The Setup

I was finally finishing my undergrad at UB (SUNY Buffalo) around 2009 — I was 25. Buffalo left some things to be desired and Toronto had more people, so I started looking a bit. Probably on OkCupid at that time, I found someone who was around 20 or 21. Let's call her Vanessa, but her real name was perhaps even more splendid. Mind you, this one was like 9/10 on a bad day — thin, a bit classy and introverted and quite intelligent. Only-child syndrome, under-socialized, loner type indie girl, but very cool - parents still together and dad was scary, so she didn't mis-behave too much.

Vanessa was embarrassed to say that she worked at Victoria's Secret (not sure why she was embarrassed about it except maybe it was too mainstream for her own tastes) and me being a bit slow, I didn't do the math — in all likelihood it would have made her quite attractive on average. I guess I didn't want to overthink it, maybe to my detriment. Her own pictures on her profile were made for her to look more average, but she wasn't, which I didn't really find out until I met her in person. Her coworkers had suggested we go to the CN Tower for our first date. I had been once before and for some dumb reason told her that it would be too cliché for us. Looking back that was pretty dumb — it would have been cool to go, but we nixed it unfortunately. I had gone home to California for the summer of 2009 and had left a laptop in Buffalo on my desk. To this day I am not sure why I left it behind and didn't take it with me to California. It was a group house where people locked their bedroom doors. We were about 2 blocks from the bad side of town and someone broke into the house, probably via the bathroom window, while I was gone. Much was stolen including my laptop. The place was a mess, stuff strewn about. I got home on a Friday and was supposed to go see her the next day, Saturday.

The Day Everything Went Wrong

I was supposed to head up to Toronto around 1pm and meet the girl around 3pm, a 2-hour bus ride up there. Unfortunately my super type-A annoying landlord Lena had the handyman come at 7am on a Saturday to fix the doors in the house that had been busted through. I had probably gone to bed at 2am and got my 4.5 hours of sleep, woken on the wrong side of a sleep cycle. I was pissed in the morning, worst mental state, and felt and looked like absolute shit. Of course it was raining in Buffalo the day I left and I remember being dog tired, felt terrible and rode my bike to the pharmacy to pick up something, probably some sleeping pills. Hit a giant deep pothole that was covered in water and took a huge spill that could have been way worse, like knock out your teeth worse. Car behind me stopped and said "are you alright?" — could tell it was not great, but I was OK. It was not going well.