Mausts On Toast

How Drew & I Met

I was given the amazing opportunity to spend 1 single semester as a student at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. I flew out on August 21st with two other fellow British students, Suzy and Holly. We hopped on the first plane to West Virginia and left our troubles behind us!! Carefree and extremely excited for the adventurous life experiences about to come our way, we were ready to face the fear of being three English girls in the big US of A, baby!

From beginning to end, our time as Marshall students was just as we imagined it to be. There were some really horrible and awkward times along the way but overall it was fantastic! During freshers week, the Wednesday before classes started someone handed me a leaflet for a student Christian meeting called Prime Time at 9.09pm, i was nervous but i really wanted to go. So assuming that Suzy and Holly wouldn’t want to go i braved it alone. It was only the next evening (Thurs) so i didn’t have too long to stew about it and worry about going alone.

To cut a long story short i went, i saw, i loved it and i found out they had been organising a long list of social events throughout the week. Unfortunately i had missed all of them except the most important! The luau. Friday night, at Kitty and the girl’s house! Dress up and if you need a ride meet at the fountain.

So i did. i’d bought this dress only a couple of days before that looked really tropical and i wore it over my jeans. I think i actually got heckled on my way to the fountain, the guy actually shouted out to his group of chums “whoa, this girl is wearing all four seasons in one outfit!!!”. I was so embarrassed but he obviously didn’t know who i was and where i was from because from experience any guy who hears an English accent would fall at your feet! haha.

Anyways, i got a lift to the party and awkwardly found my spot for the evening, firmly fixed to the porch steps. I couldn’t move in fear i would lose my seat and be forced to stand vulnerable and unprotected in the middle of the front lawn.

But then out of the corner of my eye, i saw him coming towards me from the side and a little behind me. Drink in hand. He was wearing a grey t-shirt with ‘Marshall’ written on the front, he had longish hair and the most wonderful sense of confidence but maybe the truth was hidden by his awesome sense of humour! And most people like a guy with a good sense of humour but Drew is something else!! Drew’s humour is a gift from God, i’m sure of it.

As he came and sat down he was saying “will you think i’m weird if i say i love your accent” and i said “no everybody here loves it”. Ouch. If anyone knows Drew they’ll be able to tell you Drew’s worst fear is ‘being’ typical. So we chatted for a while, he asked me what music i liked, i asked him where i could get a t-shirt like his, we had a good time. I remember thinking to myself and afterwards going back and telling Suzy and Holly, that one day i was gonna marry someone like Drew. Not necessarily Drew because i wasnt that confident in my powers of attraction but i truly remember thinking one day i wanted to marry someone with the same personality. Funny, confident, handsome! I really liked Drew but i knew he was a serious kinda guy and i was only in the country for 3 months! So we left the party as acquaintances. Over the next few weeks we bumped into each other loads, mostly in the cafeteria and sometimes he would give me and my friends a ride home from church. We would hang out at primetime and i’d always wish he would come back to buffalos afterwards but Drew being so cool and mysterious never would. We had a couple of ’situations’ that i now like to think back to these times as kind of ‘dates’ but really i dont know who was after who at the time.

But through everything we were always just friends and not even ‘alone together’ kind of friends, we always used to hang out as a big group and whenever we would be together it would be with everyone else too. But despite never really getting the chance to spend time to talk alone it was awesome, it was soo much fun hanging out with Ben, Isaac, Jimmy and all the others. Hanging out with those guys were some of my funniest memories.

At the time i could have really read into stuff alot more, like when Drew invited me to help him with his homework. He had to make a poster about drugs or something and along with Jimmy we jumped into Drew’s car and went around all the big supermarkets looking for cardboard that Drew thought was big enough to do a poster on, we went into about 4 different shops trying to find the perfect piece of card until we found some and went back to their apartment suite. Then by the time we sat down to start drawing this poster i just wanted to get out of there! I kinda felt awkward and all the boys from the rooms in their suite were hanging out in the communal area and i just felt awkward. So i left, never really having ‘helped’ with Drew’s homework. Then there was the time he invited me to go watch a friends band who was playing on campus, actually we did go together alone that time until we got to the concert that was!! haha. But that was a really cool night for me.

Enough of that though, i could go on about all the little times i read more into the situation than he probably did at the time.

The day came when i was to fly back to England. A lot had happened in the past 3 months and on the day i was leaving i thought i’d never be back in West Virginia again. So i bought this card. I bought it in the campus book store. Usually i would write a rough draft of what i might say and then change it 10 times and write it over and over to make sure everything sounded perfect, but this time i didnt and i now realise why i do do a rough draft cos when i read what i wrote in that card it sounds awful! But i basically told Drew in a round about way and in a very ‘covering my back’ sorta way that i wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. I think i actually said, i wanted to spend my life NEAR him, around him, if not so much together then at least in close proximity!! Haha who was i trying to kid.

I gave the card to him the morning before i left for the airport. He had come to say goodbye with Isaac, they had bought me a huge slush puppy and we drank them in the lobby of Twin Towers before Isaac got a phone call and had to say his goodbyes to me. Leaving me and Drew to drink our slush puppies alone. We reminisced for a few minutes about his mess up of a song he tried to sing in the cafeteria one day and he totally got the words wrong and he was trying so hard to act so cool by singing this song!! lol. Anyways, i gave him this card and some art work i had created for him and we said goodbye for what i thought was gonna be the last time i would ever see him again. Little did i know!

We didn’t really keep in touch at first. I thought he had read my card and thought i was completely crazy and decided not to contact me for a while. But then we started emailing a bit. Only some short emails sporadically. But then the emails started to become longer and more frequent and i guess we loved writing to each other, like good old fashioned letter writing. It was the prefect situation, we were both still students sitting most of the time in front of a computer anyways. We liked the confidentiality, the fact that neither really knew the others life. We were like secret pen pals and the more we wrote the more it was like we used each other as a diary. And that’s really how i got to know Drew inside out. He would tell me everything that was going on with him and not just day to day stuff.

We ended up getting to the stage where we were writing twice - three times a day i felt more and more in love with Drew everyday. Then in April 2004 Drew sent me an email that changed my life. He told me he had the hotz for me and that he wanted to see if something could come of us. So i looked at my calendar and there was this single week in amongst loads of stuff that was happening during that summer and it was in fact free. So i emailed my parents and asked them to help me book a flight to go and visit a boy in America!! They must have thought i was mad! But they were awesome, they didn’t question me once and they never tried to stop me, they even paid for the trip!

I lived the next 3 or so months extremely excited but nervous like never before. I flew out there on August 13th for a week. I met his family and a lot of his extended family, i even went to his cousins wedding!! We weren’t even officially a couple at that wedding we were just long lost friends! I flew over on the Friday night, Saturday and Sunday was traveling to the wedding and hanging out with Drew’s family and then Sunday night we had the talk and really decided there and then to get married. The thing was, we knew we didn’t want to get involved in anything that wasn’t gonna lead anywhere, and to be honest when you live a world apart you have to either be in or out. There was no “lets just see where this goes” because when you live in two different countries it could easily be over before it even begins. I knew Drew was ‘it’. And i really felt like he knew the same as me. We wanted to be really sensible, we were so worried people wouldn’t respect us for making this unbelievable commitment to live as a couple with thousands of miles of water between us. So we originally decided to wait to get married until Drew had at least finished his degree. I went home from having an amazing week being with Drew and his family and just went back to speaking to Drew over the internet and talking on the phone with £10 phonecards from the post office (hehe). We didn’t last long though, shortly after i returned home we spoke on the phone and questioned our need to wait till drew graduated. We just wanted to be near each other. So we decided to get married as soon as possible. And at this time we didn’t even consider immigration visas. We were love struck and we just wanted to be together, why would anyone think about the technical difficulties!! So we got engaged asking our parents first if we could get married the following year. Everyone was delighted and just as excited as we were. Until the bombshell came when we realised the extent of immigrating into the US. But nothing could stop us.

And here we are nearly a year after we got engaged during Drew’s Thanksgiving break. We are still apart, me in Theydon Bois, Drew in Morgatown at uni. But still and 100 times more in love than we were a year ago. I laugh at the thought that we have been apart (in person) longer than we have been together since the first time we met on those porch steps in Huntington, WV August 2004.

THE END…but still not even the beginning

Part 2 Coming Soon!