Earlier I promised you, my many faithful, avid, and beloved readers, that I would bring you drama, and I am here to deliver. It's a pretty long story, so I'm going to be typing it in installments. It will probably sound stupid to everyone, but I could never say enough how much the following events mean to me. I hope you enjoy it, or at least get a good laugh out of it. I will probably sound like one of those psychopathic bloggers after this. Maybe I am, and maybe I'm not. If it'll help, I guess you could think of this as a work of fiction. I doubt anyone, even my friends, cares about all this, but humor me anyway. Thanks.
It has been a year to the day since I first fell in love.
It is exactly this time one year ago. It is 10:30 pm on the 26th of February, 2004. It is a Thursday, not a Saturday, and I am exactly where I want to be: seated next to the woman I love in her piece-of-shit 80's Ford Escort in the empty parking lot of our college. We have been here for the past half-an-hour or so, and we will be here for another two. We are not making out, we are not doing the nasty, we are just talking and laughing, talking and laughing about the ordinary things and the ordinary people that constitute our ordinary lives, yet to us--well, to me at least--this is anything but ordinary. This is the happiest night I have yet to know, perhaps the happiest night I will ever know. The planets are in perfect alignment tonight. All is right in the universe. It is cold outside but the car is warm. It is very late and I have school in the morning, but that doesn't matter to me anymore. Few things do. I am here seated next to the most beautiful woman on earth.
You may ask yourself how I--with my near-sociopathic tendencies and all--have gotten here, alone with this beautiful, tall, sexy, horn-honk-inducing (yes, that really happened) goddess. That is a little story in itself.
We first met about five-and-a-half months ago, in the beginning of September 2003. We had both just started working at the bookstore of our school. Our eyes kept meeting each other from across the room. I thought she was a customer but then she had been there much too long and later on she was chatting with us, her fellow employees. She is tall and striking, and all the other guys at work were obviously all physically attracted to her, you know, flirting like crazy with her and all. I wasn't so much, but I did think she was very friendly and we got along and I liked her as a friend. In the next few days, I could see that she was friendliest with me. She was always talking to me and hanging around me, and I started to feel that there might be something more than just friendship between us. So I asked her out to a jazz festival. She was polite and showed what seemed to be genuine interest and told me she wanted to go, but she was a runner and had a busy training schedule. I assumed I'd misread her and that she wasn't interested in me at all that way.
We were still close though, the closest among anyone else at work. She always showed interest in me. She asked me how the jazz festival went--I told her I'd decided not to go. She asked why, and I couldn't really give her a proper answer other than "I was lazy." She was always asking how my then very pregnant sister was. She admired the fact that I was taking multivariable calculus and even joked that I should tutor her. She was very enthusiastic when she told me she loves the guitar and that she thought it "so cool" that I played. We had lunch at the cafeteria together one time, and on another we shared a laugh about how the two of us collectively wasted over a dollar trying to get a newspaper from a defective dispenser.
Every guy in the bookstore was still obviously attracted to her. Everyone was so interested in her that her age became a mystery we were all trying to solve. I'm not sure if I was the first to find out how old she was, but I did one day when we got around to talking about her high school years in Poland. She gave it away. I did the math and was disappointed to find out that she was twenty-four, which also surprised me because when I looked at her I always thought it looked about right that she was my age or maybe a year younger. I was nineteen and she knew this, so by then I was certain that this was never going beyond friendship.
Sadly our time together didn't last very long. I was really beginning to like her and whenever I would sign in for my shift I would always check the schedule to see if she worked that day too, secretly hoping that I would see her, if only for a few minutes. But after two weeks she stopped coming to work. She is one of those people who come in temporarily during the start of each semester when things are busiest in the bookstore.
I did not see her again until one day in November, when she dropped by the bookstore to leave a textbook with us for a friend of hers who was stopping by to borrow it. She exchanged a few short pleasantries with us and was off, but before she left she said good-bye last to me, and she was holding her hand out to me. She was not holding it out the way one would hold one's hand out to shake another's. Rather, she was holding it out with her palm facing downward. I reluctantly gave my hand to her, palm up, and she squeezed it, sending a shiver through the length of my arm and on down my spine. I did not see her again for a long time.
At the time I wasn't kidding myself. I'd mused that the hand "caress" had romantic overtones but really I knew she didn't like me the way I was beginning to like her, so I moved on turned my attentions to another pretty girl in my math class with whom I always had nice conversations about music.
The semester went on and ended without my seeing her again, my sister had already given birth, and I flew home to Manila for Christmas and had fun there and didn't once think of her. I came back to the states on the eve of Martin Luther King Day very depressed about leaving my family behind once again, and went back to work at the bookstore right after the holiday. To my great and wonderful surprise, she'd come to work there again, and we were very close once more, but I had no idea just how close we were about to become.
-End of Part I-
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