The Curly-Haired Man (My Side of the Story)

My fiancé discovered my blog, noticed a lack of posts mentioning him, and insisted I write about how we met. I did actually plan to do a post about it, but my depression (as well as my lungs) hit an all-time low and I am still honestly having a hard time getting out of bed every morning. I'm still feeling pretty hopeless and abandoned by God. But my fiancé insisted, so here we are.

(For his version of the story A.K.A. the Cliff's notes version, click here.)

It was during my first show back in Alberta after graduating college. I stayed in Saskatchewan and finished out two other shows (Jesus Christ Superstar and The Sound of Music), then, two days after Sound of Music closed, I packed my entire life -- three years of hopes and dreams -- into my Chevy Uplander and drove seven hours to a new life in Alberta, in a city that I had only seen twice in my life and never lived in. I had a rental place and one show lined up and nothing else. No job, nothing.

As I've mentioned in earlier posts from 2019, I had planned to make my life in Saskatchewan for several years after graduating. I had already made a couple inroads into theatre there and most of my friends were there as well. But in the course of three or four days, all of my plans for Saskatchewan fell through entirely. I had the one show lined up in Alberta... I had almost backed out of it because I had planned to stay in Saskatchewan but I had procrastinated on actually sending the email telling the people in the Alberta show I was backing out. When everything fell through and I made the decision to move to Alberta, I emailed them asking if I could join rehearsals late (as I was in Sound of Music until mid-June). After a week of deliberation, they said I could join late. I would be joining during rehearsal week five out of ten.

I moved to Alberta on 11 June and reported for my first rehearsal on the 15th. The venue was rather farther away from my city than I thought it was, and I ended up staying in the private campground reserved for the actors (rehearsals and performances took place on a massive outdoor amphitheatre). I didn't bring a tent because I despise camping. Instead, I still had my little mattress that I had bought in Saskatchewan sitting in the back seat of my van, and my plan was to simply sleep in the van, on top of the mattress.

During the first day of rehearsals, it somehow came out to some of my castmates that I was planning on sleeping in my van. But before I could explain that I had a mattress and wasn't just sleeping on a bench seat, one woman maybe ten years older than me insisted that I stay the weekend in her camping trailer. I tried to explain, but she would not hear of it -- "you are not sleeping in a van." I accepted the offer, feeling it would be impolite to refuse her kindness. She said her son was usually with her, but he happened to not be there that weekend so she had a bed free in her trailer.

At the time, I was extremely depressed, having been told repeatedly throughout the previous year that I was worthless as a performer. This was the last show I had lined up, and I had prepared to quit performing entirely. I was also by this time starving myself in an effort to hasten my end. My life was ending -- performing arts had been all I had and without it there was no point in eating to prolong it. My plan was to die very shortly after this show ended.

As such, I was not doing a lot of socialising. Usually I'm fairly quick to make friends or at least talk to people during rehearsals for shows, but my bitterness and my fast-approaching death sucked away all my motivation to do so here. I deliberately isolated myself, telling myself that nobody here would really want to talk to me once they knew the real me -- which they would know real fast once I started talking to them because I apparently have this horrible habit of 'oversharing.' My plan, therefore, was to not talk at all. Nobody wanted to hear it, so I wasn't going to share it.

To that end, I brought Lila, my faithful word processor, to the campground with me. I had intended to sequester myself in my van and work on the Kyrie revision. I brought her with me to the trailer. My host went to the washroom building to shower, and I pulled Lila out of my backpack and put in the key code. She returned an error message. I turned her off and tried again. Same message.

A quick Google search (on my phone and 1GB of data) suggested that her memory was corrupted and she was gone for good. I emailed the address provided in her error message, then set her aside and began to mope, sliding into the abyss of boredom and subsequent despair. Lila had been with me for nine years. I haven't even been friends with any humans that long. It was almost like another death.

My host returned. "They're playing some games in one of the other trailers," she said. "I can introduce you to them if you like."

"No," I said. I was too listless and depressed and had no interest in being around people who would inevitably think I was too much if they knew anything about me. She accepted my answer and engaged me in conversation. I did try, though I'm sure my responses came off as somewhat anaemic. After some time, she said, "Come; I'll take you to that trailer and introduce you." I agreed, telling myself it would be good to at least learn more names.

She led me to a tiny refurbished 1970s trailer about the size of a postage stamp and ushered me inside. I found myself in the middle of a dozen people crammed around a table, on a bed, standing on the two square feet of copper and beige linoleum available for standing on. I was offered a chair -- which I declined -- as well as food and a spot at the game table. I declined the latter as well, but ate a couple bites of something, I don't remember what. A man with a red beard stood in the centre of the tiny trailer and said, "This here is Betsy," sweeping his outstretched hand around the air above all our heads, indicating the trailer itself. Everybody introduced everybody else and I somehow managed to more or less retain all the names coming at me.

I leaned against the counter -- there was nowhere else to be, and I didn't feel comfortable sitting and taking up so much space that way. I was coughing a lot due to my ongoing lung issues, and a curly-haired man with with a handsome beard and an orange hat put his hand on my shoulder at one point. "Don't die," he said. I gave him a very brief overview of my lung situation (this particular coughing spell became pneumonia by the end of the show's run).

Throughout the night I noticed the curly-haired man seemed to look at me a lot and I suspected he was flirting with me. But, unpracticed with men as I am, I didn't dare jump to any conclusions. He wasn't making me uncomfortable, so I stood where I was and observed his behaviour. I was suspicious enough of his intentions by the end of the night that I texted my best friend about it before I went to bed that night. She told me not to freak out, and I tried my best to take her advice.

The next day, we were rehearsing in a large tent due to weather, and the curly-haired man came up to me and flicked the brim of my sunhat.

"Hello," I said, too taken aback to think of anything more eloquent.

"Hello," he said with a smile.

Over lunch I texted my best friend about the incident and she said, "he's into you. Guys don't flick girls' hats if they're not interested in them." I began to freak out a little bit. I couldn't deny I was somewhat drawn to him, but after a previous bout of male attention I'd gotten during a show the previous year, I had made a rule that I don't date guys I'm currently in a show with. If they are still willing to pursue something after the show closes and we're not spending sixteen hours a week in rehearsal together, that's fine, but I was absolutely not interested in dating someone only for the duration of a show's run again. To be getting this kind of attention from a castmate again unnerved me.

As rehearsals progressed, I continued to find myself drawn to him, despite my repeated attempts to deny it even in my own head. Every move I made was soon calculated to be near him as much as possible without it looking like I was trying to be near him as much as possible. (Apparently I succeeded, as he didn't fully realise I was hanging around him deliberately until I told him this after we started dating.) I would watch the entrance to Betsy from the side mirror on my van, and if I saw him go in, I would wait a few minutes, then go in. I never went to Betsy unless I saw the curly-haired man go in first.

During one of these visits, he and I ended up sitting on the bed/couch, in the corner, talking. He told me his entire life story, plus the stories behind all his tattoos -- some three hours' worth of material. I was so fascinated that somebody else was willing to tell me their entire life story, the good and the bad, and drank in every word of it. It was a nice change from me having to bare my soul. I think it was during this conversation that we exchanged phone numbers.

At some point, we developed a pattern of him walking me to my van at the end of the night and giving me a good night hug. I'm not a touchy-feely person, but I was extremely touch-starved and always felt safe in his arms, with my head resting against his chest. I began to look forward to the nightly hugs and would replay them over and over in my head once I was in bed.

Eventually I added him on Facebook... along with about eight other people in the cast so it wasn't as obvious that I was just adding him.

Opening day dawned extremely rainy. Our campground was quite close to the river, and the rising levels were visible to the naked eye. We were told the show would go on that evening, so during the day the cast either hid out in their tents or gathered in the big central tent in the middle of the campground. Several of us spent the day playing card games -- mostly Racko, a game my dad and I have played for years. The curly-haired man sat beside me.

Near the end of the game session, when people were starting to make their early suppers before going to the amphitheatre, my text alert went off. It was the curly-haired man. 'You're awesome,' it said. I wasn't sure how to respond, but eventually settled on 'Thanks... so are you.'

He was called to the theatre earlier than I was to review the stunts. When I got to the theatre for warmup, he met me at the warmup location and we started chatting. He brought up his text to me, then said, "I almost used a different word."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"'Like,'" he said. "The word 'like.' I like you. You're a cool girl."

I stared off into the horizon, not sure of how to respond. I don't actually remember how I responded. I remember thinking how I had to focus on the show and not the fact that a man I was not willing to admit I was drawn to had just said he liked me. I had never had that happen in my entire life. I'd had guys flirt with me and even take me to dinner, but none of them had ever been man enough to actually admit they were interested in me.

I managed to get through the performance without being too distracted, and after opening night, the production team held an ice-cream social for the cast. He and I sat next to each other and the topic quickly shifted to us, as friends.

"What do you want it to be?" I asked him.

"I'd like to get to know you more first," he said.

I nodded.

"If you're okay with that," he added.

"I'm just skittish," I said.

"Why?"

I told him my rule and the story behind it -- how someone from a show I was in led me on and then ghosted me, and how I later found out he was dating a friend of mine (from the same show) and was cheating on her with me.

"That's wrong," he said. "If you don't want to date till after the show, I'll wait."

I told him I appreciated that, and we continued our friendship. We began texting each other during the week -- constantly. Eventually I texted my dad, letting him know of the developing situation. He and my mother were planning on coming to the show the next weekend and I wanted to hear my dad's impression of my curly-haired friend. I did not, however, want anybody else to know in case it didn't work out, and I swore my dad to secrecy.

That Friday, I admitted to the curly-haired man that I liked him back. I still remember the look on his face. My parents saw the show Sunday and I managed to introduce him as a friend. It raised no suspicions from my mother, as I had so many theatre friends already so what was another one? But I had texted my dad his name, and when I said, as casually as possible, "This is Jacob," my dad caught the significance of the introduction immediately. I managed to draw my mother into a separate conversation as Dad and Jacob talked for a few minutes.

I should mention at this point that what I fell in love with was his tender heart and kind personality. I was actually not physically attracted at all at first -- which was the way I always wanted it to happen. I never wanted to fall in love with a guy's looks; I wanted to fall in love with his heart. I don't remember the exact moment I fell in love with his heart because it happened quite gradually, but I remember the moment I fell in love with his looks...

The dressing room for an outdoor amphitheatre is little more than a shack behind the set lined with wooden benches and covered with corrugated tin. There are no walls except the set wall itself. Jacob and I happened to have claimed spots on benches that were back to back. I could look across and just to the left and see him.

One night after the show, he went to put away his costume, and I hung around on my side of the bench, looking at my phone as I waited for him to come back. I heard him return, but didn't look up until he asked me a question. I looked up and his face was RIGHT THERE -- all hazel eyes and freckles -- and for the first time I felt my heart skip a beat at the sight of a man.

We continued talking through the rest of the show's three-week run -- joking about dating and even marriage, but with the understanding that we were not actually discussing dating until after the show. It didn't stop the speculation among our castmates though... Jacob would come hug me before each show and during each intermission in addition to our ever-lengthening good-night hugs. We began holding hands, less and less covertly. It was little surprise when people starting asking if we were dating, and it became harder to answer that question.

He discovered fairly early on that I was only just eating enough to stand upright, and he used his texting privileges to plead with me to eat (spoiler: he still does).

The night before the final weekend of the run, we got talking about it again. I asked what we were doing, and he said, "It's up to you. I've already told you how I feel and what I want. But I want us to decide together, not just me. I won't pressure you into dating. I'll just wait and not say anything about it until you're ready."

"No," I said. "Let's try it."

But we didn't use the words 'we are dating' until two days later. There had been a situation where our friend group had decided the night before to go out to the dollar store that morning. I had been part of this discussion and was, I thought, part of the invitation. I had no connections in my new home city yet so this was my final opportunity for human interaction. I had told them to wake me when they were ready to go.

That morning I woke at 11, found my curly-haired man, and told him I was ready to go.

"We already went," he said.

It gutted me. I was in a funk for the rest of the day. Another friend tried to cheer me up but I couldn't shake the feeling of betrayal. Finally, Jacob invited me to walk with him and we wandered around the campground. He apologised, explained the reason for the change of plans, and said he had tried to wake me but couldn't rouse me (this was entirely believable as I will probably sleep through the apocalypse). Then he asked my forgiveness. I gave it to him, and the conversation turned to other things, namely, our relationship status.

"What are we doing?" I asked. "Are we dating?"

"Do you want to?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Then we are dating," he said.

And that's how I started dating a curly-haired fellow actor in a show that I almost wasn't in. We are now engaged, set to be married within a year.

It's weird -- part of me never thought I would date anyone, let alone get married. I always thought I would be too much for anybody -- after all, literally everybody in my life up to this point has had that exact complaint... 'you're too much.' 'Nobody will ever love you.' 'You need to be more positive before anybody will want to have anything to do with you.'

How then does a man fall in love with me while I am actively starving myself because I had tried so hard to be positive and make myself fit their mould and I couldn't? Was everyone else lying? Is he sent from God? Both?

It is no exaggeration to say I am still alive today because of this curly-haired man. Recovery is still ongoing, but he is just as stubborn as I am. He wants me to live even more than I wanted to die (which was quite a lot). He is slowly convincing me that I want to live too. I am glad I met him and I am even more glad that we get to spend the rest of our lives together.

Update... The Big Pond

Update on living in Alberta again...

It's beautiful. But it's also probably been the darkest, most difficult time of my life so far.

It's MUCH harder even to get an audition here. I've responded to quite a few audition calls and not even been invited to the auditions. I've landed more job interviews than auditions (and given how the job hunt has been going, that's saying something).

The original plan, back in April, was to stay in Saskatchewan (probably Regina) for a year or two, for more experience (which would hopefully eventually translate into actual ability...). It's a relatively small theatrical pond, sure, but I'm also a pretty small fish. It would have been a good place to learn and grow and get a chance to hone my skills -- at least in Regina, some theatres did like my work enough to at least stick me in ensemble. In the past year especially I did a huge amount of hustling in Regina because that was where I expected to stay, so that was where I made my connections.

Instead, I've now ended up in Calgary, which is a significantly bigger (and therefore more competitive) pond, and I have absolutely zero connections here. In Regina I at least knew a bunch of theatre people -- I had a network. Here I have literally nothing. Most of the people in my current show here, while very nice and generally good at what they do, aren't in the theatre scene at all outside of that one show once a year, so they can't really help me.

I'm trying to look at it as a 'sink or swim' situation. I have to get my skills up to par -- there is no other option if I want to survive. I can't grow slowly and steadily now, I have to grow in leaps and bounds. I have to level up. I'm not quite sure how without practice (you know... actually doing shows), but I'm going to have to figure out a way. Preferably an inexpensive way -- as I hinted above, the job-hunt/financial situation is nothing less than terrifying, on a visceral level. I'm in a heightened state of stress and tension 24/7 because I am literally one month away from living on the street. I haven't truly relaxed, even physically, in... I don't even know how long. (Probably about a year -- last summer, before school kicked in again.) The only silver lining about being under this level of stress for so long is that I have no appetite so at least I'm saving money on food.

(Metaphorical) Split Jump

I feel like I have one foot in two provinces and it's honestly exhausting.

Earlier this spring I had made plans to stay in Saskatchewan fairly long-term (despite graduating college in April). I notified my housemates, job-hunted, started looking at places, told my entire extended family/friend group -- and then it fell through. Completely. Entirely.

I came up with a backup plan fairly quickly. Since it involved me moving back to Alberta, I officially ended the perennial Saskatchewan job-hunt -- no point in prolonging the frustration of not getting hired if I was only going to be there another month and a half anyway.

However, because I have zero income, this means I am literally scraping together couch change to pay for gas to get to rehearsals. I have $18 to my name right now. I literally can't even break a twenty for change for the parking meter at the doctor's office.

This leaves me in a very tight spot. I'm still in shows in Sasktachewan till mid-June. However, I don't have money to even fuel my van this week. The one saving grace was that there's a week and a half between performance dates here. It's a long enough period of time to go back home and work for my dad's company for a week. And that should earn me enough money to pay my final rent bill in Saskatchewan and cover gas till I move back to Alberta. It's really kind of stupid that I'm having to commute nine and a half hours (to a different province!) to work, but I swear literally NOBODY ELSE on the planet will hire me. Name it and I've applied for it. Even jobs below minimum wage. I have applied for literally everything.

I've just confirmed my place in a renting option in Alberta. I guess it's official now -- my time in Saskatchewan is ending, much sooner than I anticipated. I really only have about two weeks total here -- the rest will be in Alberta, working to afford to actually move.

It hurts. 98% of my friends -- my support system -- are in Saskatchewan. I really only have two Alberta friends left, and they'd be in a different city than me. I would be well and truly alone in a strange city, when I'm already not in a great headspace.

Don't get me wrong -- I love Alberta, and I love the city (both cities in general and the particular one I'm moving to). But I feel very much like I'll lose all the friends I made here in Saskatchewan, and I'll have to start rebuilding a support system from step one all over again -- do you know how long it took to cobble together the one that I currently have? And that was in a school environment, where you're together with people all the time, in a setting that's fairly conducive to building relationships.

It still doesn't seem real that one day, in less than a month, I will be leaving this house, driving away from this town, taking the exit off the highway... and never coming back.

The Pink Paper

15 April 2015. Three days before I graduate with my Associate of Arts degree.

I'm walking to my program director's office for the second time in ten minutes. In my hand is a single pink sheet of paper. Across the top of it are the words Program Declaration/Transfer Form. Beneath those words, in my handwriting, are my name and the date -- my sister's birthday. Below that are the words Current Program and New Program. In those fields, in my handwriting, are the words AA Music and BA Music, respectively.

And I am taking this sheet of paper, which may or may not determine the next two years of my life, to my program director for his signature, which I know he will give... he's the one who's been pressing me to take this step for the past month and a half and who, five minutes before, directed me to get this piece of paper from the academic office.

I knock, and enter.

"I'm back." I hold out the paper.

He bids me wait a moment and finishes with the computer. I stand back from the screen -- he's doing grades; he told me this when I was here five minutes ago. Then he rolls his chair closer, takes the paper and signs it. Twice -- once as the director of the AA Music and once as the director of the BA Music. He hands it back.

"There you go. Take it back up. They'll open registration for you and they'll fill in a program sheet for you and email it to you and me."

I'm aware that my face is pale. My heart is racing. What am I doing? But I manage a nod. He's already made it clear that I'm not actually committing to anything yet and can still decide not to come back. But perhaps he sees my terror at my own volition for he says it again.

"You can always decide not to come back if things don't work out. But I want you to come back. Keep me posted through the summer. Shoot me an email."

"Okay."

I thank him, leave, and take the paper back up to the academic office.

***

One full year passed -- summer, fall, winter, spring. A second summer hurtled by. By mid-August it was clear that the money would not be there to return for this degree, this program on the pink paper, and so I began packing my schedule to the brim with dance classes in Alberta. I was pulling from three different schools, working around theatre rehearsals and the few auditions I could scrounge up online, practicing on my own, working my actual job every second I could in between.

***

29 August 2016. Three days before registration day at the college -- a day I know I cannot attend. I have come to peace (at least a bit) with the fact that I am about to forfeit my Bachelor's degree and two years of musical theatre training due to lack of funds.

I go to visit a friend of mine from church. We talk about what's new and the college comes up.

"About that..." she says. "I contacted a few people I know. They have collectively contributed two thousand dollars and there is one person who is willing to loan you the difference."

Never before have I experienced the feeling that I'm dreaming when I'm not. But I am now. I sit, studying her face, utterly lost for words. So thoroughly had I despaired of ever going back again that to have it sitting in front of me, within my grasp, seems incongruent.

This just does not happen. Not to me.

Years in the church, hearing the stories of missionaries and laypeople and pastors having miraculous answers to prayer, financially, have still not prepared me for the idea that that could happen to me. I have always been the punching bag on the outside looking into grace. Miracles don't happen to me.

Every thought I had had all day disappeared from my head. She was asking me about my week and I could barely string together a sentence. I had literally forty-eight hours to notify everyone, pack, and move out-of-province. But we did. My family rallied around me and saw me out the door on my first solo flight to the middle of nowhere on the second.


And that's (the condensed version of) how I ended up back in Saskatchewan this semester.

One Week

Written 8 April 2016, 11.48pm.

Strange week this week.

Last Friday at this time I was in Saskatchewan, visiting my college friends, excited beyond belief to be able to see so many of them, despite the fact that most of my college friends are performance majors wrapping up all their final performances (and rehearsals) for the year -- to say nothing of all the major papers they were still writing.

This visit came after I stayed up late for nearly four straight days in a desperate attempt to finish my final history paper of the semester for my distance course before the trip.

Then we ended up staying an extra day (Sunday) in Saskatchewan. At first this was okay with me, but then Sunday afternoon my parents texted me: 'Grandpa has pneumonia. All they can do is make him comfortable. You should see him Monday when you get back.' Even through the text I could sense this directive was not a mere suggestion.

We bumped our departure time up to 8.30 (from 9.30) Monday morning and planned to drive straight to his nursing home from the college. Sunday night I went to the final choir performance of the year and all I could really think was 'Grandpa will hear real angels sing like this soon.' But I hoped he could hold on.

I woke up Monday morning to see a text sent at 3.30am: 'Grandpa is gone.'

No point in hurrying now. So we moseyed home. It had happened so fast that it didn't seem real. My friend and I laughed and joked on the way home in much the same way we had on the way to the college. In retrospect I'm glad I was with him that day and not at home -- as awful as it was to have missed saying goodbye by one day, being with my friend, stuck in a vehicle together for the better part of eight hours, was what I needed. Of course it wasn't really his decision whether or not to spend those eight hours with me, but he made the most of it -- making me laugh but also letting me question and ponder. He let me feel a lot of emotions but didn't make me feel guilty for feeling any of them. In spite of what awaited me at home, I genuinely enjoyed myself and I think that time of enjoyment cushioned the blow. I would never have taken it half as well if I had been at home, surrounded by it.

Then came the texts from my mother at the funeral home with my grandma and my uncle: 'We're thinking of having the funeral on Friday,' and 'Grandpa had requested that you sing at his funeral. Your choice of song.'

What?

I haven't properly sung in a full year -- and even when I was actively training, I wasn't particularly good at it. Oh sure, I sing in the van when I'm driving to dance class, but somehow I don't think that really counts. And of course, I was in the throes of a full-on chest infection and could hardly talk without drowning in phlegm. Plus I knew my grandpa had never actually heard me sing. Who in the world had given him the idea that I could sing?

We arrived home. Since my grandpa was already dead I simply went straight to dance class that night -- the first class back after a week off for spring break. To wake up at your former's roommate's house in small-town Saskatchewan and end up at dance class in big-city Alberta over the course of one day always gives me a bit of mental whiplash -- never mind the realisation that I would never see my grandpa again, though he had been fine when I left.

Tuesday I drove my sisters to dance class -- which I don't usually do, but my mother was busy and couldn't take them. Wednesday was my only semi-normal day. Thursday I spent two and a half hours at the dentist's getting two of my front teeth essentially rebuilt and am still getting used to the feel of two teeth without any nerves in them whatsoever. And of course, Friday -- today -- was the funeral.

Because of all the divorcing and petty arguments and crap that's been going on over the past year and a half, I hadn't seen half of this side of the family since before my second year of college. I didn't even recognise my cousin. And we live less than five minutes apart from each other.

I've been to funerals before, but I've never been 'the family.' Some of them have been relatives, yes, but more along the line of 'great-grandmother' or 'cousin.' But when it's your grandpa, you are the family, you are one of the people who sits in the 'Reserved' pews at the front and don't have to stand for the hymns. Funerals are very, very different when you're the immediate family. You are the last in the sanctuary -- parading past all those standing people -- and you are the first to leave it -- immediately into the waiting limo to head to the gravesite. You are given first dibs at standing room at the graveside service and you are one of the people given a rose. The people at the luncheon wait for you to go through the food line first and as they leave they come and speak to you. Half of these people I thought I didn't know but then recognised them with shock. When did everybody get so old?

And to think last Friday at this time, there were no funeral plans. I was watching Doctor Who with my roommate, planning to visit our friends later in the afternoon and evening. My grandpa was alive and although frail and weakened by recent strokes, he was fairly well.

How quickly time moves. How quickly life changes.

Time Bubbles

Moving to another province and entering a public schooling system for the first time in my life was... surreal. It felt like I was in a bubble -- that my life in Alberta was 'paused' and I had picked up a life in Saskatchewan that existed in linear time, but not on the same track my time in Alberta had been. (Believe it or not, this is the best way to explain it.)

They were so separate, so easily. In fact, so much so that when my mother and my sister came to pick me up on Thursday (to take me back to Alberta for reading week), it was very jarring to see them in that context. I'm used to my dorm mates walking around the halls and in our room, not my mother and sister. My brain was flashing 'incongruency detected' at me throughout dinner and then as we left the college campus. In fact, it didn't really start feeling normal until we stopped for fuel at Rosetown.

Saskatchewan and Alberta are so different. Saskatchewan has no trees. Even the towns are tiny and they're few and far between. I feel like the town I'm going to college in is one of the larger ones (maybe it's just because you see more people there though), and even their population doesn't reach a thousand. Once you cross the border into Alberta, the difference is almost instant. There's almost this sigh of relief -- civilization! In Saskatchewan, Subway is pretty much the only chain-anything you will see (outside of farm equipment dealers). I spent two months in Saskatchewan and I have yet to see a Wendy's. In Alberta there's one in nearly every town.

But enough about the social/geographical differences.

Coming back home after a two-month absence was kind of odd -- we parked in front of the garage, like we always do, and I grabbed some of my stuff, walked inside and dropped it all on the same spot at the table as I've always done. And as I did so, there was this sense that no time had passed. It was as if the 'Play' button had been pressed, and things were picking up where they had left off. It was like my entire time in Saskatchewan, all those classes and tests I've taken and the people I've met... it was like it had all been a dream, and this was my reality, here, now. And it was odd because I expected these once-normal things to be more foreign to me.

On one hand it was a relief... I was terrified that I would come back to Alberta and nothing would be the same, and I'm glad that wasn't the case -- nothing drastic has changed. But on the other hand it's a little frightening. Two months have gone by (almost). Two months. And it feels like nothing. This calls up the question: how much time has to pass before it feels like something? How much time can be wasted before we start to feel it? The answer scares me... two months between leaving the house and returning to it was as if maybe a couple of hours had passed. What if it's several years before you feel like time has really passed? Or several decades? You could spend decades wasting your life and not feeling it. You could conceivably spend decades inside a certain bubble of time and not realise it until it pops too late.

Seriously, it feels like I never left. Four days after leaving Saskatchewan I'm having a hard time remembering my dorm mates and all the classes as something that really happened, not just a dream I had. It feels so normal and 'right' here. I get the sense that leaving Alberta to finish the semester will be much, much harder than the first time I left...

What I Miss

You know what I miss the most about being at home?

All the driving.

No, I'm serious. It's always mystified me how much people whine about driving -- be it commuting to work/school, going on vacations, or doing errands. People hate driving. I've never understood this, but it's become even more weird to me now that I haven't driven anything in nearly two months.

See, my mother decreed that the rattletrap was not coming to Saskatchewan with me. It eats coolant and the vital systems of the thing are slowly failing. She didn't want me to wind up stranded on the side of the Trans-Canada highway in the middle of December with nobody within a nine-hour drive able to come rescue me (this was before we got here and found out several people in my hall did bring vehicles and probably do care for me enough to come rescue me from the side of the road).

I miss a lot of little things about driving. I miss watching the sunsets as I cruise down the highway. I miss seeing the streetlights stretching out before me on the way to tap class. I miss slowing down to forty and studying the buildings in the small town near my home out of the corner of my eye. I miss feeling the steering wheel under my hands and the solid click of the turn signal.

I miss the peace that came with driving... of not having to do anything else, just drive. And think. And maybe sing. You don't have to pause what you're doing to change over the laundry, or write something down, or check your email, or any other combination of ten things at once. You have one task and one task only. Just drive. I miss that assurance of knowing that if you keep going, you will get there all in good time.

But I think if I'm honest, most of all, I miss the music.

I miss JAG on the way to Bible study. I miss Daniel Amos on the way back from my friends' house. I miss Prodigal on the way back from ballet (Electric Eye) and the other Bible study (Just Like Real Life). I miss White Heart on the way to tap class and dance team. I miss Crumbächer on the way to get groceries. I miss listening to Michael W. Smith's Christmas whenever the heater's running and the snow is dancing in the high-beams.

Basically, I think I mostly just miss music. And streetlights. And dusk. And home.