I remember thinking John was kind of cute and my roommates and I even took a trip down to Longwood College shortly after spring break to attend a fraternity beach party. Then I realized he had a girlfriend which pretty much ended any ideas I may have had for a joyful reunion. My roommate who'd ended up dating one of his fraternity brothers soon realized that her spring break romance was not going to work in the real world. We said our goodbyes to the boys from spring break and went on with our lives.
A year and a half went by before I saw John again. I randomly ran into him at a bar called Samantha's in downtown DC during Thanksgiving break - ironically I was on a date with another guy. I was on my way to the bathroom when I noticed a tall, slightly familiar looking guy walking toward me. We both looked at each other as we got closer and simultaneously said "Cancun?" I don't think either of us remembered the other's name. We talked for a few minutes, I mentioned that I was in graduate school in Richmond and he said he was coming down to Richmond in a few weeks to visit a friend and should he give me a call? Sure, I said and wrote down my number. This was in the days before cell phones and email was only used for educational and professional purposes - so a landline phone number is what I had to rely on for this destiny thing to keep rolling. Quite honestly, I never thought he'd call and I went back to my date whose name I don't even remember.
Funny thing is, he did call. However - when he left a message on my answering machine (no voicemail back then) - he failed to leave his contact information (no caller ID existed) so it was by some strange miracle that we ran into each other not once, but twice that weekend while bar hopping in tiny downtown Richmond. Both nights we hung out, had some drinks, finally exchanged phone numbers at the end of the weekend and then he went back up to Northern Virginia.
This set off a weird sporadic pattern of random phone calls (mostly initiated by me), occasional dates and large chunks of time where we did not speak to each other or see each other. Eventually we started emailing once that became a mainstream form of communication. John even helped me move twice - once locally in Richmond and then again when I moved up to Northern Virginia after graduate school. I distinctly remember the first move, a bizarre combination of John and my ex boyfriend from college carrying all my heavy furniture up three flights of stairs in a building without air conditioning in the middle of August. I didn't hear from him again for months after that.
Finally, once I was in Northern Virginia and we were in close proximity to each other, we went on another date. This was not a random date, but our first official date because everything good that happened between us started at that point. Four years had passed since we'd stayed in the same run-down hotel in Cancun. One month after our first official date we knew that something was different and told each other so on a ski trip to West Virginia. This ski trip was fraught with disaster - our car became stuck in the snow on our way to his friend's house and we wandered the back roads searching for a phone (again, no cell phones - you'd think our relationship started in the dark ages). We also lost each other on the mountain the next day as I was trying to teach John how to ski and he struggled up and down the slopes trying to find me all afternoon. Little did we know what lay ahead of us.
Sometime I wonder if things would have been different if we'd had cell phones, email, facebook. I never knew when I would see him, what he was doing, whether he'd call. When the phone rang I'd answer it blindly - there was no caller id or ringtone to signal who was calling. Once I didn't hear from him for months and I found out later that he'd been in an accident, had major surgery and had been recovering that entire time. If something like that had happened today, I would have known within minutes, hours, days via all the social media that is out there. Would we have gotten together sooner or not at all if modern technology had gotten in the way?
I was watching a show last night and one of the characters was lamenting that he'd never find "the one". His friend told him "Two things have to happen. Chemistry and timing." How true, I thought. For years John and I had no chemistry and terrible timing despite all the random run-ins we had. We really didn't have much to talk about which is probably why neither of us pursued the other. When we finally got together, something clicked - we talked like we'd known each other forever and the timing was right - we were finally in the same geographical location and knew what we were doing with our lives. We weren't meant to get together in Cancun at age 21 and 22 - we were only meant to run into each other to start the chain of events that followed.
So happy anniversary to my best friend! If this had been a movie perhaps we would never have ended up together. But this is real life and we did. Chemistry and timing were on our side.
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