When We Met

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

When We Met


[Another Random draft I found in my drafts folder as I'm reorganizing the blog. I do plan to finish it. I just feel like putting this out right now.  You know me. I'm facetious.]

Dedicated to my Future Children: May you always know that someone out there exists just to be there for you, even if its not forever.

Somedays, I wish I had the nerve to talk to random people.  But no, I have to be the scholarly silent type.  I will regret high school, I know it, just like I will someday regret not talking to the boy in black.  I will have to find a boyfriend online.  My first kiss will be a smooch on MSN messenger.
I want to talk about Cory.  This... has been a post that has been worked on for a while.  I wanted to write about him while we were dating, I wanted to write about him after the break up, I wanted to write after I forgave him, and now, I think I have a handle on what to write.  You know those lists of people who have changed your life for the better in some drastic way? Cory is at the top of this list. Out of anyone who has extended a thread into my life, more change has come from him, more desire to grow.  And you don't find someone who touches you like that everyday, and you only *wish* you could touch someone like that.     

I guess all stories start with a "Once upon a time"

So, once upon a time, I was enrolled in a Calculus 2 class. Actually, I would like to say that this story, or where the important coincidences begin, starts a year earlier, when I was a junior in high school.  I took the Calculus BC AP test, and scored a 4.  A freaking 4.  There's always a blow when you come out of a test you studied SO hard for thinking you had it in the bag, and 4 months later, there's a *4* written on a sheet of paper, not a 5.

I was in the process of earning an associates degree at the local community college enroute to heading to the bigger private college in the neighboring city. I took my *4* to the Community college and said, "What do I get credit for?" To my dismay, I was told I got credit for a Calculus 1 class, and would have to take a Calculus 2 class. To increase the irony in all of this, the private institution would have accepted the 4 for both classes.  And I couldn't transfer that credit back and forth.  So I was stuck taking a 2nd Calculus again regardless.  To spite the college causing me so much grief, I shimmied over to the private institution and took my money there.

I was a good student.  Or at least, I tried to be. I sat in front of my math class, and raised my hand often.  I got "You remind me of Hermione" from lots of people and naively took it as a compliment...  Every other day, I suffered redoing integrations, and volumes and stuff I'd already done and hated, and every other day, I secretly looked forward to seeing the same boy.  You know those crushes.  The ones that never know you exist, the ones you look at from a distance, and daydream yourself in the place of the current girlfriend he has his arm around.

I didn't have a clue if he had a girlfriend, and I never saw him outside of class, so it was difficult to imagine myself anywhere near him.

He was different.  At the private institution, there were rules in place, a dress code of sorts, and he seemed to be intent on dancing as close to those lines as he could. In a school where everyone was dressing colorful and kept, he wore all black.  Black pants, black shirt, black trenchcoat.  His hair was longish, not long enough to send the dress code nazis after him, but long enough to be different.  A chain, safety pins, red lining on his cargo pants, and sunglasses.  The sunglasses completed the look on his ethnic face. What ethnicity he was, I didn't know. He was half something.  Asian maybe. Everyday he would walk in past my desk, and go down the row a desk over to the right from me and sit in the very back. There he would whip off his glasses, with what appeared to be long dainty fingers, and would fold his glasses and hang them on his shirt, and leaned back ready to be bored.  And oh yes, he was attractive. 

I know this.  I watched him.

I would consider him Gothic.  My first close up glimpse of the gothic world.  Sure there were goths at my high school, but I was way to shy to go talk to them.

For weeks, I watched this beautiful piece of darkness walk past me every day. 

It took lots of courage to enact a plan, that I hoped would allow me to talk to him without really talking to him.  I was late to class.  It went against everything I knew. To be late to class was like.. against my ethic code.  But I was, which meant my seat in the front of the class was taken.  Which forced me to sit in the back.  The only seat open, was the one next to him.  On my first try I had succeeded in putting myself around him without making it *look* like I was. Suddenly all the romance novels I had read where the 2 main characters coincidentally sit next to each other don't seem so bad.

I sat down, and knew without a doubt I was red faced...  It scared me so badly to be doing what I was doing. I went through most of the class without saying and doing anything other than stare at the teacher. Til the end of class. 

Sadly, I don't remember the under-the-breath comment that I made.  The comment that made him chuckle.  The comment that made me immediately glance up to see him looking at me with a grin on his face.  I didn't learn his name til later, but we spent the rest of that class, and the semester making underhanded comments and not listening to the teacher.  I got a C+ in the class.  Totally worth it, in my opinion, and what began a friendship, 7 years running now, with LOTS of ups and downs, and lots of lessons learned.   

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