When I first met the Doctor, it was shortly after her death; my beloved dog had died two days prior and I was depressed beyond all belief. Throughout my town animals had been disappearing and turning up dead in buried around the biggest tree in the town's park.
It wasn't my dog's death, mind you. Rather my mother who died only four short hours before I met the Doctor. She had disappeared, just like my dog had, in the middle of the night, soundlessly. In the morning we found her in a shallow grave around the tree. By then the Doctor had already gone.
The second time I met the man, I was wildly in love with a foreign girl who had attended the same high school as me. He hadn't aged a day, but here I was at age twenty, four years removed from the horrible attack on my town and I met him again.
"Ah, hello Brandon!" he said to me, smiling. "I'm sorry about your mother. So, could you tell me what year it is?"
He stood on his blue box, smiling. The same blue box that had landed in my front yard and disappeared so many summers ago.
"It's 2011," I told him. "Why are you here?"
"Oh, you'll know soon enough. SO, what do you do for fun?"
I showed him all of the cool places to hang out, and he put himself head-first into conversation with all of my friends, all of the bar tenders and even a tree. It was so strange, but I couldn't help to enjoy it.
My girlfriend texted me and asked me to hang out, and naturally the Doctor wanted to meet her.
"Ah, excellent!" he said smiling. "I'd LOVE to meet her." He had read the message over my shoulder."
"I'm sorry," he told me before he left that night. It seems loneliness followed me where the Doctor did.
I'm so, so sorry.
It seemed after that he'd give me a visit every ten years; or two weeks. There seemed to be no middle ground.
"You know, I don't often see this much of one person… but it has to be this way," he told me one evening. My wife was sitting at the table with us, giving me the strangest look.
"May we say grace now," she asked.
"Ah, sorry, Madame!" the doctor cooed. He held our hands and started babbling away in latin. "THAT is what they prayed at the last supper! I asked Jesus if I could pay, but he insisted he'd pay for it instead… Poor sod."
My wife gave me a stern look.
"Oh, and Brandon, be sure to go to this website," he said handing me a little slip of paper, "And fill out the application. I know how much you've always wanted to go to art school. Why not try it out?"
Initially I laughed at the offer. I was already forty-three! But behold, I was soon on my way, wife in arm headed to my art class at one of America's most respected art school. It almost made up for the Doctor using what I now call a 'sonic screwdriver' on my goldfish and taking it away. "These aren't illegal yet?" he asked in disbelief, snatching it out of the water and walking back to the blue box.
He's visited me many times, and this small introduction does none of them any justice. I'm hoping to see him again before I die. It hasn't been close to ten years, but I'm nearing death. My next encounter may be my last.