The last Saturday of August 2012 came, and I found myself feeling blue. The name is Steven, and I'm a big and tall Black man living in the City of Ottawa, Province of Ontario. I was born in the town of Cap-Haitien in the Republic of Haiti and raised in the City of Boston, Massachusetts. From 1999 to 2009, I lived in the heart of New England but in mid-November 2009 I moved to the region of Ontario, Canada. Family troubles, and economic difficulties drove me from the lovely New England which I loved to seek greener pastures elsewhere. I adjusted to life in Canada even though it wasn't easy. The life of a Haitian-born American guy in the Confederation of Canada isn't easy but I would like to think I managed fairly decently.
Since moving to the City of Ottawa, my life has changed. I learned to speak French and Haitian Creole in my native Haiti but spent years without using either language while living in America. In the Capital of Canada, they both came back to me pretty quickly. I began searching for my place in that ever-changing world which is Canada, I guess. I was seeing a tall, beautiful young Afro-Caribbean woman for most of the summer. June. I met her at the Blair Cineplex in the east end of Ottawa, when I went to see the movie The Dictator. We met there, and totally clicked. We exchanged phone numbers and began seeing each other. I can honestly say that in my twenty five years upon the earth, I have never met someone I got along with better. June was wonderful, and we had similar tastes in movies, comic books, and other things I found interesting.
The gal was friendly, generous and open. When we went out, we often went Dutch, though with my old-school instincts I had to learn to compromise. It's a new century and sometimes on a date, a gal wants to pay and she can if she wants to. June was amazing, and I honestly was starting to think of her as my other half. We got along wonderfully, and we thought along the same lines. She studied Police Foundations at La Cite Collegiale, a French-language community college located in the east end of Ottawa and I am studying Criminology at Carleton University in the southern bend of Ottawa. We seemed like a good match. I'm originally from Haiti as I mentioned before, and June came from the Caribbean as well. Her father is Trinidadian and her mother is Haitian, making her at least partially one of my people. I was really fond of her, but in time our relationship began to break down.
From the beginning of June until the end of July, things were simply wonderful between June and I. She warned me that our relationship was going to change in August, because of external factors. The whole time we were going out together, June told me that she was working as part-time staff at a certain retirement home/hospital near downtown Ottawa. Apparently her hours got reduced or so she told me, and she said she didn't have much money for going out anymore. I told her that she mattered to me and I'd be more than happy to cover our expenses when we went out. Little miss independent woman simply wouldn't go along with that, and for this and a few other reasons, we began seeing less and less of each other. This began to really bother me and I told her as much. June promised me she'd try just for me, but things still didn't improve between us. That's a sad state of the affairs because I liked her very much.