"Originally, she thought, "I wanted to meet someone in college, date him for several months and then bring him home to meet everyone." She thought this on her way back to her apartment after a dinner with her parents and her boyfriend of a mere six weeks.
"I wanted to know him inside and out before I let him loose with my family. Who knows what he'll say? Who knows how he'll behave."
She certainly didn't know, couldn't predict yet how he might react to a given situation. And, she worries, people sometimes want to hold her responsible for his behavior, as if she could make him say "thank you" more often, when, really, she knows he just wasn't brought up that way.
She does know this, though, he's very different than she thought he was. Different in a better way. She worried he'd be too much like that last one, too nice for his own good, so nice that she felt that one of two things would happen, 1) she would somehow explode from her desire to be not-so-nice around him, or 2) he would eventually revert back to the purely bad behavior she knew about in his past.
But this one. Oh, he came across as nice and innocent, but, then, she also comes across that way.
They are two misunderstood people living in a world that has been cruel. He's given in to more cynicism than she has. She still believes that everything will turn out okay.
She believes that when she's most in denial.
She turns to look at him and smiles at the sight of his face. She's come to accept and appreciate that this is the face she'll be seeing throughout her life. She also looks at that face and thinks, "Who are you? Where did you come from?"
He senses her stare, reaches across the car and takes her hand.
She continues to smile at him, then turns to stare out the car window, thinking, "I don't know you at all."
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1 comment:
Life so rarely follows along the path that we would like it to - reminds me of that line..."if you want to make God laugh, just tell Him your plans..."
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