Four Years in the making.

Four years ago today, to this very morning, I was stepping off a plane in a country I had never been to, about to meet a man I had never met before.    The process of moving through baggage and customs was long, and it was made even longer by the seconds I counted, the beats of my heart as it relentlessly pounded in my chest.  I was exhausted, having not slept a wink through the entire transatlantic flight, having not slept even the night before that.  Yet despite approaching 40 hours of no sleep I felt completely in the present moment, every nerve on end.

I was wearing what I’d hoped was cute. I had applied my make up in the wee hours of the morning, 30,000 feet in the air, whilst my fellow passengers continued to get the sleep I longed for.  With baggage in hand, I made my way through Heathrow airport, through the winding tunnels, following other passengers in hopes of being led out of the massive labyrinth.

In the greeting area, my eyes darted from face to face, looking for the man in the photographs.  I was still counting seconds.  There was, of course, no guarantee this person would even be here, and in which case I would’ve flown halfway around the world to a foreign country I knew nothing about and been stuck for a week.  The stress of this thought started creating a tunnel vision effect, and as I thought I might faint right there in the terminal, I saw him.

I saw Mark for the first time.

I remember everything about that day still four years later.  The way he looked, the way he smelled, the way it electrified my entire being to kiss him. As we departed the airport and headed for the subway, his hand found mine… and we still haven’t let go. Not for a minute.

We endured months apart at a time.  We lasted through awkward schedules and the occasional gaps of not even talking due to commitments.  Many nights we found ourselves in front of skype time and time again, sometimes talking and sometimes merely taking comfort in knowing the other was there.  Many nights Mark drifted off laying at the edge of his bed, sometimes mid-sentence.

We cherished the times when we could be together.  Our relationship made it through the strains and pressures of the long distance, of the uncertainty, and we married.  We found a way and together we moved mountains (and visa applications!) so we could finally know what it was like to live as a real couple.  To fall asleep in the dark next to one another and not 5000 miles apart.

I have always said and will always continue to say that I never expected to meet someone  in a video game (World of Warcraft), or on the other side of the world for that matter.  We never knew where it was going to go, and we both took a chance on a fateful conversation in a game, when I rather whimsically proposed that I could possibly come t0 visit him. Such few words, such a random and infinitely small chance that we’d have even played together, and out of that chance blossomed what we have today.

Four years on, that shy and uncertain girl who stepped off the plan at Heathrow is now his wife.  We’ve built a life of love for ourselves, and it has only continued to grow. And just when we thought we had gotten pretty good at falling in love with each other… Little Doodle came into being.  Now together we get to set out on the new task of finding out what it means to fall in love all over again, into a new kind of love with this tiny life we have created. And we get to experience all of these blessings thanks to a chance we took on someone halfway around the globe, that we met in a video game.

And we’ve never stopped holding hands.