Hubby and I met on the spur of the moment. And our relationship began on the spur of the moment. I therefore kept expecting it to end on the spur of the moment as well. I never in a million years imagined that he was to be THE ONE.
And yet as the weeks went by and things only grew stronger and stronger between us I began to wonder if this wasn’t perhaps a very bad idea. All three of us interns had our contracts renewed in June and thus bought (not yet)Hubby and me 6 additional months, but that only made things more confusing. What would happen when my time was up and I had to return home?
We stoically decided to avoid this topic as much as possible and instead concentrated on travelling and enjoying the time we spent together.
Every night after dinner (ny)Hubby would come pick me up at M's and we’d go out walking in the streets of Paris. He’d show me his favourite corners in town, or a different arrondissement to explore each time, or a little park he’d walked by that day, the bookstore he loved to browse in… each evening with him was a new discovery of Paris and an incredible time together. He also slowly began to help me with my french. During those long evenings together we decided to try and communicate in his language and his never ending patience and gentle corrections boosted my level to a point people started to notice my improvement in the office. By the way, it still amazes me how back in those days I could go out almost every night after dinner and stay out until 2 or 3am and still be able to get up and go to work the following morning.
As it was unavoidable, eventually my friendship with A suffered from this. At the beginning she was really happy for both of us. She adored (ny)Hubby and found that we made a great couple. She’d wait for me to come home and we’d spend a good half hour talking and giggling like school girls, she telling me all about her latest chat with Alfonso, me telling her all about my latest promenade with (ny)Hubby. We loved doing stuff together the three of us during the weekend and we travelled quite a bit following for the most part the plan A and I had drawn up those first days at M's. A and I did go to Barcelona and Amsterdam together. And the three of us did go to Athens and Belgium and England.
But things began to go downhill between A and me when it became evident that (ny)Hubby was going to become a “permanent” member in our little group. She liked him but missed the “girls only” relationship we’d had at the very beginning and since I knew my days with (ny)Hubby were counted and wanted to make the best of them, I began to find myself caught in the middle more often than not.
Then came the day I decided to move out of M’s place.
(ny)Hubby and I had talked about moving in together (or more like me moving in with him) but I hadn’t gone as far as to consider it seriously until the night of the fight between M’s two sons. Both her kids stayed mostly to themselves, the fifteen year-old living with us spending his time watching TV and barely saying two words to us when we came home and the twenty-two year-old living on his own, occasionally coming to have dinner with us and spending his time arguing with his brother. But one night things got out of control. A and I were in our room when we heard them start shouting and yelling at each other. Then we heard furniture being thrown around. Then we heard M screaming and shouting. More fighting, more screaming, more stuff thrown around. We were terrified. We had no idea what was going on or what all the fighting was about. Worse, we didn’t dare go out of our room because we weren’t even sure the boys would refrain from coming at us! After about half an hour of this we heard them take the fight outside the apartment and down the staircase of the building. We slowly opened our room door and peaked out. M was nowhere to be seen but the apartment looked completely trashed. Every single piece of furniture had been turned upside down. The bookcases had been emptied and a mirror had been shattered. We could hear M and the boys still going at it downstairs in the main hall and we simply stood there not knowing what to do. Eventually M came back into the apartment and we were relived to see she was okay. But there was blood on her clothes and eventually we understood that one of the boys had thrown his fist through a glass window pane and she had come back up to the apartment to look for something to clean up the mess downstairs. By then, the fight had finally broken up and the boys had left the building each going their separate way. As surreal as this may sound, A and I silently gathered a bucket of water, the mop and rags and went downstairs to help M clean up the blood and the broken glass. She seemed genuinely ashamed that we had witnessed this but from what I could gather (and by then our French was sort of ok) she made no apologies for either of her sons and didn't really explain what the fight had been all about.
Afterwards, when we were back in our room I dialed (ny)Hubby’s number and asked him to pick us up. I convinced A that we were spending the night at his place and I guess she was too much in shock to say no. The episode with M’s sons was the final straw that made up my mind to move out (other stuff at M’s had already begun to irk me but it’s no use mentioning them now) yet A flatly refused to. We kept trying to convince her that she couldn’t stay there. I offered to help her find a place of her own and even suggested she bunk with us until we found something. By then our French was tons better and we would have surely found a new place easily. But there was no budging her. She was staying at M’s.
Looking back, I can understand why she’d prefer this. A came from a very close family. At first our friendship had been sort of her family away from family, we were in this together, complemented each other, kindda like a sister relationship. We’d protect each other no matter what. But ever since (ny)Hubby had entered the picture I couldn’t be there for her 100% of the time anymore. In a way, M became the closest to family she had left. M was the caring person that I couldn’t be at that point in my life and that A needed. And so she stayed at M's until her last day in France. I never heard word of another fight between the brothers no matter how many times I checked with A that things were okay at Barbès.
Eventually we grew apart. By the end of our internship we rarely saw each other outside of work and that hurt both of us. She’d made other friends with some of the new batch of interns that arrived during the second semester and even traveled a bit with her boss from work.
I on the other hand had my own stuff going on as well. Living with (ny)Hubby those last few months only proved to us that we really wanted this to work in the long haul. As the date of my flight back home approached we kept trying to find what options we had as we knew we definitely weren’t going to be able to do the long distance thing… we’d miss each other too much.
And so we devised a plan…..... but that’s a whole other story.
This one folks, ends here.
So now you know how it all started…..
Fned.
P.S. In case you’re wondering, A and I still keep in touch. She and boyfriend are now happily married and live in the US.
And yet as the weeks went by and things only grew stronger and stronger between us I began to wonder if this wasn’t perhaps a very bad idea. All three of us interns had our contracts renewed in June and thus bought (not yet)Hubby and me 6 additional months, but that only made things more confusing. What would happen when my time was up and I had to return home?
We stoically decided to avoid this topic as much as possible and instead concentrated on travelling and enjoying the time we spent together.
Every night after dinner (ny)Hubby would come pick me up at M's and we’d go out walking in the streets of Paris. He’d show me his favourite corners in town, or a different arrondissement to explore each time, or a little park he’d walked by that day, the bookstore he loved to browse in… each evening with him was a new discovery of Paris and an incredible time together. He also slowly began to help me with my french. During those long evenings together we decided to try and communicate in his language and his never ending patience and gentle corrections boosted my level to a point people started to notice my improvement in the office. By the way, it still amazes me how back in those days I could go out almost every night after dinner and stay out until 2 or 3am and still be able to get up and go to work the following morning.
As it was unavoidable, eventually my friendship with A suffered from this. At the beginning she was really happy for both of us. She adored (ny)Hubby and found that we made a great couple. She’d wait for me to come home and we’d spend a good half hour talking and giggling like school girls, she telling me all about her latest chat with Alfonso, me telling her all about my latest promenade with (ny)Hubby. We loved doing stuff together the three of us during the weekend and we travelled quite a bit following for the most part the plan A and I had drawn up those first days at M's. A and I did go to Barcelona and Amsterdam together. And the three of us did go to Athens and Belgium and England.
But things began to go downhill between A and me when it became evident that (ny)Hubby was going to become a “permanent” member in our little group. She liked him but missed the “girls only” relationship we’d had at the very beginning and since I knew my days with (ny)Hubby were counted and wanted to make the best of them, I began to find myself caught in the middle more often than not.
Then came the day I decided to move out of M’s place.
(ny)Hubby and I had talked about moving in together (or more like me moving in with him) but I hadn’t gone as far as to consider it seriously until the night of the fight between M’s two sons. Both her kids stayed mostly to themselves, the fifteen year-old living with us spending his time watching TV and barely saying two words to us when we came home and the twenty-two year-old living on his own, occasionally coming to have dinner with us and spending his time arguing with his brother. But one night things got out of control. A and I were in our room when we heard them start shouting and yelling at each other. Then we heard furniture being thrown around. Then we heard M screaming and shouting. More fighting, more screaming, more stuff thrown around. We were terrified. We had no idea what was going on or what all the fighting was about. Worse, we didn’t dare go out of our room because we weren’t even sure the boys would refrain from coming at us! After about half an hour of this we heard them take the fight outside the apartment and down the staircase of the building. We slowly opened our room door and peaked out. M was nowhere to be seen but the apartment looked completely trashed. Every single piece of furniture had been turned upside down. The bookcases had been emptied and a mirror had been shattered. We could hear M and the boys still going at it downstairs in the main hall and we simply stood there not knowing what to do. Eventually M came back into the apartment and we were relived to see she was okay. But there was blood on her clothes and eventually we understood that one of the boys had thrown his fist through a glass window pane and she had come back up to the apartment to look for something to clean up the mess downstairs. By then, the fight had finally broken up and the boys had left the building each going their separate way. As surreal as this may sound, A and I silently gathered a bucket of water, the mop and rags and went downstairs to help M clean up the blood and the broken glass. She seemed genuinely ashamed that we had witnessed this but from what I could gather (and by then our French was sort of ok) she made no apologies for either of her sons and didn't really explain what the fight had been all about.
Afterwards, when we were back in our room I dialed (ny)Hubby’s number and asked him to pick us up. I convinced A that we were spending the night at his place and I guess she was too much in shock to say no. The episode with M’s sons was the final straw that made up my mind to move out (other stuff at M’s had already begun to irk me but it’s no use mentioning them now) yet A flatly refused to. We kept trying to convince her that she couldn’t stay there. I offered to help her find a place of her own and even suggested she bunk with us until we found something. By then our French was tons better and we would have surely found a new place easily. But there was no budging her. She was staying at M’s.
Looking back, I can understand why she’d prefer this. A came from a very close family. At first our friendship had been sort of her family away from family, we were in this together, complemented each other, kindda like a sister relationship. We’d protect each other no matter what. But ever since (ny)Hubby had entered the picture I couldn’t be there for her 100% of the time anymore. In a way, M became the closest to family she had left. M was the caring person that I couldn’t be at that point in my life and that A needed. And so she stayed at M's until her last day in France. I never heard word of another fight between the brothers no matter how many times I checked with A that things were okay at Barbès.
Eventually we grew apart. By the end of our internship we rarely saw each other outside of work and that hurt both of us. She’d made other friends with some of the new batch of interns that arrived during the second semester and even traveled a bit with her boss from work.
I on the other hand had my own stuff going on as well. Living with (ny)Hubby those last few months only proved to us that we really wanted this to work in the long haul. As the date of my flight back home approached we kept trying to find what options we had as we knew we definitely weren’t going to be able to do the long distance thing… we’d miss each other too much.
And so we devised a plan…..... but that’s a whole other story.
This one folks, ends here.
So now you know how it all started…..
Fned.
P.S. In case you’re wondering, A and I still keep in touch. She and boyfriend are now happily married and live in the US.
6 comments:
Good story! Whenever you're ready to start the sequel, just go right ahead! Hope you guys are having a great trip! Ireland, isn't it?
okay, just to satisfy your curiosity (should you feel such) I deleted the comment above because it was the same one I'd already posted. Somehow, I posted it twice! OOPs!
What a wonderful story! You know, of course, that you've got to continue where you left off eventually...too cruel to keep us hanging!
Love ya!
omg how scary! the fist fight I mean... if you are not used to that kind of behavior witnessing something like that could be frightening... I would be!
On the other hand, it is lovely how things went well with you now-hubby, that is truly a very romantic story!
(is there going to be a sequel? digo, no es que seamos chismosos, si no que es muy interesante!)
Yeah, I've always wanted to know what exactly that was all about when you came home after your internship (you only stayed a few months before you were off again back to Paris, but talk about difficulties in mother/daughter communication during that period, sheesh!)... then again, that leads up to one of the greatest stories of all time: how your super hubby proposed to you. Now THAT is a story to be told!!!!
I loved reading this series!! Thank you for sharing.
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