"I'm not confused.
I'm just well mixed."
-Robert Frost
A picture says a thousand words and since I couldn't think of more than 3 or 4 words that following morning, I did what I considered best. I found the first picture of Jacob I could, and showed my older sister. She of course, looked it over, obviously thought he was cute (I know this because she didn't say anything, it's a personality thing), and continued scrambling eggs in the kitchen.
I couldn't help what I was doing, really I couldn't. It wasn't that a guy had never talked to me. It wasn't that I wasn't used to a guy to talk to me. It was that a really, really cute guy was talking to me and I didn't even want him to. But I did want him to. Go figure.
By the time everyone was downstairs and sitting down at the table, I decided to drop a subtle comment on the subject and casually mentioned that a football player from North Carolina had talked to me until like 11pm something last night on the CollegePlus forums.
"Well, he probably just likes you," was my mom's commentary. My dad concurred. All in all, however, no one paid much attention to it because I had talked to him only once. And logically, there was no reason why anyone should get excited. I shouldn't get excited either. BUT FOR SOME STUPID REASON... my heart was zipping along a narrow line that I didn't even want it to zip along. But I did want it to. Didn't. Did. Didn't. I didn't know. All I knew was, this was one funny, cute, hilarious, athletic, awesome guy. And I wanted for all I was worth to talk to him again.
I did school that day, trying to contemplate what to do. Should I PM him again? Or should I wait? Or maybe I shouldn't... I don't know. After I spent a good time not studying and thinking about what to do a bit too much, I decided to respond to his darling well wishes from the night before and inform him I didn't dream of dead cats. So sorry. It was a silly response and it didn't get me anywhere, but it was something.
What did I want from this anyways? Heck, if I wanted to stay single forever, I should just board up the door and hope he never comes back, so to speak. I'm really not sure why I PMed him again. Clearly, I wasn't thinking straight. However, I did PM him and it was too late now. I was throwing things to the wind, hoping they would come back to me with some hint of what to do.
I returned to college work, determined to study Counseling and not Jacob Clifton. If I had any clear thought in my head that whole time, it was this: I needed to figure out what this guy wanted. I didn't need a pen pal. I had a dojo to run, college to finish, and I wasn't looking for a flirty friendship with a guy I'd never meet. I had things to do in life, and if he didn't mean anything more than being a friend, I didn't want to hear it. Silly, silly girl. All these crazy thoughts, and I'd only talked to him once.
Call it feminine intuition. Call it pride. Call it stupidity. Call it insanity. But somehow, I knew he was going to fall head over heels in love with me. And as much as I didn't want to swallow it down, I knew the truth was this: I was going to fall head over heels in love with him. How is that possible? I don't know. I still don't know. All I knew was I could faintly hear that heaven music coming from God's earbuds, as it were. I knew something was up.
He did write back. HE. WROTE. BACK. My heart fluttered. My hands eagerly wrote him back something I don't remember and probably don't need to. He was writing me about nothing, yet again, but he was writing me. I told myself not to get excited. There was nothing to be excited over.
I couldn't help it. Jacob was just like me. He was a bit more blunt, a bit more quirky, a bit cuter, and a bit more likely to make me wonder over things I might not wonder over, but I could tell he was a kindred spirit and he was worth my time.
I jumped at the opportunity to tell him anything and everything, spilling useless bits of information about myself via PM or email. I wanted him to know who I was. I didn't want to talk to him just to talk to him. I wanted him to know just who he was dealing with: sweatpants, bandanas, dojo garb, sweat, work outs, health food, weird habits, red hair loving, loud singing, overly protective, overly dramatic, perfectly honest, slightly delusional, misty and shallow self esteem, confidence over things most girls don't care about, 149 pounds and counting, music blaring, Beth Kneuer. And I didn't waste one precious message telling him just who I was. I didn't waste a second. Maybe I should have, but I didn't care. I just didn't know what was happening.
There were no books describing what to do in a situation like this. So I did what I did best: I painted over everything with an optimistic, overly zealous 'love for life' type of attitude. It wasn't sugar coated. It was just me being me, talking to a dude I'd never met.
We kept this up for most of June. I became a superb multi-tasker; studying school stuff while talking to this kid at the same time became my goal. I was constantly exhausted from booking through college tests, teaching, and studying martial arts, yet I didn't ever waste a minute. If he was online, I had to talk to him. I had to. It didn't matter if I had to rearrange my schedule. I would do it. It was ridiculous and I felt like an idiot, but I did it anyways.
Not long after I changed my life schedule to fit this boy in among the boxing gloves and CLEP tests, we decided to call.
That's right. As in a phone call. With a phone. With two people. Talking to each other.
Hopefully not talking to each other in fragments like so! I was so nervous as I handed over my phone number via email. He was going to call me. What would I say? Goodness, it needed to be something funny, but not too funny. It needed to be honest, but not something stupidly honest.
Time was up, before I knew what was happening, he was calling me and I didn't have another second to think about it. He said hello, and I blurted out with unbridled ecstasy, "Oh wow! You're real!"
The only comfort I had in saying this was that well, I was being myself. That's what I wanted, right?
Things spiraled quickly. He was talking fast, I wasn't saying much of anything because he was talking so fast, but I distinctly remember telling him that he was nervously babbling- and he was. He was talking a million miles a minute, most of which was a bunch of flirty nonsense that was ticking me off. He was trying to impress me in some loopy way, but I wasn't going for it. What I did like, however, was his voice. I loved his voice. Even though he was talking much too fast, I loved it.
What do I remember about that conversation? I remember he said he was in his driveway and that it was very warm out. I remember it was about 90 something degrees and I was pacing my bedroom in a cutoff and, ahem, sweatpants. Yes. Sweatpants in 90 degree weather. I was an idiot. And yes, I was sweating. Maybe I wanted to blame the sweatpants. I wasn't nervously sweating. Nope. Now I can say that with complete honesty.
I remember I talked to him for 30 minutes and it felt like 5. I remember clumping down the stairs and looking at my brother Tim with a silly grin, mumbling, "Ah, guess who just called me? Ah, Jacob just called me. Yeah." I remember flying out the door 2 minutes after we hung up, because I had to go teach. I remember driving to the dojo in a haze. I remember fumbling through classes that day.
But the most important thing I remember was this: after talking to him for almost a month, I still didn't know him a ton. I knew he played football, I knew he was working a lot, I knew he did gymnastics. I knew he was trouble, I knew he was on the side of being a flirt, I knew he wasn't talking to me for anything more than a person to talk to, make jokes with, etc. I knew he was talking to me when it was easy for him, when he wanted someone to quip with. I could tell.
He didn't think much about me, but I was determined to change that for all I was worth. Why? I wanted to be single forever, right? Right? What about that?
And while I messed around with various ideas of how to change Jacob Clifton's mind, I'm sure God was up in heaven somewhere laughing long and hard.
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