Moving to Seattle was like stepping off a cliff: a funny feeling in the stomach, fresh air, the shock of freedom. ANDREW LAMB SCHULTZ
Sometimes a person walks into your life and changes everything. Sometimes you don’t even know them. It’s as if they’re made out of air, dispensed by time, planted in the river just to bend the stream.
His name was Darren. To say I didn’t know him would be an understatement. In high school, in the late 1990s, in the suburbs of Southern California, I spent a lot of time on AOL. I became chat-room friends with someone who was my age, who had my same first name, who lived in San Francisco. After graduating high school, I took a train up to San Francisco to meet him IRL. Darren was that guy’s friend.
