It all started out on the first day of my junior year at U of I. As I walked into class with my buddy Matt (Marek), I hadn’t the faintest idea that I was about to meet a woman who had already made a decision that would affect the course my life would take. I’m sure at this point of my story you are thinking that Christina had decided to do something completely out of the ordinary and I was about to walk right into her, knock her books down, and help her pick them up only to fall for her as our eyes met. Well, if you are among the thousands who are thinking that, I hate to tell you, but that isn’t quite how things transpired. The woman pictured below is the woman I previously referred to. She is Susan Krische, Accounting 302 professor, and before our first class with her began, she had already assigned Christina and me to work in a group together.
I will always remember how natural our first conversation seemed and that it felt like I was talking to someone I already knew. Well, we worked together and fell madly in love with each other as our group was spending countless hours in the Courtyard Café perfecting our project. Obviously I once again stretched the truth just a bit, but we did work so well together; sharing laughs, gossip, complaints, and of course accounting wisdom.
We were fortunate enough to be in essentially the same course track together for the rest of college, which really gave me numerous opportunities to inhibit the growth of our friendship. Some of the more memorable opportunities I took advantage of include:
- Showing off my foot repeatedly to Christina after it swelled to the shape of a cinder block and the color of a grape after a well-placed bee sting
- Christina listening intently as I described (to the most minute detail) the sewer problems at my house during Thanksgiving of my junior year in college
- Christina finding humor in the countless ways my roommates and I found to disrupt our CPA review class (including intentionally walking in late)
- Showing admiration towards the mohawk and facial hair which I strictly maintained during our final year at college. Even more so, showing disappointment when I got rid of both (more towards the Mohawk – obviously)
In all seriousness, during the first two and a half years of our friendship, I was blessed to be given the opportunity to get to know someone so kind, so fun-loving, so thoughtful, so brilliant, and so beautiful. When our feelings for each other started to rise to the next level, everything became a blur for me. We both felt that we only had a limited time together before I was to go back to Glenview and Christina to return to Asheville for one final summer before starting work in New York. Our last two months at school was a giant rush for me as we crammed as many dates in as possible and took advantage of every moment we had.
Over the next year, we shared many tearful goodbyes at O’Hare and LaGuardia, but every emotion was more than worth it. The times we shared when we saw each other were so incredible because we knew we only had a short time and did every exciting thing we could think of. When Christina moved back to Chicago, I felt as if all of my wishes that had been building since we first said goodbye to each other in Champaign finally came true. Having Christina in Chicago has vastly surpassed everything I had imagined. She is everything I could ever dream of in a woman and I will never think of her as anything less than the most beautiful, most caring, most intelligent and adventurous woman I could imagine.
Read what Christina says...
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