love_at_first_light ovenbird When I was seventeen and certain I was destined to die alone I found your face across the ashy embers of a dead fire in a remote wilderness that took me twenty-four hours by train to reach, and I knew you immediately. I moved to sit beside you. You tied my shoelaces together and I thought it was funny. We walked to the lake and I put my feet in the water with my socks still on. You pretended I was about to smash into a tree branch so you would have an excuse to put your arm around my shoulder. I didn’t need saving from wayward boughs but I did need saving from loneliness. I’m not sure you realize what it meant to feel the weight of your hand on my back, even briefly. We wrote each other letters for the rest of the summer. Yours arrived on pastel coloured pegasus stationery that your grandmother gave you so you could write to her. I still have every creased page and every envelope stamped by the postal service of a tiny town in Northern Ontario, and those flying horses are as bright as the day my fingers first traced the outlines of your messy cursive. After all the years of being picked last, of being left out, of being invisible, you showed me what it felt like to be chosen. And I haven’t forgotten, not for a second, the way that changed everything. The day before you went home you wrote the last handwritten letter I would ever receive from you. You said, “I’m writing a song for you and I will sing it to you on video so you can see me.” You never did. I don’t hold it against you. We were young and the distance was great and life took you to places I could never have followed. And, anyway, every hour we had together was a song. I can remember all the words. Every line began, “I love you because…” and I had never heard anything so beautiful in all my life. 250715 what's it to you? who go blather from