I had always loved this park. Full of gentle hills, lots of open green space, little clusters of trees shading picnic tables. There was something for everyone. Waiting on the bench, the warm sun on my shoulders failed to ease my nerves.
My leg bounced up and down and I twisted my fingers in my lap. I watched the families and couples as they passed me, examining each and every face. There was only one I was looking for. I hadn’t seen him in years and I wasn’t sure what to expect.
The shoebox of memories that I had dragged off the shelf when all of this started had contained more than the sweet postcards and photos from Chris. I also had kept a large collection of notes and stories from Brian.
Tall and thin with thick black hair, Brian was my first boyfriend at college. Chris and I were officially over, I had sent Doug packing, and I was ready for a fresh start. Brian was it.
I lived in a co-ed dorm that first year, the floors alternating between genders. Brian was on the fifth floor and I lived on eighth. We didn’t have any classes together, but we saw each other in the cafeteria and the lobby, in the elevators and the common room. One of my eighth-floor neighbors had grown up with one of his fifth-floor neighbors and she brought me to his party one weekend.
Brian was perched in the corner, surrounded by a group of his music department friends, and I was immediately drawn to him. He was telling stories and making the people around him laugh. Snippets of songs or joke punchlines floated to me across the room. Eventually I drifted over to join the crowd near him and got drawn into the conversation. I wasn’t much for singing, but Brian was engaging and goofy, with an innocence about him that I sorely needed after the nightmare that was Doug.
By the end of the night, we were huddled together on the couch, talking and laughing until nearly everyone else had either gone home or fallen asleep. I gave him my phone number, but several days passed and I hadn’t heard from him. I shrugged it off as a great encounter, a fun night, and figured he must not have been as interested as I had thought.
The following Friday, I came home from class and found a tightly folded collection of papers shoved under my door. It was a note. An honest-to-god note like you’d pass in a middle school classroom. But this one was full of drawings and rambling thoughts about me, from Brian. The things he said were sweet and funny. He talked about how happy he was that he got to meet me, that he had actually lost my number and had to track me down through our mutual friends. They wouldn’t give him my room number so he had resorted to this outdated means of communication and they had agreed to deliver it.
His drawings were cute and simple but very well done. One showed the two of us sitting on the couch at the party, smiling at each other. Another one was him at a desk scribbling furiously. I had never had anyone draw anything for me and I was immediately charmed. I wrote back, with nowhere near the comedy, but gave him my number once again and stressed that I’d love to see him.
Thinking back, I probably should have seen that as a sign. He had written all these lovely words but hadn’t asked to see me, hadn’t offered up his phone number. I wasn’t opposed to being assertive and asking him out, but this became a pattern for our relationship down the road.
It turned out that Brian was a Music major, with his sights set on becoming a high school band instructor. He sang and played a multitude of instruments, but the trumpet was his first love. And he was an exceptional player. We didn’t jump into a romantic relationship immediately, but we did spend an awful lot of time together for the next few weeks. I would keep him company while he practiced, doing my own homework while he ran scales or worked on his improvisation. He would make sure I had a ticket front and center to any performance he was part of, giving me a wink and a smile in between songs. We would meet for dinner or walk to the coffee shop on the hill to support his friends doing open mic shows.
Even after we were seeing each other almost daily, I still found letters and notes and drawings under my door. He wrote me stories, self-deprecating humorous tales where I was a princess and he the lowly jester, painting himself as unworthy of my attention. There were little jabs at himself, almost always coming from the fictional me. Of course, I would laugh at these and reassure him that I liked him. He was cute and funny, his stories and notes full of compliments. I didn’t see this behavior as problematic until months later.