I am at London’s Heathrow airport Terminal 3 waiting for her. Her flight is going to land in 2 hours. I have already arrived here three hours earlier from another destination and I thought there is no point into going in to the city. I won’t be able to make it back in time for her arrival. So I decide to wait. It’s probably the longest wait of my life. The sheer anticipation is killing me. How does she look like in person? Will I match her expectations? Will it be instant spark or I would just have to work really hard to establish a proper degree of chemistry? At the age of 35 having passed a childhood of revolutions and wars and a lifetime of being a modern day Iranian émigré and a nasty divorce on my belt, here I am, a 14 year old boy again, picking Rose peddles; she loves me, she loves me not!
We have courted under very peculiar set of circumstances. And by “courted” I mean by wonder of modern means of communication and not in person. Among family and friends, I am generally acknowledged to be horrible with relationships. Aside from being a divorced man, there is not a single household among friends and family without a girl cursing me or wishing me a lifetime of misery and ghastly tidings. Never the less, as a bachelor, everyone is trying to marry me off in one way or another. I think they simply want to stop the maiden mutiny. Doing mankind a favor and all!
So one evening my cousin calls from overseas. She wants me to start to get to know someone very special. A close friend. She makes sure beforehand that I f ruin in this in any way, I’m going to pay dearly. She is ten years my junior and works as a bank manager. The picture attached to her email is, to say the least, intriguing. The eyes are the first feature that attracts me. Large dark eyes gazing at the lens penetrating my soul. There is more than one level to them; she is kind but mischievous at the same time. Innocent yet confident. I am overwhelmed by the contrasting messages her adoringly tantalizing eyes convey. She knows they are one her many assets. Her head is tilted a bit on the side. She knows that is one her many great angles. Her nose, the jaw line, her shoulder high hair, are all flawless. Then there is the smile. Perfectly proportionate to her face! Radiantly sweet! Da’Vinci couldn’t have done it better. Then there is Karma her face oozing. One look at her and you know everything is going to be all right. She is the picture perfect of a sweet heart.
I am simply mesmerized. Speechless! Captivated! Off course I want to meet her. Wouldn’t any man in his right state of mind want to? The last time I checked I was neither crazy nor gay.
I was desperate to attach a lovely voice to that amazing face. I called her one evening and we, almost instantly, hit it off. We established English as our language of communication. She wasn’t feeling that comfortable with Farsi, having been out of Iran for the majority of her life. She told me about her life and I told her about mine. Her likes and dislikes, dreams and hopes, “do’s” and “don’ts” and I told her about mine. Before I knew it I was talking to her a few times a day. The chemistry was amazing.
She is sum of all contractions, sexy, sassy, adventurous, giggly, outgoing, senseless, naively funny, yet intelligent, well educated, elegant and classy. She gets my jokes. She talks to me endless and always has something to tell me. She extracts the talkative guy out of me. I am always looking for new things to tell her which is not at all like me. What more can I say, she owns 102 pairs of shoes and I owe 3 at best. 3 pairs of very high mileage ones!
As we continued to communicate, we decide that we need to meet. We chose London because it is of equal distance to each one of us and insisted because I wanted to impress. I can impress in London. I know romantic London by heart. We can stroll down Portobello Road, hit the National Gallery, Ride the London eye, and visit as many museums as possible. We can also spend a lovely day in Greenwich and the Royal Observatory. There are the pubs, restaurents, bars, the lot.
Still another half an hour to go! I have read the Daily Mail, Guardian, Times, Mirror, and the latest edition of hilariously toilet humor comic magazine “Vizz”. I have gone out of the Terminal building countless times to smoke, had two cups of coffee and still another hour and a half to go. I decide to buy a card and write all my feelings of the moment in it, so that if we hit off, I could give it to her to read. Writing calms me down, it always does.
I may be wrong, might got naively taken the whole thing out of a reasonable and logical context. May be I’m over reacting and being unrealistic. May be soon the reality will hit me and I will get severely disillusioned. Or maybe it would never work out. But I don’t care! Anything that makes you feel like little boy like this is worth taking the risk. In this evil world every little positive energy that one’s feel is worth every possible effort. Plus, if I have one in a million chances of falling head over hills in love with a beautiful woman like this, I will take it any time any day.
Her plane is landed now! I have to go! Got a gorgeous lady waiting for me! I’m sure you would understand! Promise to fill you up on the developments soon.
