Defrost
– Mim Fatmi
When I met him, I hated this city.
I was miserable. Every weekend I was driving up 300 kilometres to be with the family I had chosen to leave.
I was working 80 hours a week and didn’t have time to meet anybody. I had a sick attachment to someone who didn’t want me, but I clung on anyway. My first time in an empty apartment felt bone-chillingly lonely.
Fall was dark and cold, and I didn’t see the hype about these Chinooks I’d been promised.
I met him at a time when I wasn’t in the mood for my life to be changed.
I was stubborn in my misery, and I made it known. On the weekend back in my hometown, I was griping loudly about this new home I’d chosen for myself when he overheard, and quickly came to the city’s defense. Turns out, he had just started school 300 kilometres north, but had much to say about the city of Chinooks and flames and warm hearts.
He’d show me around, he promised. He’d connect me with the right people, he’d said. He’d make sure I knew all the good coffee spots.
He loved this city.
And he seemed to make it his mission to make me love it too.
I fell in love with him at the same time I fell in love with the city. Every long weekend or break he’d get from school, he’d drive down to continue the tour with me. Our dates started off in -20 degree weather with hour-long parked car conversations, the condensation from our breath keeping us warm. Before our eyes we watched the Central Library come up, facades of pristine geometric snowflakes but the inside coloured with bustling life. There was no shortage of cafes to escape into, to wrap our cold fingers around warm mugs while we’d look across the table from one another, eyes sparkling at the prospect of “us.”
As the gruelling winter wore on, as the nights became longer and the year turned around with resolutions and unfulfilled promises, I noticed finally how much easier this winter had felt to keep trudging on—especially when a couple of warm days would come through to unsurmisably lift my spirits. Just as how every so often he’d make time from schoolwork to come see me, so would the temperature lift and sun come out. It couldn’t be a coincidence that something so simple could make me so happy.
He’s my Chinook.
Mim Fatmi
Mim Fatmi is a psychiatry resident at the University of Calgary, and a writer at heart. She finds writing (in the form of reflective journaling and blogging) to be both cathartic and necessary for her to survive in the world of medicine. While relatively new to Calgary, she has found home in the Beltline and in the warm hearts of its inhabitants.