Serendipity

I have posted and reposted the lovingly longuish telling of our story multiple times on Prose for various challenges. I thought I'd write a new story this time: my prequel, if you will.

A year before we met, I graduated from college with a degree in Humanities in International Relations. Subsequently, I spent the summer at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, considering a career on stage or in front of the camera (I had done musical theater since fourth grade as well as modeling, commercials and a film.)

It was great fun, but practical me decided I needed more stability than an acting career could offer. (I didn't have the burning need or confidence one needs to persevere in the performing arts.) So, knowing I loved languages, and having decided in fourth grade that I would be a teacher, I applied to three PhD programs in Hispanic Literature. (I ended up in Philadelphia because North Carolina and New Mexico seemed so far from home (New York) when I had to make my decision while homesick across the ocean.) In the meantime, I got a job waiting tables (oddly, the cliché of the starving actor) at a hotel reataurant to earn money for a trip to Spain.

For four months I worked six or seven days a week, 10 am to 8 pm. For the first month, I was in bed asleep within an hour of leaving work. (Waiting tables is exhausting. ) Eventually, once I got used to being on my feet all day, I started taking an adult education Spanish class once a week in preparation for the trip. (And occasionally having drinks with work or classmates. )

Towards the end of December, after working for four months, I tendered my resignation. Within a week of the New Year, I was in Madrid.

During the six months I lived in Spain, I stayed with a welcoming family (with whom I still exchange Christmas letters); did a lot of reading, writing, museum wandering, and city street walking; and, visited some ten different cities from Cordoba to Santiago de Compostela, while traveling for a month on my own.

I fell fleetingly in love twice (good practice for my Spanish :-) Once with a sweet Swiss farmer who realized he loved me after he left me heartbroken, silently weeping as I waved goodbye to a train, destination, Zurich; once with a German medical student who was trying to make the woman he really loved jealous. Lots of angry tears (into my pillow). No waves goodbye. Maybe a slammed car door.

And then I was home, working as a temp for the summer, before classes started, in the Latin American division of a bank, going to museums and concerts alone, meeting up with exes and realizing there was a reason we broke up, writing in my journal about the future and looking forward to what it might hold.

I felt like I was in a holding pattern, waiting for my life to begin.

One day, perhaps three weeks after I returned home, a coworker suggested I stop by a café in our building, Sweet Imports. "There's this cute guy..."

It's only in recent years that I realized she never went with me to point him out.

I went in, our eyes met, something in the universe clicked into place and...life began.

Thirty one years ago last June.