I’ve come to learn that there are two types of people in this world. Some move along slowly, deliberately, taking each day as a cautious step forward into their lives. These people are standard. And there are some who light up rooms, who follow instinct like animals to prey and who take each moment in with their breath, not a second lost to worry or doubt. Michael most definitely was the latter. 

The best way to describe myself at the time that we met was hungry. I was hungry for my new surroundings, for knowledge I didn’t know and most of all for people I hadn’t yet met. Everyone at Queen’s played out like characters in a movie, each with goals and plans to travel and climb their figurative mountains. Dreamers, or so I thought, were few and far in between, but at Queen’s they were plentiful and everywhere. Michael stood out to me first for his smile, with a space that could fit a tic tac perfectly between his front teeth. I was enamored by that space, and I felt like by noticing it I was part of some secret between just the two of us, some inside joke that I’d helped create. When he laughed and his mouth stretched across that gap my heart would thud and I knew I was long gone before I even had a say.

But there were other things that I noticed, and I couldn’t help but feel that these details belonged to my eyes only, our private secret. The way his hands flourished telling me a story, or the way his eyes would wander when his mind did and how I could notice that small shift, his attention span short but his mind fast and agile. And slowly I fell for that mind, and the intricacies of it, and the way his thoughts tumbled out quickly and fluidly. I also went weak for the way he sometimes tucked my hair behind my ears, cliches burning in my brain but me too content to listen to them. I fell hard, and I think without him, for the most part. But in those small moments, littered with details that made me feel high, I let myself ignore this fact. I made myself forget.