Melanna

Melanna has an anchor tattooed on her right wrist. It suits her.
She grew up on a farm outside Calgary where she was home schooled. She is frequently brutally honest, and often charmingly crude. After a string of nomadic years in Alberta, BC, and Europe, she came to Vancouver to attend a college for holistic nutrition. In September Melanna hopes to attend UBC to pursue her lifelong passion for midwifery. She spent last summer fighting forest fires in Nelson, BC. She laughs entirely too loud. Sometimes Melanna eats grains of sea salt straight out of the jar like I eat grains of fresh ground pepper. We will do this at the same time some days, like the yin and yang of flavour addicts.
Melanna is one of the few people I've ever met who still speak as though words are a gift; as though through them truth is achievable. On more occasions than I can count, she has kept me sane; anchored. On as many others, she has made me delicious healthy meals. She makes miso soup so divinely comforting it wraps your insides in a blanket and you huddle instinctively and humbly around the bowl like it holds salvation. Imagine this liquid gold being brought to you when you are sick. Melanna does this. She also dances; in her room she cranks Matisyahu or Miike Snow or Frightened Rabbit or Kid Cudi or Pheonix or gratuitous club anthems like that one about the Sexy Bitch, and just jumps around. Sometimes I join her, and we wholeheartedly shake and jump and yell and twist and flail all thoughts away with no concern for grace or pride until Sexy Bitch starts to sound like perfect innocence.
Melanna looks like the best Sunday you ever had, and like nature. She leaves for a few days at a time every two weeks or so, wearing cowichan sweaters and hiking shoes and a backpack, to see Russ in Kamloops, who is a mountain biker and easy going the way flannel is comfortable. She sounds like sleepovers, momentous revelations, and fire. This is also how she eats; with steady fervour. She smells like home and joie de vivre, and best of all, coconut. I've never met anyone with such a healthy awareness of freedom, and of exactly what she wants and needs, so much so that it feels healthy just to be around her. She is as much an anchor as she is the perfect lack of one. She gave me a bracelet for Christmas. It sits on my wrist right where that tattoo sits on hers, because I want to be reminded of all of these things, because they seem significant to me.

Some choice quotes
Upon returning from a trip to Victoria, when her still-packed backpack falls to the floor with a sharp thud:
(GASP) MY COLESLAW!
Showing me a bottle of pills on her shelf in the fridge:
Emily I want you to take one of these every other day on an empty stomach. I stole them from Whole Foods, they'll really help keep your energy up, and they're probiotic.
To an inebriated stranger, on a dare at the Cambie one night, for which I bought her a coffee every day for some time, followed by a suddenly sober response, and then we high fived and laughed for five minutes in the washroom:
Are you too drunk to get a boner?
In response to a listless comment I made lying on the floor beside the fireplace:
You're very poetic when you're depressed.
Out of nowhere:
There was a paperclip in the washroom at the airport, I knew I should have taken it.