how we met
a story about friendship, chance encounters, and serendipity
Me and Karlie are sitting on the couch next to each other. It’s 9:50 on a Saturday night, and we are both recovering from the tiniest Al-entines induced hangover. I think my midnight lasagna was the only thing that saved me, because I didn’t feel like the worst possible version of myself today. I actually put on my contact lenses, instead of hobbling around in my glasses in a hangxiety spiral, which, tbh, I am very proud of.
Do you want to know how me and Karlie met? Because we’re kind of dying to tell you. It’s actually one of my favourite friendship stories, because it involves our favourite muses.
Let’s travel back to October of 2021.
Do you remember part of the story I told in we are breathless, but we love the days? I had just met up with OFM to tell him that I wanted to move to Italy, and he took this as reason #2817 of why we wouldn’t work out that year. And I remember this conversation taking place on the couch at the King Eddy.
“Well. Now you don’t know where you want to live.”
Two nights after that night (which followed the same script: I miss you, I still think about you, I still <3 you, let’s hook up even though we both know how this will end) I found myself in the back of an Uber, shedding a few tears, on my way to meet my best friend - about to debrief our annual OFM encounter.
The problem was/is - I knew these were all excuses. We could lie to ourselves and to each other, and list out the logistical reasons as to why we would never be together. Relocation, out of a relationship, bad timing, disastrous timing. But regardless of what we were telling and trying to convince ourselves - it was hard to ignore the feelings. The chemistry, the immediate grab of each other’s hands from across the table, no matter how long it had been. The feelings that started all the way back in 2017, and the feelings that never left either of us.
My mind and my heart were always battling it out, and that’s how and why I found myself in tears that night. I wanted to move to Rome. I wanted nothing more than to escape Toronto, to try something new. To be in a place where I could feel the most myself, the least misunderstood, and the most free. But there was a part of me that hated that I wanted to leave. And there was also a part of me that hated that he didn’t try to convince me to stay.
Anyways, as I sat in the back of the Uber, dabbing away tiny tears (nothing has changed) and doing my usual IG explore page scroll, the following words in black and white jumped out at me.
“If we love in a language, you love through pretty words and quick glances; direct eye contact and second chances. You can be a muse not a lover, and still be right for each other.”
I immediately added these words to an IG carousel. A mirror selfie, an empty bar, and a photograph of shot glasses. Caption: “a weekend.”
She understands. I remember thinking to myself. I didn’t know who this stranger was, but I knew one thing - she understands.
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To love someone who cannot love themselves is a kind of hell I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. These words that led me to a beautiful, transcontinental friendship were written in defeat–and a reluctant (yet admirable!) effort to convince myself that just because our love didn’t look like others doesn’t mean it wasn’t love (this logic did not hold up, but it was a beautiful fantasy while it lasted) Your love doesn’t have to look like the movies, but it does have to be real. It has to exist. It has to be certain.
The truth is, that some people were simply not born to be lovers, no matter how hard you try to make them and only have the mental capacity to be a muse. Naturally, this changes the way they love others–and what they think love is. If only they could see themselves the way we see them. Because as lovely as those pretty words and quick glances are in the moment, they are not sustainable to create a life. And isn’t that what we are all looking for: to build a life of people we love?
“The right words will come to you at the right time,” Emily says to me as we are discussing the chances that she happened to be on Instagram at the time my post showed up on her explore page. Whether we ever would have met had I not posted those words, had she not experienced the heartbreak she did that led her to connect with those words.
When you have experienced loss in the way we have, witnessing this kind of serendipity and momentary harmony is not only what makes life so beautiful, but also what makes life bearable. It’s why I must see meaning in the mundane: to see the charms my mom orders from Etsy that happen to come with a letter C (my late sister’s first initial), a cross, and a heart that she didn’t order as a sign, never an accident. The two separate occasions that my brother found roses in the ocean while he was surfing in California.
Her sitting next to me while we type poems for strangers–an idea we dreamed of late one night that manifested into reality—is evidence of the magic of connection. A friendship born from the choice to write through our deep pain and feel the feelings we didn’t know what to do with instead of sinking into them; the mutual heartbreak we both felt after falling in love with potential and leaving an empty vacancy that no one ever filled.
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Emily is writing a poem for a stranger as I type her words on the typewriter. Most of these poems wrote themselves–as if the words knew they were always going to end up here; as if they fell into her lap and just appeared.
She has the entirety of the poem written except for the last line when she asks me if I have any ideas. I read the poem out loud–repeating it over and over again until I think of something that fits. I am on the fifth repeat and finding no luck when she says “I feel like Jack Antonoff and Taylor Swift writing Getaway Car.” There are very few people in my life IRL who know the infamous video of Jack and Taylor writing the bridge to Getaway Car in under 30 seconds. And I can’t think of anything more beautiful right now than the moment we said at the same time: “you put the money in the bag–” “put the money in the bag and stole the keys, that was the last time you ever saw me!” and soon after discovered the perfect line.
Harmony.
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“My love for you is steadfast. Unwavering.
I’ll twirl you around, I’ll write you a poem.
But my love for you doesn’t change.
It’ll always stay the same.”
–written for a 70 year old man who, on his second marriage, realized that love is stability (he also gave her the line “I’ll twirl you around”)
“Right person, wrong time
That’s what I thought back then
But I am thankful that
Our story never ended
You were always the right person
And now is the right time.”
–written for another 70 year old man who found the one, each went on to live separate lives, and they found eachother again AND got married at Burning Man
“New love, but it doesn’t feel like it
Does it?
To more music,
And to losing ourselves in more memories”
-written for a couple who was honouring their first date at a concert by the same artist they were seeing that evening
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Do you ever wonder why it’s hard to maintain friendships with people that you’ve known since childhood? I’m convinced this is because they will always see you as who you once were, and not who you now are. And friendships are interesting. They can be indicative of the times, indicative of what you’re prioritizing at that moment in life. Work friends, social friends. Friends that linger in the periphery. People who might meet you where you are, and they’ll provide you with something that you might need in that moment. Maybe they’re a body to share a bottle of wine with, and complain about the throes of being single. Then time moves, the universe does its thing, and you never see them again.
“Well. That was fun.” A sentence to describe those brief encounters.
But then there are others. Those angels in the form of strangers. What bonds you is something deeper. It’s not that you sit beside each other at your 9-5, or the fact that your families were friends since you were little. It’s something a lot deeper. It’s a shared loss, a similar pain, a familiar heartbreak. It’s the way you both see the world, and how you allow yourselves to feel through it.
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We write letters for lovers we will never see again–with words that linger and words that were left unsaid. We remember what it was like when we were living in the potential, the idea of it all. We put these feelings into everything, and in return, everything comes back to us. We speak dreams and lovers into existence.
I think of this poem Emily wrote for a stranger who asked for a poem to honor the anniversary of a loved one’s passing.
“Remembering.
This is where we live now
You’ve never left.
You’re always here, always home.
I love you.”
And so we remember.
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serendipity you say😏
MY SHAYLASSSSS😫😫