Eleven months ago I started a fundraising campaign for a charity race I participated in eight months ago. I boasted I would run a kilometer for every dollar donated. It seems I am still running off the commitments I made to people almost a year ago.

This week I finished running the 25 kilometers due to my friend Aryan. Yup, that was my Valentines Day activity.

Our history together began in a third year Engineering course called “Molecules to Mechanisms“. The course began with physics at the sub-molecular / quantum mechanics level and scaled up from there. It was my first real exposure to quantum mechanics and my brain was sweating most days. Whenever questions were posed to the class, Aryan had the answers. It was impressive and intimidating. We both continued our degree through the Microsystems and Nanotechnology group at UBC and discovered a myriad of common interests. A beautiful friendship grew from there!

The most substantial uniting piece for me, I think, was our mutual love of all things off-this-world. The first time we made plans to watch a space shuttle take off the launch got scrubbed and rescheduled. Aryan went to Orlando anyway to check out the Kennedy Space Center and have associated fun. I waited. On July 8, 2011 we had our second chance. We were both enveloped in the wonder of the space coast as we watched the final launch of the Space Shuttle fleet. The video Aryan shot that day is riddled with him saying “woah” over and over again. Sometimes I re-watch his video just to hear him capture the feelings I also had in that moment in the most definitive way I can think of.

He is now off at UCLA in grad school and I get to follow his adventures on facebook and youtube. I especially like his time lapse shots of cities and extra-terrestrial objects through his telescope.