Hopeful Stones on Mars

I remember the first time I saw her. I was at a party at some guy named Jim’s house. I couldn’t believe she was single! She was beautiful, but not in that fake way where girls put on heavy makeup and wear ridiculous clothes to get guys to pay attention to them. No, Natalie just...was. She had long dark hair with these streaks of red highlights in it. It was like her hair had been struck by lighting or something. But that wasn’t even the best part about her, oh no. Her eyes were the most amazing shade of green that you could ever imagine seeing on a person. They were just so bright and vibrant. She didn’t wear a lot of makeup either, which made me like her even more than if she did.

I wanted to talk to her right away, but I figured that would be a little inappropriate if I just went up to her and started talking without knowing anything about her first. So, instead I decided to wait until someone introduced us. That turned out to be easier than I would have thought because as soon as I walked into Jim’s house, Natalie walked right up to me and said “Hey Dan, right? We’re friends on Facebook, nice to meet you! My name is Natalie.”

I was taken aback by how bold she was being with meeting me for the first time. Given our friendship on Facebook though, it didn’t seem too unusual for her to come up and introduce herself like that. So we chatted for a while about random things like school and people from our respective high schools. It turned out that we had both graduated from Ridgeway High School together back in 2012 and hadn’t seen each other since then! We were so happy when we found out that we had gone to the same school because we finished each other’s sentences whenever we talked about old times at Ridgeway High School. Before I knew it, the party was over and everyone was leaving.

I walked outside with her and asked her if she wanted to grab coffee sometime next week and she said yes without hesitation! We exchanged phone numbers and made plans for Monday morning at 10:30am after she got off of work at The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf down by the mall in Pasadena. At this point in our relationship, I felt like we were pretty much dating already because we had spent all day talking at Jim’s party and then again during our date on Sunday morning! When Sunday night rolled around though, I felt weird about calling her my girlfriend so early in our relationship so I referred to myself as “your boyfriend” when we were talking through text messages on WhatsApp late into the night before finally going to sleep together very satisfied but tired from all of the intimate activities that we shared earlier in the evening after having coffee together at The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf down by the mall in Pasadena!

Sunday night was definitely one of the best nights of my life up until this point, but Monday morning when my alarm clock went off at 6:00am and I opened my phone to check the time before turning it off, only to see a message from Natalie saying "Haha bye loser!" with an emoji of a face blowing a rude gesture attached next to it made me feel worse than experiencing a series of preposterous, painful, and embarrassing events all mashed together into a single moment. It was a gut-wrenching feeling, like being knocked down by every possible misfortune that came storming at me from all corners of the universe - an outrageous, absurd, debilitating blow from fate itself.