Epilogue

While we are here, let me tell you a story: some weeks before I left the un et demi in Montreal on Durocher near Sherbrooke, the same one that houses the protagonist Gale Jones, I wrote an outline for a visual novel (an interactive fiction picture book, a genre that fascinated me for much of my teenage years) where each chapter matched a rhyming couplet from the lyrics, penned by Elgar’s wife Caroline Alice née Roberts as a love gift. As I wallowed in my despair that the city needed me not, I wrote a story from my past into the fabric of false reality: when I was seventeen, the same age as Gale in the story, I indeed shared a dance with a beautiful stranger on my last evening in Montreal. The end of a YMCA cultural exchange had come, and what a bittersweet hug-and-sway it was with E, a girl from a high school across town in Waterloo. In truth, she was not a complete stranger; we saw each other at an informational session before we departed, and from exploring the city a few times together we connected with offbeat humor, much of it centered around 420 and shunning authority. I learned that she had a boyfriend who was not with us on the trip. That was not on my mind when I asked her to dance, for all I knew in the moment was the sparkle in her eye. I never saw her again after that trip, but I shall never forget how stunning she was. Looking at her pictures on Facebook, I see that she is in a different world from me. Yet for the few minutes that she was in my arms, I pretended that she was forever mine, that she was my fated bride, that she was someone who would change my life and save me from all the things I knew not how to escape.