The last time I saw you, you were standing at the foot of the escalator. My suitcase had gotten stuck in the step’s grooves, and I fumbled with it and laughed. I watched you, and we kept waving, waving, until I got to the top and had to start walking. I would have stayed at the top a little bit longer just to watch you, you in your blue sweater and your mop of hair, your perfect American smile.

The other evening, returning from a visit to Leeds to visit my good friend Tom, I stood in the pouring rain and looked around. I didn’t know where I was – the exit I had taken from the bus station was unfamiliar. I was cold, and tired, and the grapes I had bought to snack on during the journey had spilled and crushed in my bag. A taxi splashed by, covering my boots and legs with water. On any other day, I might have been very frustrated with this entire situation. I might have cursed (silently or out loud, it would depend on my mood). I might have huffed and puffed. Instead, I stood there with a grin, laughing at the series of events that could only be described as Murphy’s Law. The thing is, nothing really phases you when you’re in love. And in love I am, absolutely head-over-heels, over-the-top, twirling-in-the-streets kind of love. And who, or what, is so deserving of this adoration?

12 years ago, I was getting ready to start another day at high school; it was my first week of being in Grade 12, my first week as a prefect. It was picture day, so I had woken up early to spend a bit more time on my hair and makeup, make sure my shirt and blazer were ironed properly. I was in the kitchen when my dad called from work.

“Something happened in New York, ” he said. My mum and brother were there, too, so the three of us huddled around the TV and watched with horror as the towers burned. My hometown is an hour behind New York, and so we had been sitting there, eating cereal, chatting about the upcoming day, without knowing what had happened, without knowing that the world was falling apart.

My ears perked up. “Winnipeg”, I had heard the girl say, I was sure of it. I had a fleeting sensation of excitement, of hearing the name of my hometown dropped casually into conversation, and I briefly wondered why she was mentioning it at all. This entire process took about 1.5 seconds in my brain, before I once again stopped myself, rolled my eyes.

“I’m in Winnipeg, you idiot,” I thought to myself. I had been for a month.

I went to Burning Man in 2011, and stayed the full eight days. I camped in the desert under the big clear sky, my days spent riding the playa on my bicycle, making friends, cooking grilled cheese sandwiches, my nights a hazy blur of stilt-walkers, fire-breathers, mutant cars shaped like scorpions and jellyfish. I wore outfits I threw together from a garbage bag of costumes in the trunk; I wore saris and glitter, fake fur and angel wings, tutus and sometimes nothing at all. When I first reached the gates on that very first day, a girl wearing pink fishnets made me roll around in the playa, coating my hair in the greyish dust. “Welcome home,” she told me, and hugged me. I was instantly in love with this alternate universe, this utopian dream of creativity and art and acceptance.

There’s been a foreboding sense to this summer – I’ve known all along that, eventually, I’d be packing up and moving my life to London for an indefinite period of time. This isn’t a surprise; I’ve been talking about it since spring. And yet I’m the type of person who, instead of taking my time packing and organizing and planning, will leave everything until the very end. I leave in four days, and yet I still feel as though there’s a lot to do. That’s the way it always goes, though, isn’t it? There’s a lot to do and we stress out and then it’s just done.