Birthdays, Friendship, and Being Better with Mike

Today is my birthday. I'm in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where I'm right now based with my husband and two little children, during a two-year posting with the Red Cross. I'm sitting here, on a rainy night in Colombo, listening to fireworks go off celebrating Sri Lankan Independence Day, 25 degree plus temperatures even at night, tuk-tuk three-wheeler little auto-rickshaws honking outside the window every thirty seconds (all of this a definite recipe to wake up the kids any second)....and all I can think about is Mike, and how much I miss him.

I wanted to post today, I thought that in doing so I would write about the many birthdays that I celebrated with Mike (in high school, in university) but for some reason I just keep thinking about Mike & I first becoming friends, a process that unfolded kind of magically, when we were about 16. Mike & I went to the same high school; I used to hang out with the 'bad kids', the class-cutters, the smoking-area crew, the break-your-curfew gang. Mike was a 'skater dude' - ok, he actually couldn't skateboard if you paid him, but at least he had a skater dude haircut (seriously, Sarah, you have to dig up old Richview yearbooks and post Mike's grade 9 haircut), and he hung out with the 'good kids': athletes, non-curfew breakers, those of the ex-Boy Scout/Girl Guide persuasion, Student Council material. 

Who knows why (but to this day I thank my lucky stars for it) Mike just decided to befriend me. And, as we all know, when Mike decided to do something, he did it whole-heartedly. And so we became friends. Mike & I had art class together: he was a far, far superior artist (superheroes leapt from his pencil, I was more of the 'trace that photo' school of drawing), but he took intense interest in whatever I drew, and somehow managed to persuade me that I actually might stop tracing and start imagining. I started imagining. And things started happening, transforming.

Mike was my guru in transformation, in the possibility of morphing into something new, into becoming what you believed might be possible, should be reality: in grade 9, Mike was a kinda skinny (and as previously mentioned, wanna-be-skater-dude) 14-year old guy. But by grade 11, and through what in retrospect I realize must have been incredible amounts of sheer will-power and discipline, he had transformed himself, physically, into this muscular, athletic, rising-star-of-the-football-team (and yet somehow still incredibly nice, funny, and human) guy. There was something powerfully persuasive about him, and yet inherently relaxed. His influence on me seemed to fall like a magic cloak, overnight: one day I was skipping class and hanging out in the 'smoking area' of the parking lot at school...and somehow the next day I was running 5km with Mike in James Gardens in Etobicoke ("don't give up! Come on, Meeeee'ghaghn, COME on!!!"), sprinting up and down Centennial Hill with Mike clocking me and doing a little dance (the Washing Machine Move, where your arms move in a circular motion as if they are churning in the washing machine) every time I did another sprint, or Mike insisting that I do 12, not 10 push ups ("you are gonna have some mean pipes, Rockhead"). And all of a sudden I woke up one day and realized that Mike was the best friend I had, that he made me feel better and want to be better, that I was better, with him as my friend.  

This is the first of many, many things I want to write about Mike over the years to come: he made me, and us all better people. I miss the heck out of him, I told Sarah recently that losing Mike feels like a hole in the soul. But missing Mike is impossible to do without a smile, and there are times, so many of them, where thinking about him feels like more than just thinking about him: it feels like he's right there, somehow. I can't believe that he's gone, but the thing is, he's still in all of us.

Miss you, P.


Megan.