I am pretty sure I'm the luckiest woman in the world.
In high school, I met a boy. He was a senior, I was a sophomore. We met through friends and went to different schools, so we didn't get to see each other every day, or even every week. But we talked on the phone, and we wrote letters. Yes, actual letters. I still have some of the ones Nick wrote to me, and I still have the journal in which I wrote about our first date (we went to see Star Wars, Episode 1). It was my first date EVER, because I was only 15 and my mother didn't want me driving around with boys until I was 16. But even though Nick was 18 and much older than me, she immediately liked him and he convinced her, with very little effort, to bend a few of her rules...like letting me stay out with him at a bonfire all night after the prom. The prom we went to together, him in a yellow tuxedo, complete with bow-tie, top-hat, and cane, and me in a 1970's yellow chiffon dress my dad bought me for $7 at a thrift store. I never thought I'd have a reason to wear it, but he insisted on buying it anyway, and it's a good thing. Otherwise I wouldn't have had anything to wear when Nick called and said, 3 days before the prom, "My tuxedo is yellow, do you have anything that will match"?
I will always feel lucky for the great memories of us from that year in high school; the time we went to the drive-in movie double feature, and the car battery died, the night he taught me to play pool for the first time, the time he came to my 16th birthday and we stayed up laughing and playing cards until it was light outside (he brought me yellow roses). I introduced him to my favorite author, Douglas Adams, and we spent the year reading through the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy together, along with the rest of the books in the series.
Even if that had been all it was, I would appreciate those memories. When Nick went away to college, we lost touch. We stopped writing letters and talking on the phone; Nick made college friends, and I focused on high school things. Even if we had never reconnected, I would have always thought highly of my time with Nick. But luckily, that’s not the end of the story. 5 years later, he was living in Boston and we ended up in the same place one night, again meeting through friends. We hit it off immediately (again). So much so, that within a few months we moved across the country together when he chose Colorado as his new location for graduate school (he is now in the final stretch of a PhD. in molecular biology).
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