THE TRIANGLE IS MY NEW FAVORITE SHAPE

I recently spent a week on vacation in Crete. There are many versions of this week I have to tell, but the most suprising for me was the dynamic of travelling with two girlfriends.

The trip was the invitation of a friend and a personal dream for me. Early on, there were permutations that included four of us, but in the end, it was a trio. I felt like I was the odd woman out, every step of the way, but not in a bad way. The other girls booked their flights together. They had time to stay in Paris together after. They met to plan things. But it was nice to be invited, and it was an amazing opportunity to spend more time together with these fantastic women in one week than I had spent with them in our lifetimes. The strangest notion was that we were going to meet up at YUL to travel together, and that was going to be the first time we would have seen each other since last December!

The geometry of a triangle is that there is always 180 degrees between all three angles, and no matter which change you make, the sum of its angles is constant. Similarly, whenever something happened in our trio's dynamic, there was tension related to the mathematical need to maintain the constant proportions between each of us.

When the trip started, the two of us were connected through our mutual friend. But this trip, which I had thought about as an equilateral triangle, changed almost instantly when we arrived. The plan was for our friend to take the basement suite, and the two of us, who knew each other least, to share the main house. Unlike most of my travels, I arrived with just a few ideas, and had thought I would make plans with the girls when we arrived. But as each day passed, I realized that my ideas were only going to take away from what could happen in the group. The triangle would survive the  stretch, but I would be less connected. That was important to one of us. To be alone. The thing that I found most interesting, was that as she pulled away, the two of us left got closer. And when we were together again, we were back to the equilateral triangle again.

Time and time again, we took turns, and the geometry never failed. The tension and laxity between our angles changed a thousand times that week, but we were always connected, and those connections were proportioned in geometric perfection every time.