I remember the drive back to Michigan from Richmond on NYE 2007– vaguely snowy, low traffic. I listened to Counting Crows for most of the ride. You can play almost their whole catalog on that drive. I was anxious but in a positive way.
Over the previous semester– my first as a PhD student– I’d tried hard to socialize with my cohort, but the truth was I just wasn’t really their speed. Other than one. There was this girl. Of course we were just friends; she had a boyfriend from her last grad program. And she had a cat, so any time I went to her place to visit with a group of students I had to bail pretty quickly lest my face start to swell up.
I was driving back to town that night to attend a department New Year’s Eve party at one of our professor’s houses, then an after-party at another grad student’s place, but before that, I was meeting up with that girl, at my office in a frozen, dark, quiet Olds Hall, the office they stuck me in next to the scholar who was my hero but who was out of favor with the program. We were hidden down by a microwave and a room full of extra chairs.
That girl had broken things off with her boyfriend over the break, and we’d spent the holiday break chatting over AOL Instant Messenger and briefly in World of Warcraft. We hadn’t said anything like “date,” at this point. We were just going to meet up to talk before the party.
Which we did. We sat on the couch in front of my office talking for a couple of hours. Then there was the awkward, anxious moment. I don’t remember which of us leaned in, but we had our first kiss there in the hallway in front of my office on the couch where people sat while waiting to meet with… me, I guess, or my officemate. Not many people came down Fellowship Hallway.
We went to that party not long after, and we held hands under-the-table. We didn’t want everyone to know yet. We’d been lectured about how bad relationships are within a grad program (by someone who married someone they met in grad school), so we wanted to get a blessing before we made things public. And we would go get that blessing days later.
At midnight, we were at the other party, among our cohorts. It was the first NYE where I had someone to kiss at midnight– and we got a few cheers from our classmates.
I remember walking her to the car after the party, as we both took off to head home. The moon was full, and the light from the fresh snow left the scene lit like some sort of dream sequence from a movie. Her green eyes sparkled as she released my hand at her car door. “Goodnight,” I said. “Drive safe.”
Sometimes in life you just know. That night, as tentative and fresh as our relationship was, not knowing how incredibly emotionally difficult the next several years would be for us, not knowing what might come after… I just knew.
That was the night I kissed the love of my life, the woman I was going to marry.
Ten years later, she still takes my breath away.
Happy anniversary, Julie Alexander. I love you.