And so we embrace again
Behind the dunes
This beach is cold
On winter afternoons
But holding you close is like holding the summer sun
I'm warm from the memory of days to come...
-Billy Joel, "This is the Time"

I still have that first original note, all these years later, set in a silver frame on my wall. The note on yellow lined college rule paper, the note that changed my life…

It was my very first lecture of my very first day of graduate school at the University of Michigan, the beginning of a new life for me. Again. Four years before I had come to Northwestern and Evanston with nothing but what I had in my suitcases and my best girl-friend at my side, not knowing what to expect, hoping for the best, nervous about the worst. I would find so much in the next four years: friends, and adventure, and an entire world that I came to fall in love with –the world of the RenFaires, of the SCA.

And I had found Thomas: Thomas who loved me; Thomas who betrayed me; Thomas who had earned forgiveness to build a love yet stronger; Thomas who offered me his hand in marriage; Thomas who I had lost. In the legal posturing of his killers I found the worst in humanity; in the friends who helped me I found the best. I mourned him. I always will. But life goes on; and so I had come to Ann Arbor, again with my best friend by my side, to see what life would deal me again. And on that very first day, I got a note…

Passing notes in class! Who still passes notes in class? Not since Junior high –if that!—for me, but here it was, a carefully folded note with my name –my SCA name—written clearly on it. Equal parts puzzled and curious, eager to know where this was going, I quietly opened the note, hoping desperately the professor wouldn’t notice…and as I saw just what was in the note my excitement redoubled.

My mystery noter was not only an artist, judging by the pen sketch he had executed on the note, but he was a * furry * artist, just like me! Anthropomorphic art –the world of art based on animals that looked and acted like people, like Goofy or Daffy Duck-- was not a common genre under any circumstances. The number of “furry” SCAdians was smaller yet. I was one…and clearly my mystery noter was, too. For he had drawn a smiling, muscular black panther gentleman in medieval garb, doing a sweeping bow across the right hand side of the note. Down the left, in flowing script, he did welcome me on his behalf and that of his Lady to Cynnabar, the local SCA group, and said that if I were interested in learning more, I should look for a gentleman in a black leather jacket waiting at the rear of the auditorium right after class. I don’t think I absorbed a single bit of information the rest of that lecture, instead willing the time to fly faster to bring the end of class all that much sooner…

He resembled his “furry” alter ego in many respects. He was tall –taller than most men. Even under his leather jacket his strength was obvious. His smile was every bit as big and broad as that on the note. And he was handsome, not in the fine-featured way of a Sidhe or an elf, but in a rugged way. I knew him –had seen him before at the Middle Kingdom’s biggest events; knew him and his lady Rosella, and I smiled with a curtsey as he took my hand in his huge paw and bowed. Our classmates, pushing out, either ignored us or gave us but a single strange glance, but let the mundanes stare: not our fault the world has long forgotten the graces of a time that never was…

“Welcome to Cynnabar, Abigail,” Christopher smiled.

Christopher Miao, it turned out, was also starting graduate school at the same time as I, while his beloved lady Rosella was starting in law; both long-time Cynnabar people and active in the Middle Kingdom, I had been good friends with them in before I came, part of the wide network of friends made at Pennsics and Coronations and Crowns and smaller wars all across the huge lands of the Dragon. With their help, Erin and I were soon back into the thick of SCAdian life, with Thursday night singing and dancing for me and Sunday fight practices for Erin, revels and events all across Pentamere, the four of us having all kinds of SCAdian fun…

And all four of us were sharing the classroom experience as well, the common grind of the early days of graduate/professional school. The four of us spent long evenings together around the kitchen table in Rosella and Christopher’s apartment in the rambling house on Ashley street. Erin and her pages of equations, and Rosella with her tomes and tomes of law books, and Chris and I with stacks of papers xeroxed from the medical library, a plate of Rose’s Greek pastries or the treats Thomas had taught me to make amidst us. Or the four of us crashed out on the couch for a study break watching late-night reruns of Mystery Science Theater 3000 or Monty Python; or playing through the twisted AD&D campaigns the fiendishly imaginative Rose would craft…

Rosella and I would trade kitchen tips or sing duets together; Chris and I would have artist jam sessions, his bold colored inks a natural match for my detailed inking, his command of action a complement for my focus on detail. And it was Chris who introduced me to the world of MUCKs, the online adventures in furrydom and community that were just in their infancy with the birth of the net…

Between work, research, SCAdian things, art, and just hanging out, it was no wonder I didn’t sleep very much that first year –and I loved every minute of it. By the time that first Halloween came around and the four of us went to the Cynnabar party as the Four Musketeers, there was no question that Dumas’ war-cry of friendship was every bit our own: All for one, and one for all.

Chris’s family came over almost every other weekend, as they did throughout college, his outspoken, energetic mom, his quieter and calmer dad, his twin young brother and sister, each eight years old and full of all kinds of energy. We and they hit it off immediately. “You two help Rose keep my little Chris out of trouble,” his mom admonished us in her own heavily accented English, still unable to shake a childhood growing up in Shanghai, even twenty years after she came to the United States herself. “Good boy, but oh so much trouble!” she mock-scolded. Yes, Momma, we’d nod and say and wink at poor Chris. Chris’ dad never understood what Chris saw in the SCA, but tolerated it with amusement; his Mom cross-stitched favors for Chris to wear on the battle-field to keep her fingers limber between the operations she was chief surgeon on. And both of them loved all of us.

Chris’ young siblings thought we were the greatest. We’d romp all around their huge house in Birmingham in wild indoor games of Cops and Robbers, the four of us college kids laughing and racing and running up and down with Sara and Stephen. The family went apple-picking together, hayrides together, sleigh-riding together, out to Windsor’s Chinatown across the border together; Chris’s parents had already unofficially adopted Rose, and now they adopted us, too.

And the New Year came, and we went together to see the Maple Syrup run and sled down the Arboretum hill on “borrowed” cafeteria trays. And we took Sara and Stephen to their first SCA event and Sara was so enraptured by the youth fighting that she decided to join and became a holy terror in helmet and shield. (“Another eight years and Sara can help Erin keep you out of trouble on the field,” Chris’ mom said, proudly.) And winter became spring and spring became summer, and soon it was June and I dropped Chris and his family and Rose off at Detroit Metro for their big trip back to China, Sara and Stephen finally being old enough to be manageable for the long trip, to visit the places where Chris’ parents had grown up, the Great Wall, the Forbidden City. Things had been crazy that day, the Miao family car wouldn’t start, at the last moment they gave up and I grabbed our van, raced out to the airport, and all in a pell-mell rush to help them make the plane, I hurriedly dropped their bags at the curb, reminded them to send postcards, gave them hugs and waved goodbye as they ran into the terminal to try to get aboard before the doors closed.

I flipped on the TV when I got back to our apartment. I caught the first few words of a grim-voiced announcer narrating the destruction of Northwest Airlines Flight 6. Less than two minutes later, I was doing forty miles an hour over the speed limit, racing back to the airport. In those days, you didn’t need tickets to get past security, and so I pushed our way to the end of Concourse C, horror warring with a wild desperate hope, both giving way to indescribable relief when we reached gate C16 and I saw Chris there, running with my eyes wet with tears of joy, running and crying and calling out Chris’s name and wrapping him in the biggest, fiercest bear-hug I could muster, impossibly glad that Chris was okay…

Gladness that died instantly the moment I looked up into Chris’ eyes and saw the dead, sick look in them.

“Chris”, I asked in a small, fearful voice, “where’s Rose?”

He stared at me numbly for a moment. And then he looked out the concourse window. Out towards where a pillar of black, oily smoke rose into the clear mid-summer sky.

Being late to the gate, the flight was overbooked and they were one seat short. Chris volunteered to wait for the next flight, while his parents, Rose, Sara and Stephen went ahead. Which meant Chris was watching from the terminal when the DC10 his fiancée and his family were aboard suffered a freak catastrophic hydraulic failure on takeoff and suddenly pitched into the ground at more than four hundred miles an hour. There were no survivors.

I didn’t cry that first night –I couldn’t, couldn’t let myself, not when Chris needed me to be strong for him, held on to me around the shoulders like it was the only thing keeping him from being blown away, gripped me so hard it left bruises, over that long, horrible, endless night. Held on to me as we walked, together, out to the hangar on the far side of the airport, where they were laying out bundles under yellow sheets in neat rows and nothing could mask the smell, where he, unable even to mouth words, simply nodded when they asked him if this was his mother, if that was his beloved Rose. I couldn’t let myself cry. Not when he needed me to be strong.

Others had been there for me that long night in the hospital in Evanston when for a moment it seemed Thomas might yet pull through, and then he did not; others had been there for me that long night years before after the firemen had pulled the bodies of my parents from the ashes of our firebombed home. Now it was my turn to be there for him; and in truth, it shames me to say that maybe focusing on being strong for him let me avoid my own sorrow; because I loved Rose and Sara and Stephen and Mr. & Mrs. Miao, too. Maybe it was because I wasn’t brave enough to face my own pain, so I focused on trying to help Chris with his. And helping Chris plan the funerals; and helping Chris go through and dispose a lifetime’s worth of stuff, and selling his childhood home, and the thousand other pieces of business that come with the end of lives, for Chris had no other living relatives, no other family, and all the burdens fell to him, and to those who were helping him. Erin asks me sometimes if I feel resentment that I did so much to help Chris, so much more than anyone else. How could I? It was no burden –it was an honor and privilege. And really, in the big picture, so little, compared to the magnitude of what he –we-- had lost…

And helping Chris through all the terrible things that Chris had to endure at the hands of Rose’s family, the family who had long before disowned Rose yet still felt they had the right to butt in now and a right to blame Chris…but the hateful things that happened there, even now are too painful to detail, to remember. Rose was a wonderful, beautiful, vibrant woman, more than her bigoted biological family ever deserved, and Chris’ parents were more a family to her than her biological parents ever were. Chris tells me later that I can’t imagine where I found the strength to be reasonable with that crew of jackals and bastards, whose behavior was so appalling the judge finally issued restraining orders to keep them out of Chris’ way. I don’t remember being particularly reasonable. I really don’t remember all that much of anything from those terrible days. I just hope I did enough.

It just seemed like the right thing to do for the three of us –Erin, Christopher, and I—to move into one place together at the end of the summer. I don’t recall or remember a conscious decision, but it was almost an unspoken understanding that it would be too cruel to force Chris to, after a lifetime living with first his family and then with his high-school sweetheart Rose, suddenly begin living alone. And there was a certain unexplainable insight I had that could help me help Chris in a way few others could, some kind of sixth-sense when he needed distance and when he needed someone to hug, when he needed someone to talk or cry with, something only someone who had lost the one they loved as their second half can know. We had lost our parents; I had lost my Thomas; he had lost his Rose, and we would never find anyone like them again; and we could understand each other like few others who had never been so hurt could.

It was in the late fall, at Newcomer’s Revel, that Chris attended his first SCA event since that terrible June Day. It was a few weeks later he got back into the fighting practices. And so, through that first painful fall and winter, with help from Erin and Issac and Marcus and so many others of Cynnabar and FurryMUCK and elsewhere, Chris struggled back into the world.

His work and classes went well; we finished our classes and cleared our prelim exams together. As Erin’s schedule began to take her more and more apart from me in time, increasingly it was with fellow biologist Chris that I went to events with together, went to Cons together, did furry art together, planned mischief together. We were roommates; we were best friends; we were partners in crime; we were partners in the same dance. We were joined not only by a common grief, but, as the months passed, also by a longer and longer series of common memories of joy.

People, even the best of people, lapse into gossip with each opportunity. Our friends and acquaintances had soon concluded that Chris and I were an item, and the vast majority were, I was told later, privately joyful that it was so. It made for a good story: two people who had lost their first loves coming together to fall in love with each other. The truth was not quite that simple. Or was it?

If anyone would have bothered to ask me about it, I would have smiled, but denied that we were anything more that close, close friends. Thomas Carolan was my trueheart, and I would always love him; and noone could ever possibly replace him. And it was the same for Chris and Rose. Chris and I both understood this about each other; understood this without ever saying it out loud. We were merely each other’s best friend, each other’s confidant, constant companion and cheerleader. We trusted each other utterly, had seen each other through up and down. We each knew that if we were ever in trouble, we could count utterly on the other to be there.

Chris and I never forbade each other from dating other people…it just never happened. Neither would either of us have felt betrayed by the other if it had happened; indeed, we would have been overjoyed. We weren’t, after all, boyfriend and girlfriend, merely best friends. Chris fought for me in the Crown Tourneys not because I was his girlfriend; merely because I was his best friend. Sure, we hugged, we kissed, we did silly so-called romantic things together, but that’s what any man and woman who like each other as close friends do. True friendship is not jealous, nor is it envious or suspicious: true friendship is when the other person’s happiness, in and by itself, makes you happy.

But maybe, that’s all love is.