There’s a little bridge over a little brook surrounded by trees, next to my dad’s apartment. The smallest possible but most convincing piece of nature, at the center of a grove of brutalist concrete buildings.

We had been out that night doing I don’t know what. But she had come my way for a change. One SkyTrain stop over, at Production Way, I bought a vanilla cigarillo at a convenience store, and because I was with her I was very extraverted and I left a little snake on the counter and told the clerk it could guard his penny jar. I went back later and it was gone.

But at the end of the night, on that little bridge over that little brook, she finally told me she had romantic feelings for me. I had been waiting to hear that for a while but, in this moment, I thought: whatever that means. Then she pulled her top up and showed me her tits, and I was just kind of frozen there, afraid to blink and miss absorbing any of the light coming off of her in the dark.

After another moment I just pulled myself in and kissed her, very gently and sweetly, like a lover’s kiss—familiar—but it was our first. And she kissed me back in the same way. Every other girl I was kissing was horrible and tonguey and aggressive, and she was very soft.

I walked her to the train and offered her my jacket. And I never saw it again, and I didn’t see her until months later when we had become different people.