#45. David Huang (Sunday, July 6, 2003)

What was your best day…of re-connecting with someone you hadn’t seen in a long time?

For the longest part of my childhood, even after my family had moved to Ottawa, I had considered David Huang kind of a best friend (as discussed at length in #91). I had seen him on two separate occasions when visiting Toronto (#91, #63), but both times my family had been too busy doing other Toronto stuff for us two to spend much time just hanging out together.

But now, he was coming to visit us in Ottawa for the first time. For a full week. And it would be just him.

He came on Sunday night, and that was the best night of them all. It was already past midnight, and we were just chatting in my bedroom, when we get into this whole conversation about each other’s lives (which we never had time to do before)…and I can fully relate to everything that’s going on with him in his middle school and his with mine. And this is middle school now, so these are some legit issues.
Somewhere in the course of that deep discussion, we decide to just say screw sleeping. I turn on the light, I show him the (really badly-written) novel (#117)¹ I had written over the course of the last year, and then we go downstairs to start a new game of Toy Story 2 (underrated classic that he had lent me) and get pretty far.
Pretty much every night after the first one, we continue having these long winding conversations about different things (the recently-released Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, quirks of different classmates, sports), and honestly it felt like finding a best friend you didn’t know you had…all over again (#91).
On Tuesday, David and I, along with my mom and brother, spend the day visiting the Royal Canadian Mint and the Museum of Nature. Then David and I spend the night trying to fix Tim’s family’s computer, after five-year-old Tim (#73) broke it while playing games (which, for some reason, we find to be hilarious). We can’t figure it out, and neither can my dad, and they end up having to get the whole thing re-imaged or something.
Thursday evening I have a game for my soccer league. David is there watching, as well as trying (unsuccessfully) to take on flag boy duties. I end up scoring the winning goal on a sweet cross. On the drive back, it’s me, him, and Todd Xing (classmate, soccer teammate, and actual best friend at the time) all piled up in the car. David and Todd get along really well – and it gives me this strange feeling of happiness to see two friends from two different worlds crossing over like that.
On Friday, his last full day, I finally do the obvious thing – teach him how to play Magic: The Gathering; and doing that with a (even temporary) best friend is just the greatest feeling in the world.

That was one week that went by way too quickly.

After we replaced our old computer in 2008 while I was away at university (and too depressed to care), I thought I had lost that manuscript forever. But in early 2019, after hunting through a bunch of old CDs in the house, I actually found it! (though the last 4-5 chapters were missing). A thrilling feeling that was only partially dampened by me reading it and getting reminded of how bad it was.