A Valentine's Day Story

Seven years ago I was a senior in high school. It was a good year, probably my favorite year in high school. I was single and I think I had more friends at that time than I ever had before, which I was really enjoying. When the year began I enjoyed being single and dating different people, but around the middle of the school year, I started getting the itch to maybe start dating someone that I cared about, exclusively.

There was a small group of friends that I managed to get in close with, and I liked all of them for the most part. They were friendly and fun, and I started sitting with them everyday at lunch and hanging out with them at parties on weekends. There was one girl in the group that I really liked all along. She was a really beautiful blonde with a great smile and an energy around her that you could just feel when you were near her. She was smart and well spoken but very shy and usually quiet. I really had a thing for her, but around Christmas she told me that she had a boyfriend (a fact she had been purposefully hiding from me.) When I found that out, I was a little bummed out to say the least, but I kind of resigned myself to just being friends with her.

At some point in the year, I'm not sure when, I found myself without a car. Imagine if you will a senior in high school who has to ride the bus home every day. Not very cool, huh? Well, this girl found out that I was taking the bus and offered to drive me home every day after school, which I thought was incredibly cool. And so for a couple of weeks we got to hang out after school on the drive home, which I really enjoyed. Eventually though I got another car and we went back to being just lunch / weekend friends.

On the Monday before Valentine's Day of that year (1998) she was really upset at school, and I found out through talking to her that the boyfriend she had previously told me about hadn't called her in over two weeks. She was getting pretty mad at him, and didn't know what she was going to do for Valentine's Day if he didn't call.

I still really liked her, so being the nice guy that I am, I told her that if he didn't call by Valentine's Day that I would take her out someplace. The week rolled on, and the big day arrived with still no call from the guy, and I kept my word. I took her out for dinner on Valentine's Day even though she had a boyfriend, just because I wanted her to be happy and have a nice night.

We drove around for about an hour and a half looking for a restaurant that would seat us without a reservation on one of the busiest nights of the year. It seemed impossible. We must have gone to fifteen places, with each either turning us down, or telling us that there would be a wait of an hour or longer. Finally we arrived at the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen on the corner of Pinhook and Kaliste Saloom (now closed,) and they had an open table. We had a really nice dinner and a pretty good time as far as I could tell. She was just really fun to be around. She had this way of talking about things that seemed to make everything seem really important. For some reason you really felt like you should just spill your guts to her when you were talking to her, and so conversations with her were often intense and long and you really felt good about it afterward. But, you could also talk to her about all kinds of cool stuff too. She knew so much more than I did about classic rock and 80's music that I was blown away because I knew a good bit. She could talk about literature and classic archetypes and symbolism in books and movies. She just blew me away.

After dinner I brought her home and told her good-night. What I didn't know was that after I dropped her off she drove to her boyfriend's house and told him what had happened that night. The two of them talked for a long time and when she left she was single again.

After that night, the two of us were pretty much inseparable. We were together all of the time. She didn't want to get into a serious relationship at first because the guy that never called had really hurt her, but I hung around anyway. We went out for coffee a lot, and we always went to the same parties to hang out. Eventually she began to forget about the other guy, and she started to let her guard down little by little and we got more and more serious until it was understood that we were pretty much seeing each other exclusively.

Tonight we spent our eighth Valentine's Day together.

So I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you Lindsey, for saying yes those seven years ago, and thank you for every day since then.