Third Date

    It’s the much awaited third date. The air is thick with excitement and the setting is perfect. In fact it doesn’t get better, for it is New Year’s Eve! We are parked illegally at a corner of the road amidst a hundred other cars, surrounded by a horde of drunken kids who are counting down to the New Year. A cool breeze blows and I’m shivering. Cold, excited and anxious.. 52, 51, 50..

I think back about how it all started. Some random day I somehow decided that I wanted to go to the US and make my fortune there ;) I was motivated by the then great prospects of being independent in a foreign country, exploring strange lands and doing whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. I seemed to have forgotten the fact that it involved a lot of studying and working hard. After The Gre, Toefl, sop, recos, apps and admit there I was, on my first journey outside the country. It was an eventful journey with a cancelled flight, an extra long delay, a squabble at London and a lost boarding pass. 50 hours after the first departure I had my first glimpse of the place which I would later come to call home for 2 long years… Austin is a nice place, yeah. Barring the scorching summer and non-existent evenings for 3 months (yeah the sun keeps scorching till around 8 and then it gets all dark and transforms into night), living in Austin is a nice experience. I even got the prestige of having a convicted sex offender as a next street neighbor and witnessing a double assault and a homicide a few streets away. Halloween at 6^th street sure was fun but Austinites apparently took it to their heart to ‘keep Austin too weird’ :O In all Austin was pretty much another nice city. I wasn’t awed by it the way I thought I would! It really didn’t feel like I was in the U.S. of the A...

39, 38, 37 .. the countdown continues. The kids are now leaning on our car and I am worried they might puke on it.. But I get back to my thinking. One month into my stay in the US there came the long weekend. At the first blink of an opportunity I was out of Austin on the way to my cousin’s place. I have always felt that the moment of a flight’s takeoff is the best feeling on earth. Yeah, even better than Dad’s big hug during a loud thunder, a long walk in the rain with a close friend or falling asleep in his arms watching the rain through a window. 

“Every takeoff blending his spirit with its own to do what's never been done in history, to lift away from the ground and fly”

 That one moment of elation, leaving everything behind and just flying off … My secret dream till then was to get married to a pilot(or a singer, ofc :P).

On the other hand I never quite liked landings. It’s being back on land, back to reality, waking up from a wonderful dream, arghhh.. But this time it was quite different; I’d say as different as it gets! I was looking out the window as the plane was preparing to land, watching mountains slowly fading and the Pacific Ocean taking over the view. We were fast losing height, almost nearing the ground. I was still gazing at the blue waters, I could even see the waves splashing. The runway was right next to the Bay and we had just landed when I got my first glimpse.. I wish my vocabulary were large enough to describe the magnificence of the moment.. It was love at first sight, indeed!

I snap back to reality by the sound of one of the kids singing or shouting; I couldn’t really distinguish. They had now counted down to 23, getting exponentially more boisterous.

I speed along the memories to the first time we had an actual interaction, I mean more than the occasional peek exchanged while we raced in opposite directions! A late night rendezvous with a light drizzle (yes, invariably there is drizzling), a long silent walk, just looking, gazing, observing, listening. We didn’t really need words to communicate. There was an unspoken understanding. The union square. The crooked street. And the bay again..

I fast-forward a couple of days. It was another glorious day; perfectly sunny and breezy. I was walking down the legendary Golden Gate Bridge; the setting of many a movie scene and possibly the most photographed bridge in the world.. Alas, it is a cliche that I too had my first taste of romance at that very place; for it was then that I realized that we had that connection. The rest of the time flew past in a blur. I was in a great hurry coz I was running late for my flight back to the now-seemingly-wretched Austin. But I knew that we would meet again and that the future would be great.

The count was now down to 12. I am wondering how one can think this much in the span of less than a minute.. 3 months have passed with a lots of ups and downs, to be honest less ups and a damn lot of downs, times which I bore with the single thought of the future, of this particular day when we would meet again.. And incidentally we are a mere 5 seconds from the New Year.

I look down into the blue waters of the Bay. It looks as if the waves are dancing, reflecting a million tiny lights of the Bay Bridge and the City and the cruise ships in the Treasure Island. In the distance the fireworks begin, bringing with them 2012. The kids are now screaming and cheering. I know it’s too good to last. I’ve got to leave in a few minutes and I take my new year resolution. I’ll be back here, in this city, to take this relationship forward from this third date; to learn more and explore more and experience more!

My NYE @ San Francisco

     

  

EDIT: After being in Austin for close to 2 years, I now think it is one of the best places to live! So full of life, tolerant and weird. It is time to leave Austin and try Santa Clara. I am going to miss Austin a lot. Well, that is what my life has been - one hell of a contradiction.