Red Writing Hood: The Love of My Life

I'm happy to be linking up for the first time this week with The Red Dress Club! Squeal!

This week's prompt involved starting the submission with "I could never have imagined" and ending with "Then the world shifted".  I would love any comments and any constructive criticism, and am looking forward to visiting the other participants.  Thanks!

I could never have imagined that I would meet the love of my life on Craigslist.

Yes.  Craigslist.

It wasn’t the sort of ad through which men and women usually meet on that site.  There were no come on’s, no propositions.  Just a girl writing an ad, venting about the shallowness of the men she had met to that point and laying it all on the line for anyone who cared to read it, and a boy who found that ad and felt compelled to respond.

Out of all of the replies I got that day, his in particular stood out.  He had clearly put a lot of thought into it.  Hell, he could spell and knew how to put a sentence together.  That alone put him ahead of the pack.  But it was more than that.  As I read I became increasingly interested in getting to know him.  I laughed out loud once or twice.  He had a dry sense of humor while at the same time an openness, a friendliness.  He seemed eager to hear back from me.  So he did.

Two days later he told me he would happen to be in my area that night with a couple of his friends, and asked if I would like to meet up with them.  My exact words were, “I’m in a what-the-hell kind of mood, so why not?”.  

I have to admit that it wasn’t an instant love connection.  I later found out that up to that evening, he had habitually driven himself crazy getting ready to meet a girl for the first time, only to be disappointed time and again.  This time he decided to play it cool to the point of underdressing.  So no, I wasn’t exactly bowled over.

Over the next month we emailed back and forth several times a day, and I’ve saved every single one of those precious messages.  Sometimes when I’m having a bad day I go back through them and laugh over those early days, the delicate getting-to-know-you dance we performed together.  I was still unsure – this was completely new territory for me, and as much as I wanted to be a part of a relationship, there was something to be said for the comfort of knowing what to expect from life.  Change is scary.

Still, a month after our first meeting we went on an actual date.  After dinner we spent a lot of time talking in the car, as he drove in circles trying to find a parking spot in my hectic neighborhood.  Finally, after 45 minutes or so, he decided to give up – he was working on Saturdays at that time and had to be in early the next morning.  Wouldn’t know you it, though, that as soon as he decided to simply drop me off, a spot opened up almost directly outside the door leading up to my apartment? Fate’s a funny thing.

There we stood, in that crucial moment.  I remember how my heart raced, wondering how this would turn out, not knowing what to do.  My palms were sweaty. 

Something had changed that evening.  He was prepared this time, he was on his game.  That plus the deepening of our friendship over the several weeks prior sparked something in me.  

After a minute or two of small talk, I knew that it would be up to me to take matters into my own hands.  And so I took a deep breath and went in for the kill.  Right there in the dingy entryway of my dingy apartment building.  Our first kiss.

Then the whole world shifted.