I fell in love for the first time in 6th grade. His name was Jeff he was tall and had the most delicious brown eyes. He was very, very cute and like every other girl in my class I developed my very first crush. I wonder if dear Jeff was aware of how much all of the girls loved him. From that point forward my heart was in a desperate race to give itself away.
Tripping and tumbling through junior high my silly heart gave itself away more then once. It is almost funny how quickly I would tumble in out and out of love. High school dawned and before long my heart was once again tumbling in out of love. However, this time it was joined one or two times with another heart.
There is nothing quite like the intensity that our heart feels from those first kisses and the rousing emotions of those first loves. Even as I sit here and write I can feel my heart beat faster as I think of those boys. The way my heart would beat when they entered the room the way my heart would jump with those stolen kisses. The way that I believed with all my soul they were the boy for me.
After high school I quickly moved away from home trying to find my own way in life. It took me a little over a year before I moved home. In an attempt to recover from a not so successful run of facing life on my own. At nineteen I settled down as much as a nineteen year old settles down. I worked full time, I went to college part time, and I had fun as often as I could.
After I moved home a friend of my mom’s mentioned that she knew a boy I might be interested in. I remember smiling at her with a grin that all nineteen year olds give to women who think they know but they really don’t. I was trained well enough to be polite and listened to her go on and on about this boy, well I half listened, I didn’t really ever catch the name of the boy she was talking about.
Before long I regularly started to attend a singles group associated with my religion. It was fun, there were a lot of people my age, and I was really enjoying being nineteen. One day during my lunch hour at work I ran up to the college to visit with a friend. Our singles group had a building off campus, there religious classes were held and it also acted as a hangout spot in between classes. I walked into the main hang out room expecting my friend to be there.
As I walked into the room on one of the couches sat a boy. When I walked in he looked up at me and the biggest grin I had ever seen spread across his lips. It was such a large grin that I couldn’t help but to smile back. I inquired of him if he had seen my friend. He smiled shook his head no and said, “No, Krissi I haven’t seen her.” I was taken back because even though I recognized his face I did not know his name. It confused me that he knew my name. He quickly recognized my confusion and pointed to my chest. When I looked down I realized that I hadn’t removed my name badge when leaving work.
I smiled said, “Thank you,” and went looking for my friend. It is hard to say how things really progressed from that moment. I will tell you that I found out that this was the boy my mom’s friend had mentioned. That made me smile, I will also tell you that he wore yummy cologne that made me want to follow him around like a puppy, and I will tell you that he wore a black leather jacket.
The reason that matters is another story that I will save for another day. All of these things added up to me paying more attention to the boy with the great smile. However, he had one serious flaw. He had a whole group of girls that followed him around. I myself was not interested in being another one of his groupies. So I watched but I wasn’t following. I guess, if you ask him he must have been watching too because we always managed to end up in the same place just not together.
This boy had one more quirk. He was quiet. When I say quiet I mean quiet. In fact, the comment about the name tag is about the only thing I heard coming from him for months. It seemed to be some accepted fact that he hardly, if ever, spoke. That is why things started to get very interesting when he started to talk to me.
One New Years Eve day we found ourselves at the building off-campus preparing for a New Years Eve dance to be held that night. I noticed as I walked in that morning that he was there, he once again looked up at me with that big grin, again, I couldn’t help grinning back. This time he actually started to laugh at me. “What,” I said. “You have your sweat shirt on inside out,” he replied. I laughed and said, “Yeah I know.” It was a habit of mine to wear my sweatshirts inside out.
He continued to laugh at me and I laughed too. The girl in charge stuck us together and had us work on a project together. While it was not the chattiest of days, with the help of my very vivacious best friend, we had a good time and were able to get to know each other a little bit better. That night he asked me out on our first date.
Our courtship, I guess you could call it, was short. We dated for mere three weeks and were engaged, before the end of January. Tomorrow, January 31, we will have been together for 14 years.
He still has a great smile!
He still has a great smile!
Comments