Once upon a time

I moved into the city towards the end of February in the year two thousand and nine. Before six months were up I had taken up smoking, quit smoking, and almost stopped drinking. I had also made friends with a handful of addicts and dealers, a prostitute with political aspiratations, drag kings, queens and assorted queers, gained a sidekick, joined a theatre troupe and found myself juggling three men. I had even tried my hand at, among other things, fire dancing, pole dancing and burlesque.

Now, a week before my birthday, I found myself looking back on the past six months. I had done things that I was not proud of, and had things done to me that I would sooner forget. I had made memories and met characters that I would cherish for the rest of my life, artists, musicians, performers, vagrants, vagabonds and good-for-nothings. All of them now my friends. I had changed the lives of people, for better or for worse, and not even known it til after the fact.

I have aimlessly ambled the streets of this city all through the night and seen the dawn colour her streets again and again and over again. I had come to love her smells and her sights and her sounds and her children. She had shown me a side of her that I did not know existed, and shown me a side of myself that I did not know existed either. The past six months had done more to rewrite my life and myself than all the other days since I had left my childhood home nearly two years before. And along with my childhood home, I now found myself leaving my childhood. In one week, I would be twenty, and instead of the Peter Pan stirrings that I felt prior to turning eighteen, this last week of being a teenager instead found me filled with a sense of looking forward, and wondering what new stories this city was writing for me in the months to come.

Yours,
Titus T.