Three years ago today, on a partly cloudy Saturday morning, I moved
into a small one bedroom studio apartment in the basement of a
building. My first ever solo-living experience. That morning, I got
up, checked out of my hotel, got into my oversized U-Haul rental, and
drove seven blocks to meet my friend Jeff's then-girlfriend (now wife)
at Jeff's new apartment. When I left Vancouver, I brought his stuff
with me, and in return, she graciously offered to help me move my stuff
into my apartment. We got almost everything into my place before
Etienne and Brent showed up, but we conspired to leave the heavier, more
awkward stuff for the menfolk. Alexis left, the guys duly unloaded the
big stuff, we returned the truck to the U-Haul depot, and headed out
for lunch and beer, on me.
I had no way of knowing on
that day that Etienne had made up his mind to enter into a relationship
with me, and it took another couple of weeks for that to become clear,
but after lunch, instead of going off with Brent, he came back to my
place to help me unpack. It was something of an audition, now that I
think back on it. As he unpacked my stuff, he was watching my life
unfold before him: the books I read, the music I listened to, the movies
I enjoyed, and the keepsakes I kept. I'd hate to think that his
opinion of me rose and declined based on the varied collections he
unpacked; I own the three-volume bound collection of the Letters of
Vincent and Theo Van Gogh, but I also own a paperback book titled Sexual Astrology. Who knows what he thought he was getting into.
Love
it or hate it, three years on from that day, he's accepted that a lot
of strange, silly or bad books, movies, music, etc. has become part of
his landscape.
Three-years-ago Fancy...
...Wish you were here.
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