Graphic by Kayleigh Woltal
In another life, I wouldn’t know you. I would go to school, finish it, have friends that come and go. I might have moved back to my hometown, finding a small apartment above one of the shops I would visit frequently to keep my younger self busy, visiting my childhood friends as much as I could and watch the airplanes together in a Tim Hortons parking lot. Being a community member would keep me occupied, and I would attend every seasonal festival and support all the local artists and businesses, promising I would move away in a few years but never going through with it. Or, I would move to a city far away. I would relearn my language, living in a skyscraper that I probably can’t afford and start a fresh life and focus mostly on my work. I would buy sunflower seed heads from the side of the road and eat the whole thing as I waited for an office job shift to start. I would buy all of the weird furniture I could find, make the place my own, and have the large windows open every night to hear the commotion in the cool city night. There would be two cats that live with me cuddling up to replace the warmth of a second human body, and tell myself I can find my person at any time as people would get into relationships around me. “You’ll find someone soon,” my foreign friends would say, and I would nod in response because they mean well, and partially because I secretly want them to be right. I would have random hookups at local bars with people who seem cool at first but probably disappoint me, leaving them to the next morning. And I would drink, smoke, and do any drugs I desired, with hangovers me and my coworkers would laugh and groan about the next morning. I probably would have shaved my head 6 months ago and regretted it, and I would have way more tattoos as I met more people and had more friendship groups scattered everywhere. I would pour myself into shitty art, probably being too scared to showcase it myself, but I would attend pretentious galleries and meet the weird people associated with the work. And people would come and go, and I would say I am fine with it, because reconnecting is hard to deal with anyways. You would have your own life, and it would probably be good. Your girlfriend would be funny and maybe know how to make a good banana bread loaf that wasn’t so dense. You probably would be in a city far away too, and you would explore every nook and cranny. But maybe she wouldn’t ask silly questions about the history of every building and statue, and maybe you would go quiet as you realize you could just explain it to someone else. You’d have a bigger friendship group, and it would be quieter in the house, and there would be less tears and misunderstandings. We would have never met, and it shouldn’t matter in the long run because we wouldn’t even know the other person existed. But my soul would feel it, and I know you don’t believe in that kind of stuff but I think your soul would feel it too. And at a random point we would say the same sentence at the exact same time and had felt our hearts pull slightly, and be left wondering why that happened.