It's been a long time since 22....

(The new song from John Mayer. I may not like the guy himself, but he can sing and play the guitar mighty nicely.)
Since it's Monday, and I don't take my computer home on Mondays, I thought I'd write another chapter in the September Stories.

And since this next part is going to fast forward through most of the relationship, I thought I'd throw in some pictures for you as well.

This is us, at the sorority formal. It's shortly after my 21st birthday, which was the last installment of the stories.

We'd been dating just over 6 months, and we had another year and a half to go before we would finally come to our senses. I have been trying to figure out how to tell the next stories. They all run together just as being part of the broad story. I may tell the holiday stories, since it is coming up on the holidays, but then they're not really that special of stories. The time gets all blurry now.
Here's what we look like up close. We were a pretty damn cute couple, if I do say so myself. Let's not compare how skinny I was back then to now, k? Oh, and let's not talk about the bangs thing. That's definitely not up for discussion....

Anyways.

We continued the bliss for about 12 more months. We truly were the perfect couple. Other couples told us how much they wanted to be like us. People said they didn't know if they could take it if we broke up.

The thing was, this part of the relationship was easy. We were living in separate worlds during the week, and came together on the weekends. We talked every night, and it was easy to make him my number one priority for an hour a night. It was easy for him to do the same for me. When we did see each other, we were so happy to be together playing house, we didn't think about anybody else or anything but being with each other. We were counting down the days until we could be together forever.

College is the time in your life that you try to find out who you are, and I just spent my time trying to find out who he wanted his girlfriend to be and then being that person. He loved country music...so did I. He loved NASCAR...I did too. I actually won my fantasy nascar league that year. (I picked Tony Stewart in his rookie season...it's not like anybody could beat me...) I watched WWF wrestling, and could name all of the wrestlers when we watched it on pay-per-view.

On our weekends home together, we would talk about when we could be together forever...when we got married. We'd tentatively set the date: June 19, 1999. I was supposed to be in grad school then, but I'd decided to skip out on grad school (even if it did mean significantly limiting my career opportunities) so that I could be with him. It was all about him.

Nothing else mattered more than being with him. All my decisions revolved around him.

Even the life-changing ones I was about to make.