either hopping on the Go Train to visit Stefan in the 'shwa or borrowing my parents' car to drive to Burlington and pick him up for a couple of days with me in the Hammer. It was the start of what Stef would later term our Go Train Romance. We'd spend our time together getting stoned in movie theatre parking lots and watching summer blockbusters, walking around the Royal Botanical Gardens and feeling soulful, cooking each other dinner, and makin' out, a lot. We'd make each other mix tapes for the rides back and forth. And the whole time, I could just feel it getting serious. I could feel us falling for each other more and more with every visit. He told me later that he'd felt it too, but like me, he just couldn't get the words out. We'd both been burned before, both said things we shouldn't have, both felt the weight of admitting how we really felt and the possibility of complete disaster. But we soldiered on, our weekends getting more intense, our late nights later, our goodbye hugs harder.

One weekend, toward the end of August of 2000, I headed up to Oshawa for that most auspicious of early adult partnering rites: the meeting of the hometown buddies. I suppose I passed with flying colours, partly because I really dig playing mini-putt and shopping for used CDs and making fun of Thin Lizzy. That night at a backyard party Stef loaned me his hoodie and kept his arm around me all night. We went home and fell asleep in each other's arms, and woke up the next morning still perfectly entwined. Granted, there is not much room to move around in a single bed. Not much room at all.

That afternoon he drove me to the train station and we didn't say much. All morning I'd felt the words on the tip of my tongue. I love you, I love you, I love you. I was so scared to say them. I didn't say them, not then. Neither did he. But you could just feel it, some sudden knowledge that our worlds were intertwined, that this back and forth forever along the Go Train Line was leading us somewhere scary and crazy and wonderful.

But that afternoon we didn't say much. We listened to a tape he'd just made me, and as we barreled along the highway, You Can't Always Get What You Want came on. That familiar choral opening, that steady seven-minute build, that anthem of catharsis. As the choir and band crescendoed toward that final drop, Stefan reached over and put is hand on my leg, squeezed my thigh as hard as he could. I placed my hand on top of his so our fingers interlaced. I leaned over and put my head on his shoulder. He leaned back into me. He kept driving, and neither of us said a word. We just let it hang there.



Sometimes you do get what you need.

On that train ride back home I rewound and relistened to that song over and over, eating a plum his mum had given me from her trip to the Farmer's Market that morning. Summer was nearly over. Soon we'd be back in Toronto. Soon there would be a party during frosh week where he would finally spit those words out, and soon I would finally reciprocate, and we would stumble back to his room and fall asleep tangled up in his single bed, where we'd sleep together every night for the next year. Soon, but not yet.