“IIX”
Such orbits we spin around ourselves, some adrift and fleeting, while others circle so close they threaten to eclipse the very light in our lives. I’ve tasted both: the gravity of relationships where I have stayed distant from love, while sometimes suffocating life in my neediness. Me and she; we have been in orbit together for decades and regardless of the space between we have always navigated to the light of the other.
Twenty years, two decades I was away chasing my passion to play a role in the industry of music, and grooming a lifestyle in a place where the weather more suited my clothes – Vancouver. When I returned to Calgary, a compelling reason was to be by her side as she braced for a second war with cancer.
We were both pups when our mothers brought us from separate corners of the globe to a playpen insulated against the outside world. Church, that’s where we met. For many years the pews was home. It’s where we grew up alongside a smattering of local kids connected by blood or by common heritage. Our connection was less obvious.
She’s an only child who grew up in a tiny town under the care of a deeply religious mother. The DNA of her life circumstance was the same shape as my own, though at our tender age of eleven and twelve the similarities were beyond our notice. Far more enjoyable activities brought us close.
I remember many lost hours spent on Greyhound busses as I joined her on summer pilgrimages back to her family farm. More hours were spent on dusty back roads travelling to all points of northern Saskatchewan becoming acquainted with her family tree. In short time this became my own pilgrimage, and her family also mine.
She was never my girlfriend, though she was my fist kiss; we never dated yet I finish her sentences at every pause; we never spoke of together, yet life has been unable to separate our caring for each other. We never entered into the magic realm of being “in love” though mutual friends accuse us of being the most unmarried married couple alive. We once considered ourselves brother and sister, we matured to best friends and now a new title is being forged, one with pomp and ceremony, and witnesses.
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