Sky, 1993

In my second year at university — 1993 — there was a girl in my German literature class who seemed not so much mysterious as self-contained.

Sara Gupta.

Half Indian. Dark brown hair that resisted cohesion, slipping forward as she leaned over her notebook. She wore long skirts even in February and boots too thin for Montreal winter. A thin silver ring looped around her thumb. She smelled faintly of patchouli and old paper, as though she had taken a wrong turn in 1974 and decided to remain there.

German literature that year was relentless. Rilke’s God-haunted solitude. Celan’s broken language. Hölderlin’s collapse into silence. Our professor paced, chalk snapping in sharp white fractures against the board.

Sara spoke rarely. But when she did, she untangled entire lectures in three sentences.

Once, in the middle of a discussion of Duino Elegies, she said, quietly, “Perhaps the terror isn’t transcendence. Perhaps it’s intimacy.” And then she closed her notebook as if she hadn’t just dismantled the hour.

After lectures, four of us began drifting to a café off Sherbrooke. The windows fogged. Someone always argued about translation politics. One of the boys insisted Celan was untranslatable; Sara disagreed and quoted him in German with careless fluency.

She stirred her tea counterclockwise.

I watched her without understanding why.

In 1993, desire did not announce itself clearly. It existed in subtext. In hair tucked behind ears. In pauses extended half a second too long.

I did not know she was interested in women.

The discovery arrived accidentally.

Before the internet gathered loneliness into clean interfaces, there were phone lines. Late-night numbers you dialled from dorm rooms that smelled faintly of radiator dust and possibility. Recorded messages floated past like ships without flags.

You spoke into a receiver and hoped someone chose you.

One February night — snow grinding against the window, radiator banging like it disapproved — I dialled.

I described myself awkwardly. English major. Books. Dancing. Curiosity.

And then I started listening.

Voice after voice slid past in static anonymity.

Until one made my spine straighten.

Low. Warm. Slightly amused.

She said she loved poetry. That she was tired of pretending not to want what she wanted. That honesty seemed revolutionary.

It was Sara.

Not her name — no one used names — but her cadence. Her restraint. Even the slight German inflection when she pronounced certain consonants.

I replayed it twice.

Then I left a message, heart beating with a recklessness I disguised as nonchalance.

The next morning in German Lit, she did not look at me differently. She took notes. Asked a question about metaphor. Packed her bag.

Two days later, before lecture, a folded piece of paper slipped under my hand.

“Friday,” it read. “If that was you.”

I did not look up immediately.

It was.

We met at Sky on Sainte-Catherine.

The Village in 1993 felt defiant and ordinary at once. Neon signs, narrow staircases, winter boots stacked near radiators. The air inside Sky held a permanent tension between sweat and electricity.

The bassline was heavy enough to dissolve hesitation.

Bodies moved because they could.

At first we played at coincidence.

Two classmates. Nothing more.

But proximity under neon light is not neutral.

Her hair caught briefly in the zipper of my coat and we disentangled it carefully. She laughed — that same low sound from the recording — and for a moment, everything around us blurred into insignificance.

We danced awkwardly. Not quite touching. Then touching.

The night did not accelerate dramatically. It unfolded.

When we left, the cold struck hard. The Village’s glow dulled beneath steady snowfall.

We walked without deciding where.

The conversation thinned into something fragile.

And then the silence stretched too far.

The kiss happened almost administratively.

Her mouth was cold. Mine tasted faintly of gin and cheap tonic. My scarf intruded and had to be tugged free. Our noses bumped. Someone exhaled sharply — laughter or nerves.

It was not graceful.

It was human.

The snow kept falling. Cars passed indifferently.

“Okay,” she said quietly.

“Okay,” I replied.

The word felt like agreement rather than conclusion.

We took separate trains.

In the following weeks, we attempted again.

And failed.

An essay on Kleist intervened.

Then her shift at the co-op.

Then my midterm.

Then someone else’s birthday.

We rescheduled so many times that the act of scheduling became the relationship.

In class, our eyes held recognition but not urgency.

There was no quarrel. No withdrawal.

Just absence where momentum should have been.

By mid-March she mentioned she would be away the next term.

The details blurred now — India, perhaps. Or Vancouver. I remember her saying “just a semester” and me nodding as though time were expandable.

We hugged in the corridor. Damp coats. Posters peeling from notice boards.

“See you,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

Which was true in theory.

Three decades later, the past resurfaced in blue notification light.

Sara Gupta sent you a friend request.

I was standing in my kitchen when I saw it. The window open slightly. Afternoon light uncomplicated.

Her hair was shorter now, silver tracing at the temples. The same steady gaze.

I accepted.

We exchanged geography. Occupations. The neutral architecture of midlife.

Then: “I still remember that night.”

I stared at the message longer than necessary.

“So do I,” I wrote.

There is an economy to middle-aged correspondence. We did not excavate the moment. We did not romanticise it.

But I understood that she was referring to the cold outside Sky. The awkwardness. The almostness.

What stays with me now is not regret.

It is scale.

How large the night felt at the time. How contained it appears now.

The smell of wet wool rising between us.

The snow resting briefly in her dark brown hair.

The precise, unreasonable certainty that something had begun.

I did not yet know that beginnings can complete themselves in a single gesture.

There was no tragedy.

Only timing — that quiet editor that trims some narratives before they expand.

A kiss outside Sky in 1993.

Imperfect.

Brief.

Enough.

It was the first.

It was the last.

And I carry it now not as loss, but as evidence — that once, before I understood the architecture of consequence, I stepped forward without calculation.

Sometimes that is all a beginning needs to be.