Night Namesake Now Awake (4)

In which our Hero has yet another run-in with LinkedIn

Last of the out-of-the-blue contacts with misplaced women out of my past while I wasn’t writing was my trusty lab-partner, and coincidentally, a namesake of my lady Nocturne, who I shall call Zap.

At my school, rather than doing alternate semesters of work and study, there was instead a year-long internship program between second and third year. With the curious side effect of temporally displacing the participants. So we came back to third-year and a bunch of our classmates were gone, and instead, there were strangers, to us, who weren’t strange to the place.

Also relevant is that my best bud for the previous seven years, Guy Smiley, had come to cross purposes with me in our intense design project of the previous year, and our friendship was never the same after that. But at the time, I was still feeling out how I felt and that meant I was still sitting in my regular spot which was second row, second from the left, leaving that left hand spot with the left hand desk saved for my left handed friend.

Except there was a girl sitting there. On the short side, but hell, I wasn’t all that anxious to sit with Guy Smiley anyway. Pretty, which I didn’t object to. And when someone new joins your group, you talk to them, right?

And that’s how Zap came to join our little troop of manly men doing manly things in C. Of course, having a girl in the group lead to some chest-thumping behaviours from some of the guys which made me look fabulous by comparison. And we were sitting together anyway and got along, and both bereft of our usual lab partner choices, and that’s how she and I became a team for the next two years.

She lived off campus, so as a matter of course, when we shut down for the night, a few of us would walk her to her house before wending to the subway. Once in a while I’d go over to study, and I don’t really remember it, but she must have come here to study too because my mother used to ask about her, after I’d left school.

We were single together. We went to the graduation ball together, largely because she felt could go with me and not have it be a declaration of romance, where most of the other guys would have assumed they’d be moving in with her in a few days after. And we had an anti-valentine’s day date, too, before she met her one true love. Which is about when, I think, her attention got a little more focused elsewhere. And for that matter, I’d started travel for work, and we just fell out of touch.

I’m tickled to hear from her, and a little google-fu has revealed that she’s still Mrs Newlastname and apparently has a few kids to boot. Except then I think about the fact that it’s been *how* long and they won’t be that small, I’m guessing. Yikes.