Thomas and I smoked pot like it was our business. We smoked every day, and every night. Always before we ate. Sometimes while we ate. I inhaled cigarettes before and after class. And it had started with four brownies, and me hiding in the basement.

We lived in a shady part of town, in condo-style apartments where we shared walls on either side with our neighbours. I had to lie to my mother about the kind of area I was living in, but it was all Thomas could afford and I wanted to live with Thomas. At the end of sophomore year, when we were all moving from dorms to apartments around campus, the two people I spent the most time with were Thomas and Asher. Both were fun, semi-alcoholic (in the way that is socially acceptable during college), and gay as the rainbow.

Since I had to pick, I chose Thomas because even though we were close friends—some would say best friends—I never did value him or his friendship the way I did Asher’s. So with a foresight I generally don’t possess, I moved into 100 Macarrow Street, Apartment D, with Thomas.

I loved the place. It was walking distance to the Campus Arts District, which was, hands down, the best place in the city. There were art galleries housed in crumbling buildings that should have been condemned but instead sold a half-dozen thousand-dollar paintings every weekend, upscale apartment complexes fashioned like Victorian mansions where the spinster professors from the English department lived, quaint little tea shops that cooked meth in the back rooms, and restaurants that served crazy, varied fusions of food—Thai-Barbeque and French-Indian, vegetarian sushi and Tailgate Greek.

Best of all, the CAD was home to the friendly bars frequented by the two communities that were fuelling and forming pop culture: the hipsters and the LGBT, who lived in a cosy, connected world of causal coexistence. That is to say, where the little gay boy went, the pink-haired girl followed, and where the uber-cool, beanie-wearing musician liked to hang on the weekends, the glittering drag queen made her home. The fact that our apartment was near all these places was great. It meant that the drunken, hungry staggers home—that characterized most weekends—were short. It also slimmed the probability of spending the night sharing cigarettes with a dirty bum (which you felt compelled to do because you were, after all, taking up space on a bench that was clearly his home).