While I understand that I hold a highly-coveted full-time writing gig in the midst of America’s greatest recession, in an industry that does more letting go than hiring, I still can’t help but wish I was sprawled out on a beach somewhere this week with a salt-rimmed something.

It’s my first year without a Spring Break since 1992, and I seriously can’t deal.

As a recent college-grad, my Spring Break stories (most from the pit that is Panama City Beach, Fla.) are endless.

There was the time we got canker sores from malnutrition after a miscommunication left us with a kitchenette-less room, and we were forced to subsist for days on Tostitos and trail mix. Then there was the time we got pulled over for a speeding ticket in various states of undress after we tried to spice up a game of Padiddle on the 15-hour drive down. Or the time one of our friends hooked up with an Alabaman named Thumper, who was missing teeth and had been a groomsmen in a deck-wedding the night of our Carnival Cruise departure.

But no experience defines this favorite warm-weather respite quite like my freshman trip to Granada to visit my best friend, who had been studying abroad.

Forget the Spanish, Moroccan and French roommates, the tapas, the obscene nightlife or the drugs. That was the quintessential Spring Break because it’s where I met Francisco.

I’ll save myself the trouble of setting up the story and excerpt this e-mail I wrote home instead:

“My heart is still aflutter and my hands are still trembling from my recent encounter with a Spanish GOD named Francisco.

It was nearing the end of siesta, so everyone was on break from work, including these young Spanish men in beautiful suits just hanging talking to each other and having a few glasses of wine. One of them especially was absolutely fall flat on your face, drop dead GORGEOUS, which my friend Mariana points out. I am quick to agree, but had to note that the tall dark and handsome Mediterranean thing has never really done it for me.

No sooner had these words left my mouth than he blows me a kiss and starts to approach. When he got about five feet from me, my heart flew into my throat and I could barely look at him.

I obviously had no idea what he was saying, but at the time that all seemed irrelevant.

He was perfectly groomed with gorgeous dark skin, deep brown eyes that I could barely look into lest I stay glued to that exact spot in Spain for eternity, jet black wavy hair ... perfect suit … wine glass ... there is no way for me to communicate to you the depth of my infatuation.

I swear I have never felt at once more simultaneously intimidated by and yet trusting of a human being in my life.

So he tells me that I have beautiful eyes (Mariana is translating), takes an eyelash off my cheek and makes me make a wish. Then he tells Mariana that he made a wish too — that I would give him a kiss. So I kiss his cheek and he grabs his heart and all his friends applaud. Then he makes me do it again, but the second time turns at the last instant to kiss me on the mouth, and I almost DIED on spot.

He is by far the most beautiful person I have ever seen up close, and it was all I could do to maintain composure.

I told Mariana we had to leave because I knew if I stayed there a moment longer or allowed myself to look at him for more than a second I would be completely helpless and spellbound under his Latin powers. I don’t know if I will ever regret anything more in life than not staying. He could have been the one, and now I'll never know. I ache, I pine. You should have seen him.

Love from Spain,
Caroline

P.S. - Anyone who's spent five minutes with me can tell you that I'm not shy. But I didn't have a chance mustering up the courage (or the Spanish) to talk to this Latin lothario. I scurried into the streets of the Albaicin, calmed myself with tinto and smokes, and never saw him again.