Prompt 3 Week 12: I met the most amazing person last week....

                I met the most amazing person last week, a brand-new college graduate on the first leg of his journey to hike the Appalachian Trail. We met by accident and I’m sure he wishes he never met us at all, but hey, at least he has a good story to tell his friends when he goes home.

                It was two in the morning and I was upstairs in the guest bedroom sleeping on two mattresses thrown on the floor. I use the term guest bedroom loosely; it was more of a storage closet where we threw the things we didn’t want but held onto anyways, just in case “one day” we might need it. I never slept up there, but we had been fighting all week. It was time to make him feel bad.

                At two in the morning, just as I had fallen asleep, I heard the front door open. The screen door slammed and two pairs of footsteps pounded down the hall. Voices. I heard the deep grumble of his voice but the other one was unrecognizable, a man with a Midwest accent. A stranger. They were talking too loud for me to sleep and I couldn’t sustain my curiosity anymore, I had to find out who this was, for my own safety. He could seriously be anyone, knowing my boyfriend.

                I carefully made my way down the narrow staircase and was greeted by a young man, early twenties, clean-cut with a backpack. Not scary at all, harmless. I breathed a sigh of relief and said, “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”

                “This is Colin. He’s hiking the Appalachian Trail.”

                As it turned out, our new friend Colin had just graduated college and was going to spend his summer testing his physical and mental limits. He was young, naïve, and apparently senseless to go home with a complete stranger like my boyfriend who met him on a street corner by the bus station on his way to the bar. He told the kid to stay put and he’d be back for him and remarkably, Colin, who had nowhere else to go, waited almost two hours.

                I couldn’t believe it and even though Colin was nice enough, I still felt like it was out of line to bring home a complete stranger and offer him a place to stay for the evening. He could have been a serial killer and even though it was rude, I brought this up. Mind you, this wasn’t the first time an incident like this had happened.

                A few months before, we had gone out and met an older woman standing in downtown Bangor. She was pulling a mid-size suitcase on wheels. It was raining and cold, a chilly mid-November evening before the chill of winter overtook the region. It turned out she had arrived on the bus from Nebraska where she gone to meet the man she had fallen in love with online. Grandmotherly and sweet, we brought her home with us. It seemed like right thing to do. It was cold and her bus didn’t leave until ten the next morning.

                We sat up with her talking. She was fascinating. Fifty-three years old, she had been a virgin before she made the trek to Nebraska. She was getting married to him the next spring and as she spoke, she reminded me of a gleeful schoolgirl after her first kiss. We were lucky with her but, nothing was stolen; we weren’t attacked in our sleep. But you can only be lucky so many times…

                “Don’t you think at all?” I asked.

                “It’s fine, he’s a nice kid.”

                “And how the hell would you know that? You knew him for what? Two minutes before you decided to invite him home? You’re so crazy….so inconsiderate.” I was enraged.

                “You’re so self-righteous, if you had been there, you would have done the same thing,” he said. “Don’t act like you wouldn’t.”         

                “You don’t know anything about what I would do,” I said, livid he had the nerve to argue back.

                This went on for a while, as Colin stood awkwardly in the corner, unsure whether or not to leave. He tried to pack up and go at one point, said he was sorry to intrude. “I didn’t mean to cause a problem, really….”he stammered.

                “You’re not the problem,” I said. “You’re fine. Smart. Sweet.” We had just heard all about his girlfriend back home in Chicago. They dated all through college. She was nervous about his adventure.

                “Why is it you are so nice to everybody but me?” my boyfriend asked.

                “Because, not everybody is as big an ass hole as you are,” I replied.

                That was it. I had gone too far. He started yelling, I had to go. This was over. I knew we were out of line as we stood in the dimly lit kitchen screaming at each other. This was not the time to get into it but there was not stopping it. He picked up a butter knife and threw it across the room. It didn’t even come near me, missing me by so much it didn’t seem like he was aiming for me at all. Silence. Everything stopped, nobody moved.

                “They said people from Maine would be crazy,” Colin said, with an unmistakable weariness in his voice.

                The next morning when I woke up, he was gone, the blankets I had gathered for his bed neatly folded and placed in a chair.