And God Blessed the Broken Road, Part 2

Read Part 1 here.

I hung out with future-husband’s friends for the first few weeks of school, and they were a lot of fun. I would join them for dinner or snacks after class. On the first anniversary of 9/11, I was there outside the residence hall for the memorial service hosted by one of his friends. He was from New York and was very close to the attacks. It was an emotional experience, lots of tears in the darkness, punctuated by candlelight in the parking lot.

But as things happen in college, people come together for a time and then float apart. With a good distance between his residence hall and mine, and his classes in the business school and mine in the theatre, it got harder and harder to find the time to meet up. After all, I was dating someone and so was he. He was just a friend I met that first week of school and somehow, things just start drifting apart.

Whenever I signed on to AIM, I would look down the lists of friends and every once in a while, I would notice his screenname at the bottom and wonder what that cute kid from the local high school was doing then.

A few months into my freshman year, the boyfriend that I followed to college broke up with me. And immediately started dating the girl he insisted he wasn’t into. That was a tough pill to swallow. I was 18 and thought the world was going to come crashing down on my head.

And still, every once in a while, I would see future-husband’s name on my AIM list and wonder about that cute guy in the residence hall across campus. But the thought would pass and I would head to rehearsal. That’s where I spent most of my college years, in the theatre.

I never realized that the cute guy I saw on my AIM list would eventually come back into life in a HUGE way.