It begins like any other romantic tale. Boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, so on and so forth. But this story, my story, is anything but ordinary. Perhaps because its two main characters are two people who are simply extraordinary. I thought I knew so many things until I met this woman. Knowing her, even for a short time, has opened my eyes to everything I didn’t know.

Everything you are about to read is true. All the events, the dialogue, the emotions and the spiritual moments are all real things that I experienced. Fueled by a combination of depression and fervent restlessness, I have tried to put them all into words as best that I can. The words on these pages may be the most honest words I have ever written.

I am a man who is deeply touched by music. I require a soundtrack to my life. My friends who know me well know that I am hardly ever without headphones on my ears or music blasting in my car. Music to me is capable of capturing and expressing emotion that is beyond the written or spoken word.

For me it is spiritual, even holy in some instances. I always listen to music that best captures my emotions at that moment in time. Sometimes it is the lyrics of a particular song, and sometimes it is the emotions within the tune. Whatever the reason, it gives purpose and raw vulnerability to every emotion I have ever experienced.

For this tale, I will be giving you a musical guide to compliment the written word. These songs helped me write these words, put me in touch with my soul, and in some cases, brought me back to these moments you will read about.

I suggest listening to the music softly while you read. It can all be found on any of the major music purchasing or stream websites and applications. However, you may do as you wish.

If you have duly prepared yourself, then I have no further reason to delay you.

Sit back and settle in. Here we go...

She - Ed Sheeran

I’ll never forget the warmth of the sun on that mid-October day. It was not an oppressive kind of heat, as it had been over the previous weeks, but the kind that makes you feel grateful to be alive and outdoors. I had convinced some of my friends who lived on my floor to join the tour of Milan with me. It was being hosted by some of the Italian students we lived with and was open to the students from the other university dormitories as well.

I had one particular Italian friend who had encouraged me to sign up. We were good friends and we chatted nearly every day about rock music, cars or motorcycles while sharing a cigarette. Turns out, he was the guide for the tour, which would begin in the morning and run well into the afternoon. After some initial hesitations, I convinced most of them to sign up. So we went, and I stayed mostly with my group of friends who were from countries scattered across four continents.

It was maybe an hour or two before we noticed each other. Truthfully, it seems she noticed me first. At this point in the tour, we were making our way toward the city library. We were going to see some handwritten sketches done by Leonardo Da Vinci that the library had on special exhibit.

I forget who I was talking to…it doesn’t matter really. Somehow we wound up next to each other. I stole a glance at her out of the corner of my eye. Everyone else on the tour was Italian except for my friends, and my mere six weeks of classes in the language had not yet given me the boldness to try and start a conversation with a woman such as this one.

She was stunning, so much so that it took me by surprise when she caught my gaze and asked me where I was from without missing a step.

The soundtrack of my daily life that was playing in my head instantly began to skip violently. For a second or two I froze as my brain and heart tried in vain to communicate with each other and process the fact that she was actually talking to me; that she had actually asked me a question, in my own language no less.

She was about my height with beautiful hair running past her shoulders. It was straight at first and began to twist into these big, bouncing curls the further down her face it ran, holding off on fully twisting into tighter curls until it settled past her shoulders. She had it parted so that most of her hair ran across her head and down the left side of her face with one thick bang just slightly separated from the rest of her hair hanging over her face itself. It fell no further than her eyebrow, flaring just enough so that the very ends of her hair kissed the corner of her eye.

It was curated in such a way that if she ducked her head ever so slightly her hair would softly fall over her eye, providing a seductive veil.

She had such dark eyes. They were such a deep shade of brown I had to catch myself before I fell into them. It was impossible to break their gaze. For all the depth of color that could be found there was also a radiant light that danced amongst the chestnut brown orbs. I took a moment to drink in that vivid gaze, and after being thoroughly intoxicated, determined that I never wanted to be sober again.

Even more captivating was how perfectly settled they were amongst her beautifully radiant complexion. Her soft face at resting position radiated a comforting warmth when her smile took hold. Her soft lips gave way to dimples that simply complimented an already dazzling expression.

She smiled as I stuttered trying to find enough momentum to force words up from my throat and out of my mouth. Her dimpled smile was so perfectly soft and warm that I couldn’t help but be thrown further off balance than I already was. I’m pretty sure I actually tripped walking on the street.

Finally, I managed to coax sound from my vocal chords and built on that initial momentum to formulate an actual sentence spoken by a human, “Um, I am from America.”

…I wanted to hit myself.

I anticipated several different reactions to her finding out where I was from, ranging somewhere between reviled horror all the way up to the required niceties demanded within the bounds of appropriate social decorum. I have a nasty habit of cynicism. With all this in mind, I was mentally preparing myself for one of the more negative outcomes to this particular interaction.

Her reaction was so unexpectedly positive I couldn’t control the initial shock on my face, even as hers lit up brighter than those dear old Broadway lights I have seen so many times. The smile that had left her face for an instant as she listened to my answer returned and was even brighter than before. The tip of her tongue just barely peeking out through her teeth. It was a beautiful smile that occupied every corner of her face.

I was so swept up in her gaze that it took my mind a few seconds to realize that my ears were registering sound and that the sound was her beginning to speak to me again.

She excitedly began to tell me of her dream to study film in America. She was exceptionally passionate about her chosen artistic field of study. I could hear it in her voice and see the truth of her words sparkling in her dark eyes.

So we began to converse. I was so excited that a woman like this would even talk to me I could hardly contain myself. I still can’t really explain it, but it was as if by some instinctual urge I had to know everything about this woman, and I had to know it all as quickly as she could tell it to me.

Everything, no holds, no hesitations. I have never had such a deep interest in anyone before, certainly never that quickly. But some little voice in either my head or my heart urged me on, giving me the impression that the consequences of failing to inquire dramatically outweighed the gripping fear that was latched onto my heart at that particular moment in time.

I still don’t know whether I have my head or my heart to thank for creating that sense of urgency in me that day, but not only were they right, but the spectacular vision I was about to be exposed to over my remaining months amongst those picturesque streets exceeded even the grandest conceptions of my imagination.

After quieting the millions of questions that were bouncing around my head at warp speed, I decided the best course of action was to start at the beginning.

Bright - Echosmith

We began with the standard questions centered on the five W’s and quickly moved on from those into more thought-provoking conversation. We fell in step together as we spoke, following the group but not avidly following along. I certainly wasn’t giving the slightest bit of attention to the direction we were going or the words being said by anyone other than her. I was completely enraptured with the woman in front of me.

The more I spoke to her the more I wanted to hear her speak. I found her to be passionate, intelligent, gifted, and having this seemingly insatiable desire for people; a raging fire to meet, interact, and learn from others. She was like a moth to a flame, hopelessly doomed to be sucked in once she was captured by someone’s life story or experience. It was a fate she was perfectly content with and had embraced to the fullest extent that one can. There are more than six billion of those flames on this earth…and I am convinced she would fly straight into every single one with reckless abandonment.

I was hopelessly ensconced in her passion and vision of the world and the people within it. She was like me in so many ways and better than me in so many more. I could feel the genuine love and desire contained within every syllable as she spoke. There was nothing hiding here; it was as if there was no environment for anything dark or undesirable to find life within her.

I knew she was extraordinary within moments.

I had never encountered a woman like this in my life. Her perception of the world was pure, unadulterated and the most exquisite vision I had ever been exposed to. It was intoxicating.

As we entered the library, we split for a moment. She fell in with her friends and I bounced around to a few of mine. I began to look at the sketches on display from Da Vinci, each a bastion representing human creativity and intelligence that was centuries ahead of its time…and I could barely focus on what was in front of me.

I was only half-heartedly paying attention, constantly catching myself scanning the room for this woman whom I had just spoken with.

I caught glimpses of her a few times but would quickly divert my gaze.

"Jeez kid, what the hell are you doing?” I thought to myself.

I was so afraid she would think I was a total creep because I could not tear my eyes away from her general direction. But I was hopelessly hooked. I mean heart racing, mind aflutter, smilingly stupidly for no reason kind of hooked.

I don’t recall exactly how we found each other again. I forget whether it was in the library or on the street moving to the next location of the tour. Regardless, we fell back into step and spent most of the remaining three or four hours of the tour talking with one another.

I was determined to make her laugh because every laugh was accompanied by a smile. While I had already seen her smile dozens of times throughout the course of the morning and early afternoon, I could not get enough of them.

Every time I got her to smile, I wanted to pump my fist higher and harder than that guy in "The Breakfast Club." It was a grand victory…I had many of those that day.

Finally, in the mid-afternoon, our tour ended. Some of us were planning on going out in the city that evening. I asked her if she was coming, but she lived in a different dorm and was not sure if she could make it. I told her I hoped to see her, and we parted ways.

Waves - Kris Allen

As I rejoined my friends, whom I had hardly seen or spoken to over the past five hours, they all looked at me with ridiculous smiles.

I grinned sheepishly. “What are you guys looking at me like that for?” I asked them, already knowing what their answer would be.

“WHO WAS THAT GIRL?!” one of them asked enthusiastically.

“What girl?...oh that girl!” I responded shyly.

“She was TOTALLY into you,” one of the girls chimed in.

“REALLY!!!...*Coughs*…um…really?” I answered hardly able to contain my excitement.

My mind was in overdrive. Was she really? I thought to myself. I tried to talk myself out of the possibility in order to lower my expectations out of fear of rejection. But the idea that she might have reciprocated even a fraction of what I had felt during our time together that day was simply too grand a prospect for me to ignore.

After a fleeting moment, the doubts that gripped my mind dissipated. I smiled and let my heart drown out the fearful droning in my head.

I knew the instant I laid eyes on her she was special, if only I had known how special she would turn out to be. I knew the instant she started talking that she would touch my soul, if only I had known then how deeply.

I looked at my friends and flashed them a smile.

I lowered my head and smiled as we all fell into step together and headed home. I tried to control the overwhelmingly vivid fluttering in my chest and tried to determine whether the warm feeling hugging my entire being was that glorious afternoon sun or the graceful vision I just left standing at the metro stop.

It was five months before we saw each other again.

Five. Months.

I thought about her constantly over that time. I checked in with her from time to time. She was an exceptionally busy woman, and I was traveling quite often.

I already know what you’re thinking. Five months is a long time. Maybe once some time passed and the initial emotions burned themselves out, you’re thinking I realized I was not really as hung up on this girl as I thought I was. I won’t lie to you, I had the same hesitation.

I am a passionate man. I fall hard and love harder, and I have gotten a bit ahead of myself before. But I couldn’t shake the feeling deep in my soul that this was different. The depth of the emotion I felt just thinking about her was riveting. Sometimes I would smile so much that the only way to provide any relief to my outstretched facial muscles was to laugh so they could find relief in the movement that laughter invokes.

Other moments I would be near tears at the pain of thinking that someone so moving had been dropped into my path as only an intersecting point and not a parallel line.

I went back and forth between those emotional extremes for the better part of those five months, caught between gripping fear, heart ache and joyful ecstasy. I don’t know how I survived. It sounds dramatic, but trust me when I tell you it wasn’t. I constantly wondered to myself, how is it possible that a woman I interacted with for only five hours could have me so caught up like this? What did it mean? I was questioning the entire meaning of emotions I previously thought I understood intimately.

Then, five months later, I laid eyes on her again for the first time in so long and all the jumbled emotions that had thrown a dark shroud over my sight during that time were thrown back to the darkness from which they emerged and provided me with a riveting moment of clarity…..but that’s another story…