Scott R. Armstrong
English 105
Journal Assignment 1


	I was certain that I would meet "the right one" some day, but I was approaching the age of 30 and still hadn't found her.  I thought I had found love a few times, but it was usually a one-way street.  I did meet some nice people, but I still preferred life alone to turning a nice friendship into a life together--something just wasn't right.
	Then, as if by design (but I'm sure it was completely by accident), I met Melanie during a tour in Germany.  We became close friends, and made many travel plans together.  We seemed to be made for each other, but I just didn't think that I should commit to a life-long relationship.  Her enlistment was almost over, so I thought I would just wait until her time in the Air Force ended.  After that, she would probably return home, and our relationship would quietly and painlessly fade away.
	Her enlistment did end, and she did return to her parents in Illinois to look for a job.  But I was in pain, and I didn't know why--or so I thought then.  One night, after a couple of months without her, I sat in my room, staring out of the window into the cool foggy Berlin night.  Never before, and never since, did I hear a saxophone play in those barracks, but that night, muted by the misty fog, a saxophone cried its lonely tune.  That night, when I remembered her smile, when I longed for her kindness, when I thought of how she inconvenienced her own modest comfort to make others happy, when I remembered how others were pacified by her presence, when I read the beauty she composed in her letters, when I replayed the sweet sounds of her voice in my lonely mind, when I felt the warm rush of friendship while reading her cards, when my toes tingled just by looking at her photograph on my desk, when I thought of how happy we both were together, and when I realized just how utterly miserable I felt without her, I knew then that I had found, and so stupidly lost, "the right one."
	I called her from Berlin and she said yes.  I'll never forget the time I spent without her, thinking that I had lost her forever.  I'll never forget why I feel the way I do.  And one day, I'm going to learn how to play the saxophone.