This was my elementary school. The Catholic institution I attended during the first few years of moving here. Where I used to offer best-friend status for a mouthful of Big League Chew. Old, familiar four-square courts are still painted on, unmoved. The T-ball poles are rusted out and missing their tethers. Countless feet jumping, running, skipping during recess have caused the pavement to warp and crack. Even the old portables are anything but, their familiar beige tones still inhabiting the back of the school, built out of concrete and plastic foam when the town was budding, and the classrooms couldn’t handle all the students. Walking up the wooden stairs, I bet they even have the same groaning creaks.

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On days like this, it’s better to wear light clothing, and throw on a hooded windbreaker. The rain outside is just a drizzle, so it’s comfortably cool. Pay no attention to the hydraulic hiss of the windshield wipers, or you won’t be able to help hearing them through the quiet parts of every song. Window seats are prime. There are fewer distractions from people walking down the aisle.

The 95 goes from one end of the city to the other, straight through the heart of Ottawa. Every stop is a memory. Old haunts. Past lives.

Here was your first apartment. Sometimes you’d find Christie waiting for you here on the benches between classes. How long ago those days seem, how immature and relatively innocent. The next two stops are on the edge of the university campus, four years of scattered truancy. Two stops later is where you use to buy a medium caramel corretto every morning after an exhausting night with Louise. Your old government office is another two on. The concrete building looks so foreign now, and you wonder if the same people are still inside. Another few stops is your last apartment, before buying the house, the end of bus rides home every day.

Music never meant so much.

You pass by construction sites, finished buildings, see the evolution of the city.

Six years of experience, six years of shifting, ever-changing anima.

Six years passed.

Six years lived.

Six years grown.

Her unwitting nickname in high school was Fudd (as in Elmer), because her “r”s came out as babyish “w”s.

This was partially due to the fact that she would imitate her older brother in admiration during childhood, after he developed his own impediment from an orofacial sports injury. The other, and much more severe, aspect of her impediment was a random and sudden inability to speak. No stutter, no slur.

As her speech therapist explained, it was a short-circuit in the brain, causing her to believe that a sentence was finished when she was only half-way through saying it. The only problem was that she would get stuck on a word. On good days she simply couldn’t repeat it, on bad days she couldn’t speak at all. Most people thought it was brought on by a rather traumatic series of events brought on by her supposed friends in high school. The wascals.

I always found it endearing, but she never cared for it. One of the tricks she used to get by was to take her time in saying a word. E-nun-ci-ate. It was like massaging the tension from a muscle, and slowly, she would be able to speak again. Another trick was to imagine being in a comfort zone, which was her room, to relax when she was flustered.

I’ve always found that girls share some intrinsic bond with their rooms. It’s almost as if they’re following an evolutionary nesting instinct, and their rooms become their homes. A place to grow and be safe. Along with the carefully lined-up books and the random pieces of jewellery, the hidden cache of photos and the purposefully placed candles (some of which must never be lit), are the characteristic quirks.

In time, Christie’s comfort zone became the walk-in-closet of my room. She was old enough to make love, but simultaneously too young to stay overnight, so we would spend most of our time in there, the place where we could reach out and feel the walls around us, confined to the intimacy of the enclosure. We spread out the blanket, lit the candles, and closed the door.

After a while, the humidity would build up, and this was no more apparent than in the winter when we would crack open the door and tangibly feel the chill on our skin. Opening the sun she called it, as the daylight sharply spilled on the blanket that covered us. It was the only place where we could shut out the world, the only place that felt like night.

In a relationship, sharing the night is more important than sharing fluids. Falling asleep with someone is an acceptance of trust, a way of saying that we’re comfortable enough to drift into our subconscious minds. Perhaps it was the unavailability of such a ritual that’s given the night so much significance.

Having no night of our own, we had to make due. I covered one side of a cardboard panel with glow-in-the-dark stars and suspended it from the top of the room. The panel was large enough to fill the vision, and in the darkness the closet became a microcosm of the starry sky. Even in the middle of day it was near blackness, and we’d lose track of time, huddled under the blankets with her sleeping at my chest, or lying there face-to-face, talking while I ran my fingers through her hair. Sometimes, all we would do was get together and nap.

And eventually, Christie didn’t have much trouble speaking anymore.

For most of my life, I felt like I was young for my age.

I remember the later years of elementary school. I would be the one wearing things like jogging pants on the civies¹ days. The other kids would be smoking under the bridge, starting playground fights over girls, contracting gonorrhea through sexual contact. Even in high school I was eating lunch on the bleachers with John while others were ODing on rat poison, winning worldwide math competitions, or being featured on cover articles of Macleans.

I had never really understood how people grow up. Most adults I know have been the way they are for their entire lives. Due to the fact that I can only figure out the changes I’ve made in six month cycles, I’ve mostly grown in small, undetectable increments.

It’s only in the last six months that things have changed. I’ve reached my (previously life-long) goal, not gradually, but rather suddenly and unexpectedly. Interestingly enough, this was due to three different factors, and I suspect that I wouldn’t have been able to reach this point without every single one of them.

Now I feel old for my age.

The Trinary Maturity Series

1. Introduction
2. The Job
3. The Girlfriend
4. The House
5. (In)Conclusion

1. Days where we didn’t have to wear uniforms, a short form of “civilian” [↑]

Today, I got to pick the restaurant. I chose one that’s always bustling on the weekends, even when there isn’t a wedding reception being hosted, named after the Yangtze River in China. There was a mixture of language in the air, due to the fact that I was surrounded by large Chinese families, catching up on each others lives, and young Caucasian couples, on their Friday night dates. The families were all familiar. I could relate to every young boy in them, trying to finish his deep fried crab claw balls while concentrating on the game in his GameBoy. The couples…

I thought about the time we walked around those long, sterile aisles that only you could take me to. There were small plants of basil next to a miscellaneous food item sample stand, and it was my first time smelling the aroma of a live stalk. What a drastic difference it was from the basil I bought in a container, or labelled as “FRESH” when they were ripped from the roots before transportation.

“For some reason, I feel like steak”.

Someone from another couple overheard and couldn’t help laughing.

“I know exactly what you mean”, the man jovially said.

We looked for a steakhouse afterward. On the highway, I asked for a suggestion. Your knowledge of the local restaurants was always wider than mine. I gave reasons against your first two proposals, and you refused to continue, frustrated. I thought about the time we tried to find a game we could both get into, and you rejected the first eight. How difficult it was to not kick that Gamecube into the wall, and yet I didn’t say a word, something I could only control because of how much I still cared at that point. I put my foot down to make a decision (much better than the alternative), and we set off for a teppanyaki steakhouse.

It was a place that I saved for celebrations. We were seated alone at a table usually reserved for eight, along with a lone performer, twirling his knife and flipping his flipper. A celebration of us we agreed.

And I decided that those couples around me weren’t so unfamiliar either.