like a kite. Big wind raises it higher./ibrFortune Cookie, Toronto, Canada;brNovember 1996brbriRelinquishing fears now allows you to succeed./ibrFortune Cookie, Port of Spain, Trinidad;brNovember 1998brbrPerhaps the hardest thing, we realized in hindsight, was making the decision to go.brbrIt had started as idle, dreamy chat in the bleak days of January and February, the time of year I detest in Toronto, when all the color is sucked out of the city, and even the snow looks gray and tired. As I do.brbrI left for work in the dark and returned home in the dark. On the rare days the sun bothered to show itself, it was a pale lemon pretender, offering little warmth and barely brightening the gunmetal surface of Lake Ontario. When I cooked dinner in the evening, Steve would catch me warming my
hands over the stove, and, later, huddling over the heating vent in our bedroom while I read. It's a very sad sight, he would say. I looked like the little match girl rather than a successful magazine editor. I didn't
care. I longed to be too hot.brbrSteve -- three years younger than me, all hard angles and sharp edges on the outside, a romantic softie within -- was my partner in work as well as life. A small-town Ontario
boy, he'd relocated to the city to go to art college in the seventies and never left. For the past few years, we'd been working for the same magazine, and it was hard to tell most days where business ended and private life began. We operated in separate spaces: he, the freelance art director, from a crammed studio tucked into the back of the second floor of our house; me, the editor, at the magazine's main office, a fifteen-minute
drive away. B@%… ¸Që…ÿ¾Û€
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