Reminiscing in three parts

A little over a year ago, I opened my heart up to someone romantically for the first time since my relationship had ended. A close friend's girlfriend and I had been getting to know each other, and she wanted to introduce me to two of her best friends from home because she knew we'd hit it off. She invited me to dinner with the guys, one of whom lived in L.A. while the other still lived in their hometown of Phoenix, AZ. After dinner we played a silly game of tennis and rounded off the evening with a round of cranium at a local coffee shop. At that point it had been about three months since my break up and I was desperate to meet new people and experience the reawakening that brand new introductions can often inspire in you. It's refreshing to step out of the muck of a failed relationship and trying to figure out who you are on your own, for an interaction with a completely clean slate.

It was a fun night all together, and at the end the guy from Arizona asked my friend if he could have my number. While I suppose this initial step suggested an attraction, as we got to know each other it became clear that for the most part, this was destined to be a friendship. I was doing my best to be single and give myself space and time to recover from my break up, and he had made a commitment to not date, period. His thought process was that at this age (he'd only been out of college for a year at that point), relationships with women were better served on a friendship basis, and this was the time for him to explore opportunities and focus on identifying a life path to lay the foundation for the relationship he hoped to have one day. Or at least that's how I understood it. Still, over the next 4-6 weeks we gradually talked more and more, and I grew to depend on the cheerful phone calls we'd share. I often got a message when I got out of the shower in the morning with him singing some song he'd been listening to and wishing me a happy day. That sounds silly but he's just one of those guys that's really good at bringing a little sunshine into your life. We also spent many hours talking about spirituality, how faith plays a role in our lives and what it means in the modern world. We even attempted a book study. Suffice it to say, over that relatively short period of time he became a somewhat integral part of my life as I opened up to him in ways I was somehow unable to with many friends, and enjoyed the validation of someone wanting to experience all those sides of me that hadn't had an outlet in my relationship.

Throughout this time though we were both aware that he would be leaving the country to start an 18 month graduate program in Israel at the beginning of November.