We met at a bar, at my going away party before I left for India on a mountaineering expedition.
When I shook his hand, his name didn’t even register. He had shaggy hair and some weird “Occupy Wall Street” graffiti all up on his hoodie. Not my type, I thought to myself, though who ever is your type when you are hosting your own going away party?
I spent the ensuing hours wildly gesturing in conversation with a different guy who had done boatloads of traveling in Asia and making inappropriate eye signals at my roommates across the bar. I danced, I laughed, I screamed bad 80′s music at the top of my lungs. I was leaving New York and I was on another adventure. This girl don’t let no grass grow.
When he had had enough of watching me not watch him, he stole me away to talk about jukebox music and what terrible taste in it I had. He tried desperately to impress me with stories of how he traveled around the world playing baseball. I may have audibly rolled my eyes. And to be honest, I still didn’t know his name. But he did make me giggle and I was leaving New York soon, and he was so very tall.
I found myself at an all-night a diner with him, trying hard to ignore our collective attitude of what-the-f-are-we-doing-here, and ripping into the New York Times. He had bought it moments before on a whim because the front page was about baseball and the travel section was a splashy photo essay on India. It was then that he taught me, without meaning to, that I should pay closer attention to the signs.
What I didn’t know then was just how much he would teach me by letting me go. Continue reading
