But, I supposed I ALSO owe the one or so person reading this an explanation of the OTHER thing that has me so busy. That other thing currently resides on my left ring finger, where it spends most of its time being sparkly and beautiful.
I got engaged in December. Whoa.
And so, I thought that I would tell the story. Our story. The story of how we met, and all of the times that we could have met but didn't, because that story is almost as interesting as the real story.
I met Michael in 2008, when I was at the tail end of the first semester of my junior year in college. He added me on facebook, and I looked at our friends in common and thought "sure, why not. I remember those girls. They were cool." I then minimized facebook and proceeded to fill my head with absolutely anything else, and the event that would change my life and write my most important chapter was forgotten immediately.
A few months (or weeks?) later, I noticed an update from somebody whose name I did NOT recognize. Michael has one of those names that you'd KNOW if you knew it, and I definitely did not. So I checked out this mysterious stranger with the apparently hurting leg. And I liked what I saw. He was close to my age. He'd gone to my high school (what?!). He was in a band. He was CUTE. And he also worked... pretty much down the street from where I grew up. I sent him a message.
...And he did not think it was weird, creepy, or desperate. He wrote back, and we spent the rest of my semester messaging each other on facebook and AIM (this was, after all, back in the dark ages, when people still used AIM). It was great to have that feeling again, something to look forward to as I pretended to be surfing the internet while really waiting for the guy on the other end to see that I'd signed on and send me a message. Come to find out, he was waiting for the same thing. We decided to meet. Don't sound your alarm bells yet, I was safe about it. I brought a friend, we met in a public place, and it was a concert for his band, not exactly some dark alley somewhere.
I remember the conversation I had with my friend Heather on the way to the bar to see him play. I had recently (I say recently; it was really like 2 months ago) experienced a terrible breakup. The kind that leaves you paralyzed for a few days, the kind you're legitimately not sure you'll get through, the kind you write terrible poetry about and wonder if there really IS anyone to catch you when you fall. I had made up my mind that I was done. Not in the "I'm done with guys, I just wanna dance" way, but in the "I'm just done with that situation. I'm going to live now, for me, and see what happens." I have to say, sitting in the car urging Heather to please drive faster or we'll miss it he said they were on at nine -- I definitely did not suspect that four years later he would ask me to marry him on bended knee. I was just going to "see what happened." I was just going to see a guy play some music at a bar in Norcross with my long-time buddy Heather, who had almost talked me out of going because she thought I might look desperate and that it was "kinda shady" that Michael had listed two high schools on his facebook.
Li$tprice played one of my favorite songs. I remember being ten years old, listening to my brother Eric's Offspring CD on one of those old personal CD players that you have to hold reeeeaaaally still or it'll skip, and screaming along to "The Kids Aren't Alright." I don't know why. I had a great childhood, full of opportunities which I utilized to get where I am, and I lived in a nice house with nice people who cared about me. But man, it was fun to scream to that song!
We went on our first date two days after the concert, and life since then has been a series of milestones. Meeting families. Going on the kind of trips that require plane travel together. One year. Moving in together. Graduating (twice). Our first rental house, in a town that I'm pretty sure is a xerox of a storybook town. Somewhere inside me, I know it's been four years. I know that I wasn't even 21 when we met and that I'm now almost 25 and we're both legitimately adults now. But what is four years? Not to quote Rent, but how do you measure that? What does four years feel like? I just wish I could visit that girl I was four Octobers ago, in the days of sad poetry-writing and late night ceiling staring, and assure her that he was coming. That, in fact, he was already there. I just never saw him.
Michael and I went to the same high school. We had some of the same friends. The aforementioned source of my October sadness was actually friends with him, in the kind of way that I might have actually seen them together once or twice. But the teenage brain doesn't know how to notice things it isn't fixated on already. He didn't see me, and I didn't see him, but we were both there. We were both there one night in February, the day my nephew Cody was born, when I went to see a different friend's band play a concert in Loganville. Heather (again with the Heather!) went with me, and we took a picture of us at that show. I stare at that picture and imagine that life is like a touch screen computer and that I can slide my finger across the screen, drag, pinch-to-zoom, and find him there in the crowd, just outside the bounds of the photo. That photo, it seems, was taken of the wrong thing. Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe it's just a reminder to me (And to anyone else who needs the reminder) that what we're looking for is always there. We find it, ironically, after we've stopped looking.
