He Kissed My Hand... And Then I Cried

         It was a windy day, and I was wearing my high black boots with skinny jeans and a gray business jacket. I was heading down the stairs between the third and second floors of the library, when suddenly I heard hurried footsteps behind me. A guy I had never seen before in my life with jet black hair and a tall baseball cap stopped abruptly next to me. He looked at me with wide eyes.
          "What's your name?" he wanted to know.
          “Liz. What's yours?"
          "Abe."
          He said it as though it would be music to any woman's ears. We stood there for a moment, and then he said:
          "You are ridiculously pretty."
          Oh dear. I could already tell that sweet-talking was his second language if not his first.
          "Thank you," I decided to say. "That's really nice of you."
          We continued to talk and got to the part where the guy asks for the girl's number. At this point, I told him I didn't give my number out to guys I didn't know or had just met.
          "Oh, I didn't want your number," he said. "I wanted to give you my number."
          I must have looked at him like he was crazy because then he said, “That’s the way we do it in my country.”
          “Oh, where are you from?” I asked.
          Apparently, he was from everywhere from France to Argentina. He knew about five different languages including Portuguese, Spanish, and French. Then he sat down on the stairs and invited me to sit down next to him. Nope. Not happening. I remained standing right where I was. After a while, he must have gotten uncomfortable looking up at me because he stood up. Then he told me I was “different.” He said I had "a wall" and "was more reserved than other girls." That’s right, I thought.
          "But that's okay," he said. "That's good. I like that."
          Then he stuck out his hand to shake mine. Warning alarms went off in my head, but what could I do? There his hand was hanging out in the empty space between us, and there I was standing awkwardly as people passed on the stairs. So I took the hand and shook it, saying, "Have a nice day."
          "Au chante," he said, as though his French would win me over. Then suddenly, he flipped my hand around so my palm was facing down and...
          He kissed my hand.
          I walked hurriedly away from Abe down the next flight of stairs. And suddenly, I just wanted to cry. I wanted to hide away from everyone. To be alone and away from people like Abe who come up to me and tell me I’m “ridiculously pretty” and kiss my hand goodbye.
          You may well ask, "What was the problem, Liz?" And I would honestly answer you with: "I don't know."
          Or maybe that's not an honest answer. Maybe I cried because every girl wants a guy to kiss her hand. She waits and waits for it happen, but then when it finally does, she finds out she really didn't want it. At least, not from him.
          Examining this entire experience has led me to realize some things about myself and what I really want. I realized that some girls would be flattered by Abe's forwardness, but my heart just sighed. Why? Because I want so much to find the right person in my life. I imagine finding him all the time. So when someone comes up to me, pretending to be him when I know it's not him... it just gets tiring after awhile.
          From this, I learned that I need to look at the reasons behind why I do the things that I do. Of course, it's hard to examine your life and ask yourself: "What am I really feeling?" It's not always fun. We would much rather just push the "up" button in the elevator, skipping over the painful examination of life and how we really feel about things. But if we skip over looking and thinking about our lives, simply pushing elevator buttons up and down, we're never going to move onward. Onward is not necessarily upward. Going forward in life sometimes hurts and requires us to go down first. But even if we do have to push the "down" button and examine hard things we would rather leave alone, in the end, forward is the only way we can go afterwards.