I promised you the drummer’s story. Here it is.
But first I have to correct the record: before he was ever the drummer, he was the guy at the piano.
I was about eighteen, deep in one of our university musical productions. He had been invited in from outside to play drums, and this detail matters, because our campus was small. We knew each other, if not by name then at least by face. A new face stood out.
His stood out to me. I had been checking him out, in the dignified, deniable way of quiet girls everywhere.
Then one day, during a break from rehearsals, he sat at the piano and started playing a tune I knew. Not just any tune. A duet. He was playing one half of it.
Now. You have read twelve days of this series. You know that small talk is not my sport. If he had walked up to me and attempted conversation, I might have offered him the personality of a filing cabinet. But he did not open with words. He opened with half of something that needed completing.
So I walked over to that piano bench, sat down, and played the other part.
We played beautifully, me and him. No introduction, no chitchat. Just two strangers building something together on sight, which, as you know by now, is the only language I have ever been fluent in.
It was somewhere in that season that he made his now-famous declaration: that we would get married. I filed it, as previously reported, under “interesting claims, unverified.”
We talked a few times during breaks. Then the production ended, and life moved on. No mobile phones existed. There was no “keeping in touch” unless you worked at it, and we did not. He became a pleasant memory with good rhythm.
Fast forward several years. I had finished my MBA in Maryland.
In those days, the way you updated your friends about your life was by writing one long email to everyone at once. A friend from university sent exactly such an email, an update, addressed to what looked like everyone she had ever met.
And as I looked through the “To:” field, scanning the list of addresses, I stopped at one name.
It looked like it could be him. I could not be sure. I had known him by his middle name, and this email address carried a first and last name. The evidence was circumstantial. But something in me said: investigate.
So I did what any sensible woman would do. I picked out the address, wrote to it, and asked if he was who I thought he was.
He replied. It was him.
And here is the twist neither of us had planned: he was also in the USA. He had been in Georgia this whole time, the two of us on the same continent, an ocean away from the piano where it all started, connected by one mass email and a hunch.
We exchanged phone numbers. We kept talking.
Then came the Maryland Incident.
One day he told me he was coming to Maryland “to visit some friends.” I said I hoped I would get to see him while he was around. Reasonable, casual, appropriately unbothered.
When he arrived, he called me, mobile phones existed now, technology having finally caught up with our story. He was in Maryland. He was ready to meet.
I was in a car. On my way to the airport. Flying home to Kenya for Christmas.
He was, I would later understand, devastated. At the time I was mildly puzzled by the depth of his disappointment, after all, he had come to see “some friends,” and I was merely a hopeful add-on to the itinerary. It took me longer than I care to admit to work out what you, reader, have already worked out: there were no friends. The man had crossed several states for me, and I had cheerfully boarded a plane out of the country.
He did not talk to me for a while after that.
I will allow him this. A man can only take so much.
But good duets survive a dropped beat.
Eventually, we started talking again. And when it came time to finally, properly, deliberately see each other, no productions, no mass emails, no cover stories about visiting friends, we met in Chicago.
Our first date. Years after a piano bench in Kenya. A declaration finally moving from “unverified” to “under review.”
The rest, as they say, is a story for another day.
Here is what Day 38 has taught me, and I mean this beyond romance:
The best connections in my life have never started with small talk. They started with something being built: a song, a project, a production, a purpose, and someone joining in. Sometimes I walked over and played my part. Sometimes others heard what I was making and came to add theirs. Either way, that is how I find my people. It has always been how I find my people: not in the talking, but in the making.
So if you are a quiet one like me, take heart. You do not need better conversation openers.
You just need to recognise your half of the duet when you hear it, and have the courage to walk over and play it.
Come back tomorrow for Day 37: the return, the biggest risk I ever took.
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