Part 1: Big J
He was perfect. He was 183 cm tall and had a lean and athletic body. His legs were well-toned from all the biking and hiking. I remembered the panoramic pictures he would send me from his biking shenanigans, and I could tell that those countless hours spent exercising had toned his calves and thighs like those of a Greek god's statue. He had silky salt and pepper hair and the fine lines on his face reflected his experience and gave his looks immense character. He had deep brown eyes and a piercing look. But if you looked closely, you could see the pain in his eyes from a recent separation from a twenty-five year-long marriage.
It was 3 AM on a hot summer night. I stood in his hotel room, and he asked me if I could locate all the seven swimming pools in the hotel looking down from the window. His room was on the 22
nd
floor. He left my side as he assigned me this project to find all the pools. I could hear him moving around in the room while I continued my search.
It was late and dark. The hotel had very few lights on, and I had had too much to drink on an empty stomach, for my hazy eyes to spot all the pools. I struggled and was able to identify maybe two. I felt like a little child assigned with a counting project who was trying hard to succeed, and to impress my teacher.
Suddenly, music started playing in the background. He put on the first song he had
shared with me on text months ago. I could instantly recognize the tune because I enjoyed it as I had played it repeatedly many times, sometimes on loop when listening privately and many times in the rental during my spring vacation with some friends four months ago. My mind raced to figure out why he had picked that specific tune. Did he associate that song with the beginning of our strange but beautiful friendship... or relationship?
I met Big J when I got a new finance job over seven months back. We had the same job in the same team, but Big J and I lived in different time zones, in two cities in very different parts of the country. Although we had met in person only a few times, we started talking a lot a few months ago. Our conversations started with sharing our mutual challenges at work but soon drifted to everything under the sun. We joked and laughed about the challenges and bad, awkward or funny situations at work. We used sarcasm to express ourselves and had that in common, and often our perspectives on work or non-work-related topics were similar too. If we disagreed with each other, we heard the other person's standpoint with an open mind and had a healthy, bringing varied perspectives into the conversation. He treated me like an equal, even though Big J was almost two decades older than I was. Age was a non-issue, or at least seemed like one. We inched closer as we continued to share our lives bit by bit. Every day with each other in conversations laced with humor and sarcasm. This brought happiness to me and, I hoped, to him too.