I was teaching fifth grade and it was the end of the school day when kids are getting their stuff. It’s a little hectic, you know, you’re just getting your backpacks, you’re waiting for the bell to ring. Kids are chatting with each other, whatever. And then someone’s like, “Heyyyyyy, someone needs you in the hallway,” and I could see that there was a student I didn’t recognize in the hallway, which is usually not a great sign. If a student you don’t know is asking for you, that makes you think, like, “Uh-oh, something serious must have happened.” Because if it wasn’t that serious, they’d probably just tell their own teacher. But apparently it needs to be handled now and here.
And so I went out to the hallway and I braced for the worst. And, you know, the other bad omen at the time was that the student waited for the door to close before she told me what happened or what was going on, which is also a sign where I was prepping myself, I was like, “Oh my god, she needs privacy. This must be pretty bad.” Um, I thought maybe someone hit her or like touched her inappropriately, I was ready for anything. And, you know, she had a hard time getting started, you know, she couldn’t make eye contact, and she was like, “This is pretty awkward, but…” And I was like “Ah no, oh please.” And she’s like, “But, my mom was curious as to whether you’d ever wanna date her friend?” Which was a complete — completely unexpected. And so unexpected that I didn’t know how to formulate a response because my mind went 100 different ways in a split second. One of the prevailing directions my brain went was like, “Alright, am I getting match-made by a ten-year-old?” And, “Is that — that’s not okay, right? That’s weird. This is weird. Yeah, this is weird.”
So I didn’t know what to say. You know, maybe I should have said, “Well you know that’s not really my place to say, and I don’t know if it’s your place to bring this up.” Instead, I just kinda like mumbled and I was like, “I, I, hnghuh, hah, ahduhna.” And I kind of just made like a knowing, like, “I gotta get going, sorry I can’t do this,” and I walked away. And this was a puzzle for a while. It became a story that I told my family right away. You know, I told anyone who would listen, with whom it made sense to tell, anyway, within my social circle. And it was a pretty amusing, entertaining tale and, you know, everyone wanted to — you know, at the end they were like, “So, who, who was it? What happened?” And I had to be like, “I don’t — I have no idea. Because I don’t even know who that girl was. She wasn’t in my classroom. That was just it. I walked away and that was a wrap and I never heard anything about it again.”
Until the end of the school year, when I received a message on my classroom app from a parent who I guess had the tact to wait until the school year was over, ’cause she thought it’d be weird beforehand, and informed me that she had a mutual friend, or just a — not a mutual friend, but she had a friend with whom she thought I would enjoy befriending. You know, and I was coming out of a relationship and so initially I wrote back, I was like, “I just don’t think I’m ready to go there,” and she’s like, “Eh, no worries. But just, just, I wasn’t even thinking that. I was just thinking friends. You guys have similar personalities and I just think you guys might just enjoy literally having each other to speak to.” And, uh, took me a few months, maybe a few weeks, to ponder that and eventually I conceded. I was like, “Alright.” I thought it should be an automatic ‘no.’ I remember asking my co-workers like, “This is not good, right? This is — you shouldn’t do this?” And my co-workers were like, “No, go for it. Why not? It’s great. Shoot your shot.”
Um, so I went out to breakfast with this, uh, with this woman who ended up being pretty wonderful. And then we ended up dating for over a year, leading to present day. It’s the person with whom I’m involved with at the moment. And it all technically started, yeah, with a random fifth grade student who I now know, I have ID’d this person, and my partner has informed me that that student still thinks that she is the one who’s fully responsible for the fact that we ever dated to begin with. So, yeah, fun times. I like when a good puzzle is solved.