When he told me he wanted to take pictures on the tracks, I thought it’d be fun. We’d be high up there and it’s great to look down at the world sometimes. I think we both needed that then.

We had mutual friends and similar interests, like computers and cameras and being alive. It was only natural we’d become friends ourselves, and it was only too obvious that it would one day get complicated. Similar interests. Mutual friends.

But before all this would come out, we stood on that bridge, in the cold, looking down at the world. I walked half across, then back. No coat, for a while no shirt, always the subject of a camera capturing the instance of a man alive.

Two weeks later I got an oversized envelope in the mail. Inside was a completely penciled and inked drawing of my characters Traveler and Shakkle. I was speechless; how many artists would do something so generous?

Soon, the drawing had an effect that I hadn’t anticipated. With such an incredible cover, my comic had a whole lot to live up to. A cover like this warranted a comic I couldn’t deliver. And then, the project ended. Traveler and Shakkle stayed up on my wall, adored, while I moved in a new direction. I created a series called Stick-Man: The Psycho Hero, a funny comic of limited quality that took only days to finish. And then, soon enough, that ended too.

Years later, I decided that the drawing had been done under false pretenses. I felt guilty more and more until one day I made a copy of Stick-Man and sent it to him. I added a note to explain, but it didn’t really make sense, and then I lost interest in comics altogether. I didn’t understand that there will always be someone better than you at what you love to do. What’s important is to keep doing what you love.

One of the people I was talking to turned to his friend and said, “See? I told you! It’s not a drunk person, it’s a drunk Indian. It’s always a drunk Indian.”

It wasn’t at this point in the story that I totally understood his meaning, but when I did, I realized my discrimination. And further to this, it wasn’t even about Indians, or Natives, or whatever label might be applied; it was about unnecessary details and why they are used. The story I was telling wasn’t particularly funny itself; it was the stereotype of the characters involved. These days I consider the relevancy of those extra details.

Today I no longer have black friends or white friends, Jewish friends or Native; I just have friends. And if you ask me to describe them, I’d tell you what you need to know.

I knew nothing about veganism other than that a lot of things you wouldn’t expect were on the restricted list. I had a few questions. One in particular was sincerely ignorant. I asked if he could eat Cheezies. My presumption was that they probably weren’t made with actual cheese, thereby avoiding the dairy qualifier; this was incorrect. They’re on the restricted list.

I’m looking back at my life and noticing different things now, memories like this. If it hadn’t been for Dave, my awakening to veganism might have taken longer, or maybe not at all. Today, I don’t look at my diet as having a restricted list. I can choose to eat anything I want. I make these choices every day guided by principles I believe in. Perhaps if I’d asked different questions that day, I wouldn’t have eaten so many Cheezies since.

On the occasion when the attack eased, she might have realized she was wrong. Dinner was in the oven waiting to be heated. Champagne was on ice by the tub, waiting to be filled with warm soothing water. Lotion at the bedside for a long massage. This is what I’d prepared.

On every occasion she was shown wrong, she went quiet. Never apologetic. In some small way, she was always right. It is this quality that, unchanged, could leave her as alone as I left her on the last day we ever spoke.

There was another family that went to the same restaurant every Friday. They had a son a few years older than me, and just after the machine dispensed the little wrapper to me, he walked in. Of course he knew what was going on! He knew I was some twisted sexual deviant and he was going to tell my parents what a pervert I was! Oh, it was too embarrassing, what could I do!

He never said anything to me. He probably didn’t even care. I was just some silly little kid, and he’d probably even done the same thing once. But probably not what I did next.

I opened the wrapper, took the condom out, and filled it with water. Tying it off like a balloon, and being watched by him the entire time, I went to a toilet and flushed it down. I laughed. Yes, like some kind of vandal, some evil mastermind. Definitely not whatever he was thinking. That is, if he even cared.

At the time I was in a role I thought I could manage; the lusting friend, never so easily accomplished as is intended. She said it wasn’t fair that she had to be up early for her conference. She wanted to go out. I thought that if I stayed, she would see how considerate I was. This is why I took my shoes off and sat in the room quietly while she slept, doing my best impression of a loving boyfriend. I knew she would remember this gesture fondly.

Weeks later I recalled this upon her. I said that I regretted not going out that night, especially in light of what happened after the trip. I stayed to be polite, I stayed because I thought it would change how she felt towards me. It didn’t. To her memory, the incident never happened, just like so many other things never happened. To this day I wonder how present I ever was.

We went out for dinner a few times and on these occasions we’d get into deep discussions about vegetarianism. I’d never given it any serious consideration because I knew man was supposed to eat animals. I knew we needed to, I knew we always had, and I knew no other way.

She had only recently become vegetarian for ethical reasons, and so she didn’t have enough scientific argument to satisfy me. It was this ignorance of ours that I attacked, compelled by my duty as an omnivore to ensure the status quo. I brought up the obvious physiological construct of human beings, such as our dental structure and the predatory position of our eyes. I brought up the food chain, nutrition, and anything else I could think of. Anything else I’d been told.

Now, of course, many years later, I understand the flaws of these arguments; the facts do not support them. And I wonder today if I’d've heard all this from her, would things have gone differently? Would I have been open to it or would I have argued against it anyway? It is in this memory that I look back to to understand the resistance to information that conflicts with all we’ve known. Truth can be scary. We worry about how it will affect us. But that doesn’t make it any less true.

In nearly ever sense, I was trying to impress her, and when we finally arrived, much too late to do anything, the evening fell apart like anything but romance.

There wasn’t enough time to see the sights and not enough daylight to accommodate our desire. Much sooner than we expected, the trip was over. We left for home, and on that drive began the end of whatever we were.

There was no such illness. If a nurse had examined her, there would be no fever. No infection, no upset stomach, nothing. The illness was a relationship that she couldn’t get used to. She was so accustomed to being alone that trusting anyone left her uneasy. The feeling of falling, the feeling of one day being hurt; these were her fears, and by what they were, she suffered them only because she wanted something that she didn’t know she didn’t want at all.