My Fifth Proposal--Revisited

Here's a thing about me that you may or may not have noticed. I always seem to fall in love with the wrong people. Its not that there is anything wrong wtih the people I fall for--not really, anyway. The problem always seems to be when I fall in love with them. My timing is absolutely attrocious and has been my entire life.

I fell in love with Jackie my freshman year of college. It was 1997. I loved wearing jeans, didn't own a single pair of khaki pants, wore more flannel shirts than polos and wore my Teva sandles no matter what the weather was. Needless to say, I was not looking to impress any ladies at the time. I was all about being with my friends and having a good time. I made it an entire week at the university before I found someone I wanted to be with. There was one problem, though. Mark found her first.

That's actually how I met Jackie. Mark brought her along as his date to my birthday dinner that year. He had just met her a few days before and thought it would be cool to introduce her to all of our friends at the same time. I almost feel sorry for the girl. You would too if you knew all of my friends, trust me. As it happened, Jackie and I sat next to each other and talked the entire night. At one point, she even said that she was cold, so I took off my flannel and gave it to her to wear.

Needless to say, we hit it off pretty well. Turns out she and Mark did too, though. Not about to interfere with Mark, I accepted my place as Just-a-Friend.

Jackie and I started hanging out more and more as the year went on. I can honestly say that I'm not sure exactly how it started, but to this day I'm glad it did. One night, we found ourselves walking from one side of campus to the other. Instead of heading to our dorms, we just kept going. I have absolutely no idea what we talked about that first night, or any of the thousands of other nights for that matter, but I just know that we kept walking and talking through the night. Actually, what we talked about doesn't even matter. Not in the slightest bit. It was how we felt as we were walking that really mattered. We were free. Free of all our friends, all our families, all our stress and all our worreis. We would talk about whatever popped up be it serious or silly and no matter what, we knew the other person wouldn't judge or make fun--well, ok, so we'd make fun of each other all the time, it was all in good spirit, though.

One day Jackie and I were hanging out in the common area of our dorm, shooting some pool. We did that a lot. Neither of us were very good, but it was right down stairs and it was free. Hard to argue with that. Well, on this particular day, Jackie was telling me about her ex boyfriend from high school. Eventually, that lead us to talk about Mark, which was always a little tricky for me. Afterall, Mark and I had been friends for years and here I was, crushing on his girlfriend. Well, on that particular day, Jackie started talking about how she didn't think that Mark would be able to commit to her.

I had just racked the billiard balls and was about to break when she said that she thought he might dump her.

I looked up from the table and into her eyes and told her that he would be crazy to ever let her go.

She smiled.

Without breaking our eye contact, I sent the cueball flying for my Break. Smack! Crash! And I smiled back. It was perfect. I couldn't have set that situation up better if I tried.

Her eyes darted to the table, then back to me. Then back to the table. Then back to me. And she started laughing.

I looked to the table to find that my break was not as impressive as I'd hoped. I mostly missed. It was actually kind of sad. I started cracking up.

I re-racked and let her break. We finished the game while talking about other things. When we were finished, though, we sat down on a bench near the pool table. We just sat there, not saying much. I looked over my shoulder at her, and she was looking back at me.

I gave her a little half smile and took her hand in mine.

My heart was racing out of my chest.

I couldn't believe what I was doing. I was actually holding her hand. I looked down, just to make sure. Yep. I was holding her hand. Crap. What now?

I looked back up into her eyes and said, If neither of us are married in fifteen years we should so get hitched.

She pulled her hand away from mine and hit me, laughing. At that, we decided to call it an afternoon and went back up to our rooms.

I realize that wasn't much of a proposal, but looking back on it, if she would have said that we didn't have to wait fifteen years, I would have said OK and gotten married on the spot. To this day we are still good friends. She did get married, though. And not to me, so it looks like that ship has sailed.

I do miss our walks, though.