Sebastien at the Solstice Party

His energy is way out there. He looks in your eyes like he's digging for treasure while he talks.

"My sister has been trying to make me gay my whole life!" He laughs a real open-mouthed laugh, rolls his sparkling blue eyes, and shakes his head back. Time slows down for a frame-by-frame of the wild masses of curly blond hair bouncing around his face and shoulders.

The gypsy girls at the dance distract him vaguely, but not nearly to the extent that others are distracted by him. When he's dancing, his perfect t-shirt body moves with the rhythm of your own secret pulse, and when you watch him, everything spills out of your heart and out of the closet and it's all in the open, swirling into the air with the music. All the cute boys aren't ashamed to look at him, and none of the beautiful girls feel inhibited from staring. Even you, buhao yisi and blushing a bit, aren't really that ashamed.

"Look at that guy over there," he says, oblivious to his own beauty, "the guy behind the bar. With the dreads. He's so cute! I wanna be like that." He is laughing and happy and he's confident even without knowing that he's beautiful.

As he keeps dancing, all you can really see is that hair. Instant freeze-frame: you glimpse his adam's apple peeking out from beneath his curls. The feelings you had looking at high school guys when you were 12 resurface and catch in your chest.

When you dance with him you move seamlessly together like the tides with the shore. Quickly or slowly, you're like one body, and you're not sure which one of you is the tide, and which one the shore. Is it him who is so in tune that he can pick up your vibe and roll with you, inside your own fantasy? Or is he so entrancing that you are actually being carried along with him, that he has gotten into your veins, and your heart is now beating with his rhythm? Though the thought terrifies you, you think it's the latter... All you can do is hope you don't fall too hard.

Later, your footfalls mute in the luminous midnight snow, you're smoking up together and laughing. He talks about his kids and his job. You tell him he amazes you, because he does. He doesn't find that warranted. "People always congratulate me like I am doing something special, and I don't like that. I am just doing my thing, you know, changing diapers and playing with my boys and going to work." Just being natural, right?

You nod, but really you understand why people congratulate him on holding it together. He's a 22-year-old with two toddlers at home, while most of your circle, already in their thirties, still can't contemplate that much responsibility. People in your demographic can't even tear their attention away from their own insecurities long enough to move their hips when they dance. They just stand there looking at the band in their thick-rimmed glasses and castro hats, thumbs hooked into belt loops, a conspicuously uncontrived-looking stance. With those gen-x-ers, everything is always so "casual-but-i-meant-for-it-to-look-that-way." How do you dance to that?

Has he always been so natural, or did he get this way from having kids? You want to ask him. But you know the answer. Of course he is natural. He is natural through and through. What could be more natural than coming out west from Montreal at 17 to pick fruit in the Okanagan, living his freedom and his energy... reveling in Nature and reveling in romance, and having a bit of unprotected sex?

Now he's part single dad and part big brother. On normal evenings, his kids tug at the legs of his shorts, asking him to turn up the stereo, to dance with him, demanding alternately Kimya Dawson or AC/DC. They scream-sing, they playfight, they jump on the bed, they sometimes eat cereal for supper. But not this evening - tonight, he's out with you, and his kids are at home with his best friend.

He is independent, honest, and hard-working, but he's still fresh, fun, and as poor as you are. He's so much less well-traveled, well-read, or well-fed than anyone you know, but so much better at his second language, so much more experienced at life and living and accepting, so much more experienced at reality, at being an adult.

Meanwhile you, Peter Pan, you've stayed away in never-never-land so long you feel like your own hometown is just a stopover. You've forgotten to grow up. You don't even know what it means.

You may be older than him, but standing here in the snow, your acquired earthly wisdom is reduced to tidbits, factoids: hostel recommendations, restaurant reviews for cities he'll never visit, pat academic opinions, and music suggestions in Mandarin.

You want to offer something, but you have nothing. You feel like a giant sponge. Now this adult boy has his big, steady hands around your shaking wrists, and he tells you he likes the smell of your sweat. It reminds him of peaches.

And you know he means the juicy, soft, real peaches of the Okanagan, the ones that drip and ooze and make a mess... not the small, hard, dainty celestial peaches you and the eight immortals have to peel with a knife in China.

Your skinny wrists are still shaking the next day.