Brendyn.

Buckle up. I have a lot to say about this one. I first met Brendyn in the Rocky Mountains in Alberta where I lived with Ryan, my boyfriend at the time. I came home to the trailer we rented one night with a handful of people in my living room. I hated when Ryan did that without notice. I'd get home from work and have to hang out in my own home with a bunch of people I didn't even know. Brendyn was Ryan’s co-worker. He was so tall, so loud, so animated, his arms flying in the air as he told a story. He never stopped moving. I remember staring over at Ryan with a look on my face that read, "Who the fuck did you bring into our home?" I sat down on the couch. Brendyn sat across from me and we started talking about the east coast, where we both moved to Alberta from. I had a picture frame with a photo of Brittni, my best friend on the coffee table. She's from a small town in Nova Scotia. I handed it to him saying, “Do you know her?”, making fun of the fact that the Maritimes are so small, everyone seems to know everyone. He looked at it. “Oh yaaaaa, Brittni! My best friend has dated her sister forever! I thought, “Ok if this guy knows Britt, he might be alright.” Brendyn hung out with Ryan. We were friends but only because of that fact. I didn't know him very well. After the Rockies, Ryan and I moved to Charlottetown, P.E., to be on the east coast, close to my family for a little bit. When I lived in Alberta, I lived with Ryan, two other male roommates, and a dog. So, I was ecstatic, over the moon, really, to only live with one person. We settled in. Ryan convinced me to get a dog - one I didn't want. (It's been eleven years and my dog Hank has been my right-hand man the whole way through). So, we lived a few months like that, Ryan, Hank just a little puppy, and myself. Then one day Ryan came home and asked me if Brendyn could come stay with us for a while. He wanted to move back out east. Just for a month or so until he gets on his feet. I wasn’t impressed to lose some of the privacy that I had just gained, but I said yes because Brendyn was funny, and it was only for a short amount of time, and I mean, how bad could it be? Brendyn moved in, and it was awesome. I would come home to the apartment and Brendyn would be mopping the floors. I would laugh, what are you doing?? He’d say, “Oh just cleaning a little bit, me and Hank just got back from a walk.” "Ok!" I would get home from work and he would offer to cook for me. I was really into the show Keeping up with the Kardashians at the time. What can I say, I like trash T.V. It’s a guilty pleasure. I got Brendyn hooked. He would get home from work. “Are you watching without me?! What did I miss??” After a few months, Brendyn just full on moved in with us. I was happy about it. He was nicer to me then my boyfriend was anyhow. That summer my parents needed a side of their house re-painted. Brendyn worked as a painter previously, so he and I made the trip to paint it for them. It was like +35 that day, the sun beating down on us while we stood on the scaffolding drinking beers, not water, to keep hydrated. Laughing the whole time. Later that night after dinner, my dad got mad, who knows

about what, it could have been anything, but when he got mad he would get mean, and that night was no exception. I went to sit outside in the backyard, hot with embarrassment. I tried very hard to hide that part of my family life from others, and I had so much shame attached to it when I wasn’t able to. He came and sat down beside me. “It’s ok Jo, my dad was like that when he was alive too.” It made me feel closer to Brendyn, like he accepted me, flaws and all with no judgement. It really solidified our friendship in the early years. Brendyn and I have gone through every breakup we’ve both had in the last twelve years together. I remember after I had moved to Ontario, I had just got my own place after my own breakup with Ryan, and was sitting in the backyard when he called. He told me about the breakup he was going through at the time, that he was sitting in his empty apartment. His ex had taken literally everything. She left me a spatula, Jo. Am I supposed to use it with my non-existent frying pan? Cook my non-existent eggs? Like what the fuck?” I laughed I didn’t mean to but I did. He was going through this breakup and still some how he was making it hilarious without meaning to. Brendyn is hands down the funniest person I’ve ever met. Brendyn was living in Moncton at the time my dad got really sick. When I got the call late one night at work in Ontario that my dad had been rushed to the hospital, I booked a flight to go home for a week. I stayed for three months. I didn’t realize at the time that my dad’s last weeks were going to be spent in a hospital… that he wouldn’t be going home again. Or that Cole, my mom, and I would be pretty much living at the hospital as well. We did full twenty-four hour "shifts" we would call them, at the hospital… two of us on, one of us at home. But we only had one vehicle, and the hospital was forty minutes away, and we had Hunter, our family dog to take care of. It was too much. My dad was in the hospital for seven weeks, but the last five he was in palliative care. Brendyn stayed with us basically the entirety of the last five weeks, feeding our dog, driving me into the hospital, driving Cole home, supporting my family through one of the hardest times in our lives. When he would drive me to the hospital, he would ask what I wanted to listen to. For some reason, I got hooked on the song Round Here by The Counting Crows. I would stare out the window as he drove, preparing my elf for another night on "the floor of death" where almost every "shift" I would go in for, I would hear sobbing from behind closed doors. Another family losing a loved one. The next day walking by the room to see an empty bed, with fresh sheets, knowing soon enough it would be our turn. “Can you play it again?” I’d say to Brendyn as we drove, and he would put the song on repeat. Sometimes it’s the only thing that we would listen to for the entire drive. To this day, whenever I get into Brendyn’s truck it’s a song we play. Sometimes he will have it queued up ready to go. Sometimes I’ll request it, but either way, we drive down the highway singing as loud as we can to the chorus of that song. When I decided it was time for me to move from Ontario, home to the east coast to be with my mom, I phoned Brendyn and asked him how he would feel about me flying him out to where I was, and him driving my Jeep, with a U-haul attached, myself, and Hank back to the East. “Sure Jo! Just give me the dates and ill book it off. I love a good road trip.” And so he did. He took his one week of vacation to fly provinces over, spend two quick days to help pack up the U-haul, worked last minute underneath the hood of my worn down Jeep the night before we left, and

then drove Hank and I home. The first part of the trip was okay. Sunny. Easy. Then we hit a snowstorm. A bad one. All the way through Quebec. He drove the whole time. We kept on pulling over at gas stations to track the storm. He would say, it looks like we are almost through the worst of it, let’s keep on going. But we never were. Finally around 9:00 p.m. I got him to stop at a store. I went in, bought him two king size cans of redbull and myself two king size cans of Heineken. I got back into the jeep. “Sorry Brendyn, I gotta!”, cracking myself a beer. My nerves were shot. My nerves. We pulled back out onto the highway. He wiped his eyes, put his hand through his beard and said, “Back into the devils den.” We drove until about 2:00 a.m. when I called it. “Pull over. This is crazy.” We were somewhere close to the border of New Brunswick. We found a hotel. Hotel 1212, it was called. I waited in the car as he went in to see if there was a room available. Watching him from the jeep as I saw his arms flying all over the place talking to the guy at the front desk, I thought… “Well, this doesn’t look like it’s going very well.” He came out to get me. “We’re all good to go, Jo! He just needs your credit card.” We walked in and Brendyn started speaking fluent French to the attendant. I looked at him shocked. “You speak French??” I had known Brendyn for a decade and had no idea he could speak another language. We got to our room and immediately passed out. The next morning I woke up, while Brendyn was cuddling Hank, I made a coffee and opened up the curtains to nothing but sunshine and snow-topped rolling hills. Our spirits were high, as we made the final push into Moncton. We were both dancing hard in the jeep, so excited to almost be off the road. And then the vehicle started to shake. I looked at him. “Are we ok?” He said, “I don’t know?” We pulled over to the side of the highway to find that our right rear tire on the U-Haul had exploded. If Brendyn hadn’t pulled towards the middle of the road the night before, the tire definitely would have blew out in the in the snowstorm. We were super lucky. After we finally got it fixed, we got to my house, and unloaded the U-haul. He sat down for a quick piece of lasagna and a beer, and then got up and went directly to his job for a night shift. A week later I got a package in the mail. I opened it up to find a Tee-shirt with a picture of GPS coordinates that showed the storm we just went through. At the top, words that said "Hotel 1212!" and at the bottom "The Devil’s Den." What a guy. Brendyn never comes to my house empty handed. He always shows up with something he made for me like a charcuterie serving tray, or a huge wooden beautifully stained planter for my mom to put her flowers in. We had a huge fight only a few months before I made this trip. The first one we have ever had. There was lots of swearing (on his part) and lots of tears (on mine). We hashed it out. We made up. I told him I was scared of losing him, and he said, “Well just take that thought right out of your head, because that’s just never going to happen Jo.” And I believe him. We’ve been through so much together. I don’t know if we will ever live in the same place again. I hope we do. I hope we get to go on more adventures one day. Because to me, Brendyn, wherever you are is just a better place to be.

JW