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The warm autumn sun threatened new freckles on my upturned face, but I happily soaked it up like a basking amphibian. My sister Erin and I had plopped ourselves down on a step outside a tiny sweet shop in Venice, while the two girlfriends we were traveling with perused the colourful shelves inside. After several months as scruffy backpackers, eternally on the move, we’d gotten very comfortable with getting comfortable wherever. So it was without pause that we threw ourselves on the stone step to wait. With my eyes closed against the sun, I felt my head bob gently as Erin wove an elaborate braid into my hair. Such tantalizing sugary smells wafted out of the shop, and the din of Venice washed over my ears. Just a sea of anonymous voices speaking mostly in languages I didn’t understand, and then: “Laura, Erin? Is that you guys?” These words rolled through my brain looking for a sensible place to land. Our happy hobo perch on the ground was evidence enough that we’d become thoroughly used to being strangers in the crowd ourselves, so it took a moment for comprehension to strike when I opened my eyes and saw the face of our childhood friend Shane. Shane and I had grown up doing theatre together. Through countless productions we’d played husband and wife, father and daughter, archenemies, you name it. He was a couple years older than me, and had transferred to a different high school, so I hadn’t seen him in ages. Yet there he was before us, standing in the early October light, looking as stunned as I felt. The other girls came out of the sweet shop to find noisy exclamations and startled hugs taking place, and they joined us in our amazement. This tiny side street, in this huge sprawling city, in this country halfway round the world from the familiar habitat where I might expect to run into Shane. Even if it had been Erin and I in the shop while the others waited outside, he would have walked right past them and we’d never have known! It’s funny how quickly a shocking new circumstance can become the new normal though, and we were soon strolling the streets and canals with a new guide. It turns out Shane had joined the U.S. Army, and was stationed nearby. This surprised me a bit, since we’d grown up together on a little peace-and-love kind of island, performing on stage in silly costumes. It was hard to imagine him in the deserts of Afghanistan. He spoke of the travel opportunities though, and how he’d been learning new languages, and I was pleased for him. He invited us to visit his base the next day, and we all enjoyed the strangely inverted travel experience of stepping through that portal, out of Italy and into a tiny America. At the grocery store inside, we gleefully stocked up on treats from home, and were astonished to have our Euros turned away, as we all scraped together what U.S. dollars were still hanging around. Back in Shane’s barracks, I looked at the photos of this uniformed man with a gun and tried to square them with my own images of a boy dressed as Mr. Toad. Then he opened up to us, and the truth of his experience came out. Shane told us that joining the military had been the biggest mistake of his life, and he couldn’t wait to get out. When he walked us back to the gate and said goodbye, Shane thanked us for giving him a warm reminder of home, and we thanked him for the same feeling! A few days later, in Rome, we ran into some people we’d met earlier at a hostel in Switzerland. They couldn’t get over how strange it was, or how blasé we seemed about it. Shane did eventually finish his tour and go home, but I never saw him again. A couple years later he lost his life due to symptoms of PTSD he suffered after his time in war zones. After that, running into him that day in Venice went from an amazing coincidence to an unprecedented event in my life.