Ten Years

Ten years ago, I fired up my laptop, waited while Windows Vista loaded, and opened Facebook up in a tab while I checked my email to see if I had heard back from the grad school I had applied to. I had a new Facebook message! It was a slightly cryptic message from another Facebook user, someone with an obviously fake name pulled from literature, whose profile was not yet connected to my own, asking if I was the Elisabeth Sokol they thought I was, peppering their paragraph with enough clues for me to deduce that they did in fact know the real me (or at least the real High School Me from six years previous).

That was the beginning. There were fun chats and phone calls back and forth as we reconnected as friends, reminiscing and catching each other up on our lives. We had grown up dramatically since high school, and were eager to be friends as adults. With promises of mini-golf in the future, I met up for a friendly friend-group meetup of dinner (they had never had Indian food before!) and watching a cheesy movie. I didn't dress up like it was for a date, because that would be silly, but I did wear my cute new lace blouse and style my hair nicely.

After all, Liam was my ex, and one must look their best when meeting up with exes, so they can see what got away.

The chemistry was immediate, and we promptly spent almost a whole month trying to ignore it, because neither of us was in a particularly great headspace for relationships.

But sometimes something can be incredibly easy, and when you know, you know. We moved in together less than a year later. We were engaged a year after that, and married four months later. Two apartments, two houses, four moves, three cats, and two children later, here we are. It seems like the last decade has flown by (how can it have been ten years? Ten full years, with at least 365 days in each year?), but at the same time I cannot remember a time when we were not two halves of a matched set.

I'm glad we didn't work out the first time, in our teens; we were terrible in our young relationship. It was only with several serious (and terrible) relationships under our respective belts that we could recognize what it took to make a good one. So here's to you, darling. Here's to mini golf, and making cookies at 11 pm, by the romantic light of a preheating oven. Here's to hiking Mount Major, and knowing when I'm willing to share desserts.* Here's to buying a WHOLE BOX OF SPOONS from the gas station to eat a WHOLE CARTON OF ICE CREAM on the swings near our home until twilight fell and we had to go home. Here's to remembering each other's favorite flavors, and hiding love notes and presents, and knowing how to argue without fighting. Here's to the rest of our lives.

*never. I never share dessert. Get your own. Your "one bite" is negative one bite for me.