Ana kissed me off, opting to stay back at the camp to chat with friends, while Will and I biked through the streets, weaving in and out of traffic without helmets (exactly as you feared I did), and as if it were the most natural thing in the world he invited himself into my apartment, and then into the shower, and then over the next few weeks bit by bit into my heart until, by mid-November, he was more or less living with Ana and me. The three of us made a little queer family, cooking extravagant meals, gossiping, fighting, auditioning, going out to shows, trying to write our own, drinking too much coffee and getting too little sleep. Some nights Will and I lay in bed talking about the little theatre we would open up together one day. Where friends could put on their plays, even the bad ones; in fact, especially the bad ones. A home for all the beautiful rejects.

After the first snowfall we went back to St. James Park to check in on a couple of Ana and Will’s friends who’d stuck it out. It seemed like it was mostly just anarchists and their dogs by that point. There were about a dozen tents huddled together like a low-rent Antarctic research base. The library was gone. It felt a bit like we had shown up to a party just as the lights were turned back on and the DJ was packing up. We sat around a garbage-can fire with this one Occupier who I think Ana had always wanted to sleep with, I forget his name, passing a flask of whiskey back and forth and talking about Noam Chomsky (naturally). I found myself looking at his Soviet military jacket and thinking of Chicho Dimo’s jumpsuit and truck and imagining an animated map showing the flow of decommissioned military paraphernalia flowing out of the USSR upon its collapse and circulating around the world like a giant Pacific gyre of kitsch and nostalgia.

Whenever Will and I would bike through the city we’d ride one in front of the other, pulling up side by side at street lights to share a joke or just stand together in silence. As I biked behind him I would watch his long blond hair blown about and imagine it was frantically reaching back for me. I studied the exposed skin on the small of his back as he leaned forward on his handlebars; the blue veins under his skin, the two little bumps of bone above the waistband of his underpants bobbing up and down as he peddled. On long summer evenings in 2012, we coasted through the back streets of west Toronto looking for our tiny theatre space, which we figured would have to double as our home if we were to afford it.