Elena and I started out as classmates in the AI class, then became team mates on the class project. We were both super nerds, working on the Master's program in Computer Science. I was impressed with her astonishing grasp of discrete math as she was with my skills at LISP and Prolog. I found myself thinking about her long after we had finished our class project, where we worked together over days and nights over cups of coffee and plenty of cigarettes. I constantly thought about her shoulder length red hair and how she would run her fingers through it when she was deep in thought or when she was intensely focused on something she was reading. I thought of her bluish-grey eyes, which were accentuated by the rimless glasses that were always perched precariously over the bridge of her aquiline nose.
I loved to look into her eyes and watch them reflect a myriad of emotions as we talked about a plethora of subjects under the sun: quantum theory, world affairs and globalization, the Russian Czars (I had boned up on them as quickly as humanly possible to impress her) and the Bolshevik revolution, evolution, well there was no end of the things we could talk about. I loved to hear her laugh and I loved to hear her talk; she had the honeyed voice of the Lorelei who could distract sailors on the Rhine to their doom on the rocks. When I heard her speak in Russian (a language that I have mostly forgotten now), it was all I could to sit there and not fall into a trance. To this day, I believe Russian is a language that sounds beautiful only when spoken by women. For me, all of 22 years old, it was love at first sight.
My dating experience had been very limited until that point. I was the chemistry nerd in high school and I was part of the school debating team. I was also a huge trivia geek; my knowledge of random facts impresses many people today, but it was not so back then. I guess girls my age had very little time for a guy who always had his nose stuck in a book. But Elena was different. She was the first woman who was impressed by my nerdy chops. In one of our more open conversations over several rounds of vodka and orange juice (where she comfortably out drank me), she confessed she was strongly attracted to me. I had never summoned the courage to tell her about my feelings for her up until that point. So hearing her talk about her attraction for me opened up my emotional floodgates. Now I don't remember how my gawky self exactly expressed my feelings for her but I remember it was a torrent.