schweblog

I was worried.  We all knew that I was worried� What if I stepped off of the bus in Lyon, our eyes met, and we both realized the the chemical reaction was long since over� What if, upon spending a few days together, we discovered that the magic had dissipated and if we chose to continue with it after her semester in France, that we would simply be settling?

I had mapped out plans and schemas for how it would go if things went awry.  I would ask her to pretend that we were still in love and we would live in a blissful facade, ending it all with a kiss upon my departure.  If it went really bad, I would find a cheap little youth hostel located in the slums of Lyon and experience Europe for the first time in an angst-ridden haze.  And if it went terribly, I could always just attempt to swim one of the rivers and drown myself.  Difficult problem, easy solutions.  Anxiety, accompanied by excitement and, even more strongly, hope, dominated my mind up to a certain point.

Then it ceased to be–the anxiety, I mean.  It was approximately 11:00 AM on a Thursday morning.  The bus pulled into the last stop–the one I was to get off at–and I caught sight of her just as the vehicle came to a halt.  “She’ll look different, you know,” my coworker had told me.  I agreed with him at the time, but she really didn’t now that she was just a few feet away.  She was just as beautiful as I remember her–perhaps moreso.

I forgot about the small step down in the aisle of the bus and ended up stumbling (falling over, really) as I rushed from my seat.  I smiled sheepishly at the driver and she met me at the door.  We made eye contact and our lips met and we embraced and every single ounce of anxiety that was in me melted away.  There were sparks and chemistry and excitement and everything good in the world in that moment.

But it wasn’t like the movies, where things slow down to a near-halt as background music intensified.  Instead, time sped up…and it stayed sped up for the entirety of my stay.  The murmur of Europe, foreign dialects and accordions and the lull of trains at night, was our soundtrack.  It was the same as it always was.  Better� Better because there was a new sense of knowing, a verification of not only our expectations, but our hopes.  And I knew, leaving her early nine days later and fighting off the urge to jump from the bus and wander back to her apartment, that we had achieved something significant.  That this was a benchmark.  And that I was a fool for ever doubting that it would go exactly like this.