My foot crunched the rose pedal on the wet pavement, spreading a crimson paste across the boulevard. I don’t why I had kept the bloody thing in my pocket for the weekend, but seeing it now, so easily eviscerated with the pass of a shoe, it was difficult not to get just a little sentimental. Was that what this all about? Why I had kept that damn rose? Sentimentality? Had I been holding on to something that never existed in the first place? Was I so possessed by the feeling that I had to keep some reminder even after it had been surgically removed from my heart? I stared at the beautiful red cream on the pavement, wishing I could take it in my arms and build a new rose from it. Thankfully Farah managed to get my head out of that one.

            “So, do you want me to address the elephant in the room here, or just let you keep blankly fantasizing about the sidewalk.”

            I shook my head. “I wasn’t fantasizing about the sidewalk, Farah.”

            She laughed. “Why not. It’s a good looking sidewalk. Not too many cracks, right beside some beautiful trees. It doesn’t have a brain so it probably also shares your taste in music. I think you two would get along famously, certainly much better than that Mariah character.”

            My words started creeping past my tongue in a semi-angered, semi-amused fashion. “Why do you always have to work my crushes into our conversations?”

            Farah smiled again, her lips pushing against her hijab. “A girl stands you up and you still have a crush on her? I had hoped you’d progressed since that point.”

            “Well, what can I say, I get caught up in the past sometimes.”

            We reached her house at the end of the boulevard. It was a typical two story Victorian townhouse, trimmed in green and protected by an enormous oak. As cultural attaché for the Iranian Embassy, Farah’s father could have afforded more, but as the parent of seven children, he was pushing the financial limits as it was. Iran might have been a corrupted theocracy, but the money the clerics managed to take from their people rarely found its way back to Ottawa. I had been friends with Farah long enough to hear her say that more than a few times. And we certainly had been friends for a long while. I had been introduced to her with the rest of the class at the Gatineau Academie de Francais nearly five years ago when her family was fresh to Canada. It was odd for a girl who couldn’t speak a word of French to come to a French Academy, but apparently because she had managed to stuff English and Farsi into her brain already, learning the Gallic tongue wasn’t too arduous. I had been assigned to help her pick up the language, and we became fast friends. Since my mother worked as a translator for the Malian ambassador, we had our respective embassies in common. Later on, as we became more comfortable with each other, we discovered that our both our fathers had forced us into a religion which we cared little for and in actuality knew nothing about.

            “I don’t even speak Arabic,” Farah had cried one day during the walk home from school, “and that’s the only language they read the Koran in. You can buy an English translation, but it’s considered a bastardized version. God speaks in a tongue I cannot comprehend. I just utter nonsense and hope I’m singing in the right tune.”

            “Trust me,” I had replied, “it doesn’t matter whether you understand it or not. It never gets any better.”

            Now there was barely a secret which I hadn’t shared with her and although it is impossible to know exactly what another person is thinking, I was pretty sure that the same was true with her as well.

I stopped in front of her yard, and planted my feet in the sidewalk. I couldn’t approach her house, not without being considered an intruder. Farah had already said that the only reason she was allowed to walk home with me was because her mother thought I was a homosexual. Apparently this made it okay for me to spend time with Farah at school, but it was definitely not acceptable for me to go anywhere near her house. I had never heard of any verse in the Koran that said, “thou shalt defend one’s home from potentially gay Italians” but I decided to choose my battles on that one. So, I stayed exactly where I was, waiting for Farah’s reply.

            She turned back just before opening the door and said, “Sometimes you gotta get back to the present, Beni.” And then she closed the red, wooden door and disappeared.

            Beni, God I hated that name. In truth there was no one in my family, immediate or extended that did like it. The name had been a compromise between my mother and father. My father, the Italian, and probably a remnant of the old Fascist regime had been hard set on calling me Benito the instant he had seen the little Johnson on the ultrasound pictures. My mother, a proud Quebecois descended from endless generations of the Habitents decided that I was to be called Boniface. I can’t even begin to explain the logic behind this reasoning, being that Boniface is the patron saint of Germany, but according to my father at least, she had read one of her wacko, communist magazines and the name Boniface had  moulded itself into her mind and it was going to take a lobotomy to get it out. Eventually mother began to relent somewhat and suggested calling me “Bonnie”. My father erupted in anger at the proposal and said that naming me Bonnie would be asking that I became a queer. I’ve never really been certain why this mattered so much to him, since mother at least had always been superficially non-discriminatory and my parents did agree on a few things, but his feet were firmly planted on the “Bonnie” issue. Later, only a few days before I popped out unexpectedly in fact, he countered with the name Benedict. Mom didn’t like the idea of naming a kid after a breakfast since that apparently would force me into morbid obesity. Again, although I can see the health issue here, my parents were definitely overthinking the name. And so my name actually came about on the emergency drive to the hospital when my father confused one of Mother’s contraction grunts as a “nee” and filled out my name as Beni Jean-Luc Mussini. He even managed to put the veiled reference to Star Trek: The Next Generation in my name by waiting to fill out the birth certificate until after my mother had entered a postpartum semi-comatose state. Thus was the genesis of Beni.

            I continued my walk down the boulevard, staring up at the browning leaves on the autumn oaks and crisp, rusty sun slowly making its descent in the middle distance. I watched the last leaves of summer desperately cling for life on a hopeless and abandoned post and finally, after being evicted from their long sentry duty, found joy again in floating like falling clouds to welcoming pavement below. I had always wondered why they struggled so much against the gentle wind trying to set them free. Did they not see that they were struggling futilely against liberty for another brief second of the tyrannical trunk? Did they really prefer the rough clutch of a dying oak to the weightless soaring through the endless ocean of the shrill autumn air or was it simply that they knew safety in the malevolent arms of their ancient master and saw only peril and hazard below? I heard a crunch beneath my feet and began to understand their point of view.

            It was always so simple to trust the devil you know, to feel entranced by the mixture of old hatred and enduring love, to never venture past the confines of the gloomiest cell but instead sit and relive the long lost glory of the past. I could understand that, perhaps I could learn to adopt the strategy myself. But no matter how comfortable or secure there was always that nagging feeling biting in the back of my head that something was wrong, that opportunities were being missed and life was passing me by. No matter how full I was, I couldn’t stop the hunger. Perhaps that was why I had been so forward with Maria. Perhaps it was also why I lied about her to Farah. She had not stood me up, but in fact had met at the Le Baccara earlier than expected. Ever living by the ideal of dressing for the job you want and not the one you have, she had opted for a professional woman’s business suit opposed to the casual dress or skirt I had imagined and developed over sixty well written compliments for. Instead I had been forced to say a simple, “You are looking rather statuesque tonight, Maria”. I don’t know how many times I bashed my head against the wall of the restaurant washroom for saying that one. We were both in suits; it felt more like a meeting than a date. I probably should have gotten the hint, but like most people, I’m far more observant after the fact. I’m practically a Sherlock Holmes when I’m remembering, but I stumble around like a drunkard when I’m actually living.

            My father had jokingly (I hope) told me to smooth her over by asking the waiter for “the strong stuff”. I decided to rely on more of the quips and poems I had found on the internet or dreamed up myself. Although they were all appropriate and some even a tad bit on the humorous side, they bounced off her like a marshmallow gun on King Kong. No matter what those discount rental DVD comedies tell you how all a girl wants is charm and persistence, at some level they have to like you as well. Maria may have been the sweetest girl I had ever met in my life, after all it’s why she had agreed to go out with a guy like me in the first place, but sometimes even the angels among us have to walk amongst the earth dwellers. That night, the Saturday before Halloween in the great year of 2011, was such a time. Although she never articulated it to me, I knew that she had only gone on a date with me because she had taken pity. Perhaps to her I was nothing more than a child at her hospital, looking for a little relief from the pain of loneliness. Regardless, the nurse decided to discharge me a little too early for my comfort. After we had eaten she took me aside and in the moment that all the movies had told me we would share our first kiss and love each other until the very ends of time, she decided instead to inform me that she just wanted us to be friends and that we probably shouldn’t go out again anytime soon. She tried to say it in a nice way, but there really was no nice way to say it.

            So why lie about it to Farah? Well I suppose it was the politician in me wanting to lay blame. Maria was the nice girl I thought she was and now I knew I couldn’t have her. So I decided to get out of this problem like I did all my others, by lying to myself and those around me. I created another Maria, a heartless, twisted and cruel bitch who’d left me on the side of the road with a bundle of roses crumpled against my chest. I had told the story of the woman who had smiled wickedly as tears flowed down my cheeks and I gripped my hair in frustration. She was the pariah and I was the saint. It wasn’t my problem, it was hers. I didn’t lose a great opportunity, she did. I wouldn’t be alone for the rest of my life, she would.

            Yeah, that sounds great, I thought. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I might be able to fool Farah, but there was no way I could convince myself. I annihilated another leaf beneath my foot.