Kind of but I think my imagination ran away with it in all honesty. 

There was this one day where the agency I used to work with asked me to go to a training session at this venue I had worked with a few times before. I only had this training planned for that day and so was completely free 20 minutes later when the training had finished. As I was on my way out, a colleague of mine asked if I’d like to join them and a few others to go grab some coffee at the coffee shop across the road and I accepted. It was me, the guy that had asked me, a girl I had worked with once but never spoken to and this guy who I actually didn’t even look at once while we were walking. 

As we were walking, I was chatting to the girl I had never spoken to before, we all bought our stuff and then grabbed a table. I got a chocolate cake and just immediately tucked in, just passively listening to the conversation as it wasn’t really something I knew anything about. Then the conversation changed to instruments we used to play as kids. Just the usual responses around the table till the guy I still hadn’t looked at started speaking. He said he played Bass guitar and Saxophone. Two instruments I think are really cool, nothing incredible but for some reason made me look at him finally and yeah… something clicked, in my head at least. 

He had blues and dark hair. He looked chill, like he was high but also like he always looked like that. He spoke with a smile, not just then but everytime he spoke. He looked genuine and like he had no interest in lying or exaggerating the truth. He also reminded me of someone and probably the worst person to remind me of, especially when I’ve just met you. 

The imaginary boyfriend I had made up when I was a teenager.

Yes. I know. This is where this poor guy gets roped into one of my stupid girly fantasies and gets labelled as the human embodiment of the “Perfect boyfriend”. I barely know this guy now, barely knew this guy at the peak of knowing this guy and I sure as hell knew NOTHING about this guy in the 3 seconds I saw him for the first time, established all this and compared him to my teenage imaginary boyfriend. Insane. 

If you were watching this interaction you would’ve seen 4 people at a table, 3 people engrossed in conversation and one girl really interested in a piece of cake then suddenly she forgets the cake and is completely goo goo eyes as this one guy at the table. Almost like he had said he was a millionaire or even something I was passionate about. Nope. He had just started talking, I took a look at him and realised his face was THE face of the guy I was picturing in my head all of my teenage years. Once I had forgotten my cake and had this new motivation for being there I started being more active in the conversation. No idea what I was saying because frankly it didn’t matter but I remember everything he said. 

We stayed in the coffee shop for a few hours then decided to leave. Someone said we should make a group chat and exchange numbers and so we did. I can’t remember ever using this group chat or why we needed it but you can probably guess that was not something I was thinking about. I now had his number. 

As I mentioned at the beginning, we were all agency staff and so we would be sent to different venues all the time, not just the one we had training for that day. The first couple times I bumped into him again were shifts where the other guy that was at the coffee shop was working or other mutual agency friends were also working and so I didn’t really talk to him much at the beginning. Around a couple months after the initial meeting we started seeing each other at a specific venue quite regularly, along with some other people who were there quite often. We’d joke during shifts, have drinks after work and had a few deep conversations when we were alone. He was kind and passionate. He was vegetarian and only bought from charity shops. He was conscious about the world and his impact on it and honestly, he made a huge impact on me. His kindness was so refreshing and made me feel like such a thing was possible in people and in myself. Not just in my words but in my actions, be conscious, be kind. 

I will just say now a few extra details. I was in a relationship, one that I shouldn’t have been in. He was cruel and disrespectful. He kept trying to cheat on me and my stupid young brain would constantly say “But he didn’t actually cheat on you because he never got that far,” honestly pathetic. I broke up with him not long after I met this guy (not related, just for reference). He was also a few years older than me. I was 18 and he had just finished university, maybe 22/23 or even older but I knew that if he was the type of guy I wanted him to be, he wouldn’t date an 18 year old. He’d know regardless of where we’d met or how mature I’d seem, that I was still freshly 18. I had never drank alcohol. I was a virgin. I had never done any recreational drugs and he had tried “most of them” in his travels. In one of our last shifts together we had walked to the station together and he’d asked if I was single and at this point I was and said “yeah very recently” and he said “same quite recently too”. I’m not sure if he wanted that conversation to go anywhere but it felt very melancholy and not like he was trying to initiate something. Almost like he wanted to talk about it but I wasn’t sure. 

The last shift we had together was his last shift before he went on a road trip around America. He didn’t have a plan for after and said he might come back if he doesn’t think of anything. The entire team had written a goodbye card for him and I didn’t see it until they were giving it to him and so never got the chance to write anything in it. So I had to find another way to say my goodbye. The event we were working at that day had postcards dotted around with a graphic for the event and date on it, so I grabbed one of those and hid in one of the empty rooms. I wrote a long message on the back of the postcard and I can’t remember a single word of it. Did I confess my feelings? Did I say a typical goodbye message? I remember it being really long and drawing a saxophone but that’s it. Now all I had to do was to find an opportunity to give it to him and I couldn’t until it was the end of the day and we were all going home. Me, him and another guy were going to the train station and where I had the option to go so many different routes including alone, with guy 2 or with this guy, of course I had found my perfect opportunity to say goodbye and give him the card. We spoke for the duration of the ride and just as we were approaching my stop I told him I didn’t know they had got him a card and I didn’t get a chance to write in it. So, I wrote something here. Showing him the graphical side and saying I chose this because it’s the last event we worked together. I gave him a hug, stood up and got off the train. That was the last time I saw him and spoke to him. 

He does pop up in my sometimes, I hope he’s doing well. I hope one day in the future we’ll bump into each other again but I feel as likely as that is when it’s just within London, he’s the type to travel and live in other countries and the chances dropped from unlikely to maybe never. I have since tried to detach this “perfect boyfriend” idea away from him as it’s not fair on anyone I date. I’m also not the type that wants to live abroad, I don’t really have the desire for it but feel like most of the people around do and so… I should? Maybe my view is skewed and I haven’t travelled enough. Maybe it’ll change later.