A chance encounter brought all the emotions streaming back
I met her in high school, we began dating 18 years later during the pandemic
This is how you win against the pandemic: write in an empty bathtub. Write in an empty tub because your girlfriend of three months was visiting you from Cobourg when the lockdown began and you both took a chance on living together. The prospect of being apart for a month or more felt impossible. So she and her dog Suvi, a white shepherd, stay with me in my 380-square-foot Parkdale apartment. She needs her privacy, has Zoom meetings, works long hours and needs near silence to record interviews.
I’ve come to appreciate this tub and its colourful grout. It’s a cheap tub that nevertheless fills and empties like a wet lung, year after year, decade after decade. Plumbers clank and curse in the basement beneath me. The building’s heating operates like it has a never-ending existential crisis. Her Zoom meeting ends and she brings me a sliver of chocolate cheese cake. We’ve earned that cake because we ran five kilometres last night in the cold. The day before, I ran 25.
We first met in high school. She was a punk rocker with a shaved head, a feminist with a boyfriend four years older than her. I was naive about sex and women, raised by two librarians and some Neil Young records. In art class she came up to me, said she’d seen my drumming and wanted to jam. That Saturday her boyfriend’s white hatchback pulled into my parents’ driveway to pick up me and my drums, to bring them to her house.
Playing the drums is like controlling thunder, creating a heartbeat louder than your own, for roaring, bashing and brawling. We ended up playing whisper quiet in her parents’ basement, and I was terrible. Ashamed at my performance, I never went back to pick up my drums. I had two other drums kits anyway. A month later I found out she had gone to Ecuador on an exchange, hadn’t told me.
Eighteen years later and it was the summer of COVID. I stayed sane by exercising, but struggled like everyone else. My birthday was the loneliest I’ve ever felt. By October I had run my lakeshore jogging route so many times I was sick of it. One day, I ran a new route toward the CNE grounds and ran right past her as she walked her dog. Our eyes met and her look opened something in me. I was in the zone and kept running, but soon stopped on Dufferin Street, worked up some courage and turned to catch her. She was beautiful as ever, her hair was longer, her eyes still intense. That night I found her on Instagram and asked her out.
“So do you still have my snare drum?” I asked on our first date.
She laughed. She had been keeping it all this time, until recently. “I sold it for 30 bucks only a couple months ago to a guy in a bar band. After all this time you almost got it back.”
On that same date we each learned that we were both leaving the city in two weeks; her permanently to Cobourg, me for a stay in British Columbia. We dated for those two weeks, endless walks, an evening at the Skyline Lounge patio; us, bundled with our drinks and Queen Street alive with pit bulls and beautiful people frayed at the edges. A drunk man tried to fight our waiter.
After I left for B.C., we talked daily on the phone for hours, tender voices replacing touch. In Cobourg she worked long days and walked the shore of the great lake with her dog. With friends I climbed mountains, skied glaciers, wrote poems. I came back to Ontario for the holidays, drove through a snowstorm on Christmas Eve to see her.
Now we live together, the faucet drips on my sock as I write this and I’m happy. This pandemic has cast aside so much of what was normal, helixing our lives together.
I buy her coral tulips, she buys us lavender. We run the CNE grounds under the setting of a low winter sun. We pick up guitars and sing Tom Waits songs, her red Gretsch guitar shining in candlelight like a ruby. We write together, at the kitchen table, in the cab of my pickup truck. We cook, debating the merits of salt. She makes me laugh more than I ever have. We dance through the long nights; to Aretha Franklin; to Stevie Wonder; to Nina Simone.
On walks we are drawn to Lake Ontario, its waters and sky like Monet’s paintings of Rouen’s cathedral. He painted the same cathedral scene again and again from his studio across the street and every canvas came out unique. Like this, each day the lake continually changes but is also exactly the same. On its shore she meditates under a bare willow while I hold the dog. I hold my breath when she removes her mask, struck by her beauty each time she does.
On Jameson Avenue, where we live, prayer flags send wishes into the wind. Children sing from balconies. We are all locked down in small spaces. In my apartment I’m exiled to my bathtub. She feels uncomfortable with the idea that I’ve been relegated to this, but I’ve become its writer in residence, poet laureate of the washroom. I don’t mind at all.
We’re in love and in this lockdown together. This pandemic is forging us. For the better, not the worst.
Amongst the sickness, us fortunate in health. Before this lockdown my body ended where hers began, but that’s no longer true, we are one. We are one, plus the dog.
Throughout February we’ll bring you stories that take a close look at Lockdown Love. Stories of longing, of questioning, of passion, of awakening, of life-affirmation. We hope the stories bring you new insight into your own relationships or a diversion, and maybe even surprise you.
We’re in love and in this lockdown together. This pandemic is forging us. For the better, not the worst