Part I
The story of me and the love of my life is no short thing. We often hear of things being beautiful in their simplicity, but over the past four years I’ve found the most beautiful gift in the complexity that is my continual pursuit of and relationship with Grace Anne Woodson.
I first met Grace my sophomore year of high school at Christian Heritage School, Trumbull, CT. Having been at this one school 12 out of 13 years of schooling, I had become very comfortable with my group of friends and my way of life as it was there. So, I was fairly reserved around those new students that came to CHS later on. Grace was one such student and rightly so, she was the one to come up to me and introduce herself a couple weeks into our sophomore year. My first impressions of Grace included being impressed by her spunk, confidence, originality and of course, her pretty face. I was immediately fond of her and looked forward to a friendship with her, but had no idea what God had in mind for us.
Grace and I were both the type of kids in high school to not be satisfied unless they had a hand in way too many activities. Sports, worship leading, student government, ensembles, musicals, you name it. The good thing about this for us was that it gave us plenty of time to get to know each other, be ourselves around each other, and learn what makes the other tick. Junior year of high school was filled with these kind of times and Grace became one of my closest friends at school. It’s strange to look back now and recreate in my mind the interactions that I had with this girl who was, at the time, just a close friend, but would soon become my fiancé. I feel like part of me always knew that there was something special about Grace, and that I could almost foresee us together, but another part of me, at the time, never thought it would be a reality and certainly saw Grace as way out of my league; the beautiful cheerleader for the quiet music kid. This still amazes me to this day!
Senior year of high school is when things started to get fun. Our friendship continued and even grew into the start of our final year at CHS, but I had no idea what was about to hit me. There are often stories of love at first sight and although this wasn’t my first sight of Grace, it happened instantaneously all the same. It was the last school day before Thanksgiving break and I was saying goodbye to everyone when I came up to Grace to wish her a happy break. I went to high-five her and as we did, our fingers interlocked and I held her hand, scandalous I know. It was at this moment that God decided to drop the bomb on me all at once and let me know that I was in love with Grace. It sounds random, but it was that very moment holding hands that I realized I was and really had always been in love with her.
From that point on, my senior year was absorbed with spending as much time as possible with my love and letting her know, in the most subtle ways, how much she meant to me. Now they needed to be subtle because Grace was not exactly single at the time and that last thing I wanted to do was to get in the middle of her existing relationship. Plus, although I was deeply in love with her, I still never thought I would ever see the day of actually being with her. She still seemed vastly unattainable for my little self. Despite this, I still felt it my duty to pursue that senior year without really pursuing her; to try to spend every second with her and put my best foot forward without trying to steal her from her boyfriend. This involved sitting next to her in class, inviting her to my basketball and baseball games, convincing her to come to my band’s shows, and even joining our school’s musical so I could spend long practice hours with her after school. This musical was especially important and really if it was not for us being in Beauty and the Beast together, who knows where we’d be right now. By some random fortune, I got the lead part of Gaston and Grace was the student choreographer as well as one of the “silly girls” (who fortunately for me fawned over Gaston most of the musical). It was the many hours spent rehearsing, encouraging each other, bouncing ideas off each other, and just living that big chunk of life together that drew us even closer and solidified the fact that I had a certified crush on Grace Anne Woodson.
I definitely think of my senior year of high school as one of the best years of my life so far. Most of what made this year so great was the many memories involving my pursuit of Grace and also a couple of occasions of her sending some hints to me in return. Some of these must be recounted here in order to fully understand our story. Some may not seem like the most significant, but they meant the world to me. The first involves Spirit Week and “twin day.” It was April, the day before twin day and, oddly enough, both Grace and I still hadn’t found our twins. So, we jokingly decided to be twins and decided to wear a band t-shirt I had two of and green pants. It was an outfit beautiful in its utter ridiculousness. Still, what made that day so great was the few comments from teachers asking us if we were dating when they saw that we were twins. Although we were quick to say “no,” just the question made me smile.
The next story should be prefaced with the fact that she was no longer dating her boyfriend by early April, so as to not portray myself as a shameless home-wrecker. This was what can be considered our first date. Grace and I decided to go to the “Spring Fling” together, which was a semi-formal banquet type event. I was super excited about the night and thought longer about how I looked and what I was wearing than ever before. Grace looked beautiful that night and I felt just a little undeserving. Nevertheless, we had a wonderful time with each other and all our friends at our table. I had heard that there would be an open-mic after the dinner, so I prepared an acoustic song I had been writing for Grace and played it at the end of the night for everyone in the gym. She seemed to love it and I was quite proud of myself; I’m not going to lie.
We come to the end of senior year and no matter how close moving on from high school and on to new lives at college seemed, I still knew that I could do nothing less than pursue Grace with everything I had. And while I was busy doing just this, Grace spurred me with a few surprising hints herself. One of these happened a few weeks before the big Senior Banquet (our school’s version of a prom). Both Grace and I hadn’t committed to going with anyone yet, so I was thinking of a good way to ask her. Before I had gotten up the courage to ask her myself, I hear Grace’s voice come over the intercom at the end of a school day asking me to go to Banquet with her, with the whole school listening. I was ecstatic, but said that I didn’t really want to go to banquet anymore. Ha! Just joking, I ran down the hallway to the office and blurted out the fastest “YEAH!” ever. We had a beautiful time at the banquet and I loved every minute of it. We left each other that night as friends, but realized the unmistakable connection we had, although it was still unspoken up until this point.
Stay tuned for Part II…
