Home

I met Adrian when I was twenty three. He was a friend of the boy I'd moved across the country for - a boy I thought I'd marry someday. He was a few years younger than we were, an engineering student living in residence at the university we attended. Tall and tan, he was good looking in that perfect, golden way - all white teeth and easy laugh. He got along with everyone. In my mind I can see the three of us together: a gangly, smart-mouth intellectual, a pale, skinny angry girl, and Hubbell Gardner.

For a while we saw a lot of him - and then less. Then my boyfriend and I broke up and I sank in to a haze of sadness and didn't see anyone.

A while later, after months of voluntary seclusion, I ran into him on the street near my apartment. He was living with some friends a few blocks away. Hi how are you call me we should hang out. I honestly thought that was the end of it. I liked him a lot, but he'd always been my ex's friend - a friend once removed. I couldn't have been more surprised when he showed up at my door one warm afternoon. "Wanna go play frisbee?"

Now you have to understand, I was not a frisbee kind of girl. In those years I avoided the sun completely. I stayed indoors until dark if I could. I was six kinds of miserable, trapped in my own head, at odds with my body. I did not go places or do things. I wore army boots every day, and long, heavy pants in the heat of summer. Standing in the doorway, looking at this shining boy who really thought I'd want to go play in the park, I had absolutely no idea how to respond. I did the only thing I could do: I went.

And it was fantastic.

In the year or two that followed, Adrian did what no one else could do consistently: He got me out of the house. There was something in his tone that held so much potential. I knew that if I let him coax me I would find a reason to laugh out loud and it would save my life.

One February night he called me at three in the morning to say he and his roommates had rented a hot tub and set it up in the back yard. "Get your bathing suit on and get over here, mama. I'll see you in fifteen minutes." How do you refuse an invitation like that? The four of us sat in the hot water with the snow falling around us until ten in the morning. (God, the neighbours must have hated us.) When we both found ourselves living in Toronto, he was the one who organized a mud wrestling party, the one who had everyone over during the Blackout. We sat on the illegal deck he'd build on the roof of his rented warehouse apartment, a happy, disparate group. We barbecued whatever was thawing in the freezer and watched the silent cars drift along the dark highway below. When he started producing country music videos (a random line of work that seems to suit him perfectly) he found a way to put a little money in the pockets of all his friends, hiring us where he could and making life fantastically absurd.

I don't know how to explain him except to say he is filled with light and heat and promise and comfort.

And last night he came over and I wept like a child and asked him to tell me everything was going to be alright, and he promised it would and I believe him.

g.