I didn’t notice the impact of “love at first sight” when it occurred. “Flechazo,” as we say it in Spanish, is Cupid’s work, firing an arrow from afar and watching the magic happen. There was no evidence on my skin, just the impatient movement of my feet as I waited for a vaccine in the Drassanes Primary Care Center in Barcelona. The state of Massachusetts required me to get a meningitis shot before starting my semester-abroad program. 20 days before leaving Spain, I went to my appointment.

I saw him when I was in the waiting room. He moved in and out of his office. It wasn’t a vision, just a simple shake all over my body. He was tall with long blond hair and medical scrubs. Yes, he was the nurse.

“Have you been waiting for a long time?” he asked me.

“Kind-of, yes,” I admitted.

I followed him into his office. Rather than chitchat about the weather or awkward silence, he asked me about my present, past, and future. We jumped from one topic to another with the complicity of a first date. He told me that he had started working at the center only two days before we met. Before that, he was surfing the French coast and living in his van. I told him that I was a journalism student about to study abroad. We shared the same love for travel and adventure.

“Maybe when you come back, I’ll still be here,” he told me. It was subtle insinuation, and I jumped on it quickly. There were butterflies in my stomach fluttering around my insides.

I think both of us could tell that something was happening. People around us noticed it as well. We talked for almost half an hour. Someone should have shouted, “yo man, kiss the girl!” But he couldn’t kiss me. We were just two strangers standing in front of each other, asking ourselves if love at first sight existed. I left the center with an arrow stuck in my back. I could feel it.

The next morning, I woke up thinking about the nurse. My first thought could have been food, my actual boyfriend, or that I really didn’t want to get out of bed. Instead, I thought about him. He had a special beauty, imperfect, but I liked it. He smiled a lot.

I started my search on LinkedIn. It was the only way I could think to find him. I only knew three things about him: his name, profession, and where he worked. It was like looking for a ghost.

At noon, I gave up on the idea of finding him. All the men I found were men of my father’s age.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my boyfriend. We are happy together. But I had never felt that way. I needed to know who he was. Sure, I had seen handsome men across the street and exchanged looks. I fantasized about the possibility of asking for their numbers. But this flechazo was different. It was magical and real. What would I do if I found him? Probably nothing. I tried to believe that it wasn’t anything more than a funny story to tell my family and friends; the “What If?”

And yet, sometimes life resembles a film and the most unpredictable situations actually happen. The following day was that. While having lunch, I received a text on WhatsApp from an unknown number.

“Hi, Mar! I just arrived at work. I wanted to know if your vaccine hurt. I found your number on the computer program. I shouldn’t contact you.” I looked at his profile picture: a guy surfing a big wave. Bingo.

After two days of chatting, he asked me to go out for coffee. It was time to tell him about my boyfriend. To my surprise, he was hiding something too; a girlfriend of two years who lived three hours away from Barcelona. I didn’t expect it at all. After having an honest conversation about our connection, we promised to go out for coffee sometime. It never happened, because I took a step back. The week before arriving in Boston, I was nervous about moving. I wasn’t feeling ready for meeting the nurse and allowing him to know who I really am.

I can’t help but wonder what could have happened if I had met him for coffee. I ask myself if love is something we seek or something that finds us. I will never figure that out with him.

Cupid has a graceful way of playing with irony. No matter what the little he was thinking when he decided to fire an arrow against my back, we still felt a connection surrounded by vaccines, needles and… love.

The Day I Was Prescribed a Crush