our timeline

August 1998- We met & became friends quickly. I've always been able to read people, and sense a person's heart. He had a good one.

May 2005- Had our first kiss at our high school graduation party. I accidentally rolled down a hill afterwards because I was so excited. We spent the night in the back of his pickup truck in a field in the middle of Georgia. When I woke up the next morning, I had a feeling the world would look different from that moment on. It did. It does.

June 2005- He came to visit me in North Carolina before he left for Beast at West Point. We sat on my roof at night and he had electric blue hair. I fell so hard.

March 2006- Officially became "boyfriend/girlfriend" even though we had been "talking" for almost a full year, and I had accumulated a box brimming with love letters postmarked from New York. 

April 2007- We broke up. It was a Sunday afternoon and I had just returned from the gym. I was an RA at my college and was chattering on the phone to him about something that had happened in my dorm earlier that day. He stopped me and quietly said, "We need to talk." I don't really remember the next few weeks, that kind of hurt does a number on your senses, on your spatial awareness, on your whole universe.

January 2008- He & a friend came to visit me at college. I had a boyfriend at the time, so nothing emerged between us, but it was there. Oh it was always there- I just had enough dates, enough nice guys, & enough frozen margaritas to keep me laughing so I wouldn't turn around and catch it staring me in the face. 

27 December 2009- He was flying into NC to attend a friend's wedding, so I picked him up from the Greensboro airport. I was wearing my Hollister work attire- skinny dark jeans & a navy sweater that I kept tugging at nervously. I saw him come down the elevator in jeans, a white thermal shirt, and a UGA baseball cap and my heart went straight to my throat. I had not prepared for this. We ate dinner at an Applebee's and both of our hearts seemed to have forgotten the last 2 and a half years. This was not the plan.

31 December 2009- On 2 hours of sleep, I drove him halfway to Atlanta. We joked nervously in the car about me moving to Germany with him. I dropped him off at a Waffle House, expecting to never see him again. I could hardly read the text message he sent me, for all the tears blurring my eyes. "I can't even eat my eggs. All I can think of is you." 

22 January 2010- Again, he flew to NC. Again, my heart leaped to my throat, this time in the Guilford County courthouse. I was in jeans and fake pearls, he was wearing khakis and the most genuine smile I've ever seen. We had matching gold bands, and the world couldn't touch us. We were married. It was the craziest, yet most sound decision I have ever made. 

2 May 2010- I moved to Germany to be with him. He gave me a rose at the Frankfurt Airport and from that moment on, I was enamored with him and Europe. We joke that we had a two-year European honeymoon. I guess we really did.

31 December 2010- We had our "real" wedding for all of our family & friends. It was wonderful having everyone together for such a special New Year's Eve, but it didn't come close to that blustery January day when he & I stood in an empty courtroom, shaking & crying & saying yes a million times over. 

22 February 2011- He deployed to Afghanistan and I thought my eyes would never dry. I've never ached so physically for another person. But we became much stronger, both as a couple and as individuals.

14 February 2012- He came home. Still the same sweet and sincere Zack that left one year prior. I didn't take my eyes off of him for days. 

Present- Living in the middle of Missouri, trying to figure out the future, and still looking forward to forehead kisses in the morning & the sound of his truck coming home.