i spent two years in a fever dream which ruined my life in all the best ways, and i've been chasing the feeling ever since. i called C a few weeks ago and he said, i remember running into you in the Mozilla office for the first time that night and we already knew that you would be one of us. i didn't know it at the time, but that would be the beginning of everything. i can see every detail of those early days: C standing at the front of a full room in that light-blue t-shirt, me in the blue-and-white dress, that first conversation with T when i barely knew how to do anything at all, A's quick wit and instant friendship. we made magic together for two years: driving up north on weekends, Blue Mountain trips where P taught me how to ski, building bizarre things in the office after hours, the morning we woke up early in NYC to go to the Sea Air Space Museum, Tommy Thompson Park that summer night, photos of stuffed whales in cities all around the world. though we're never going to exist exactly like that ever again, i'm grateful for the way you showed me that extraordinary joy is possible, and for friendships which i'm never giving up.
i thought i knew something about making magic after that experience, you see. i left behind the home that you made me / but i will carry it along. i thought i would be able to replicate that magic somewhere else: build something from the ground up, but this time it would hurt less because i was armed with the truths we learned together. this time, i would get it right. maybe i should've known that lightning never strikes exactly the same way twice; this time has been stranger: from dramatic beginnings to being thrown into pandemic spacetime, the realization that we're playing an infinite game, a million conversations had somewhere between nine pm Toronto time and two o'clock in the morning somewhere across the ocean, and the way that you were shelter to me. none of this happened the way i thought it would, and at one point i had given up on finding home here. but the sun came up and eventually we could exist together in the same room again, and finally everything came together.
maybe this is the dream in progress: walking down Front Street on the first spring evening listening to this song and thinking about everything about to be made real, post-5pm Battle Tetris, counting bridges together the day we met, July in NYC and August in Toronto, three of us walking across the Brooklyn Bridge that night while catching up on three months of i'll-tell-you-in-person conversations, going down to the lake after work to scream and ending up with ice cream instead, the four of us conspiring on a summer night from a bench just off of a darkened Fulton Street in Brooklyn, waiting on the day that we all exist in the same city. it's inter-city flights and shared secrets, sunlit waterfront and streetside patios, waking up at 4am to drive up the mountain in time to call you at sunrise, the group call from the balcony in Vancouver when we were remotely buying groceries together, “hiking” and bubble tea and trips to Value Village, lying head-to-head on the balcony at midnight, finally giving in to all the love i had given up on ever finding here.
this time i'm lucid dreaming; fully awake and conscious and writing it all down as it happens. maybe it won't always look like this; maybe one day we'll be scattered out in the world and i'll tell stories about What Happened like the mythologies they will become. but while we're here together, i'll stay awake for every single minute, even when it's hard. with you, everything hard is made bearable.
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