Twenty Years Later
Yesterday I talked about how my partner Della and I met at a party 26 years ago. Today y'all get the next part!
Note: There's like a whole bit in the middle where we broke up toward the end of high school and ended up living on opposite coasts but that's waaaayy less interesting than the part where I ended up back in the Bay Area in early 2005 and she and I decided to try out being 'friends' so we're gonna start there if you don't mind.
The safeguards were in place! We weren't looking to romantically reconnect, we'd struck up a distance friendship on opposite coasts and she had been accepted to a photojournalism program in Denmark so even if I ended up back in the Bay Area, she'd only have a few months before she was moving to Europe.
Turns out we are really REALLY bad at 'just' being 'friends'.
I ended up moving back to the bay area; she had mentioned during our 'calling each other a lot long distance friendship' (see what I mean, we're so fucking bad at this) that if I was ever in the bay I should hit her up for coffee. It's not my fault that I called her from the airport when I landed, it made sense in context!! I was in Oakland which significantly closer to her place in SF than if I'd landed at SJC.
We waited a day though, just in case.
So - the next day I caught a train up to see her; she wanted to show me a cool cafe and a sushi place in north beach. Coffee was innocuous! The sushi was...have you ever been to a restaurant right at opening? The staff's in a good mood from not having to deal with assholes yet, the seats are all empty; two people show up for a meal and (She SWEARS she didn't plan this) the servers thought we were a couple and gave us a secluded table complete with candles; they dimmed the lights since it was just the two of us.
So for those keeping track, we went from Not Together to Remote Friends Who Talk All The Time to On A Candlelit Sushi Dinner Together In An Empty Restaurant
She invited me back to her place, but first - insisted we get a bottle of wine because this is how things go! We headed back to her place to hang out and watch a movie. I accidentally (I SWEAR I didn't plan this) spilled wine on my white shirt and she insisted she had to wash it off immediately so it didn't stain.
So for those still keeping track, we went from Not Together to Remote Friends Who Talk All The Time to On A Candlelit Sushi Dinner Together In An Empty Restaurant to Shirtless at her apartment half a bottle of wine in
BUT! Nothing happened that night. Not in a "haHA I'm not gonna tell you the juicy bits" way I'm serious, nothing happened. We both were mature (lol) adults who got some sleep.
The next day she called me to ask what the fuck we were doing and that's when the second half of our relationship kicked off in earnest. It felt like we were just gonna wing it and see what happened, knowing full well it couldn't be serious since she was moving to Denmark at the end of summer (an eventful thing happening in the final week of July, a common thread in our lives it turns out)
We picked back up our old lives; photo adventures, going to concerts, hiking, everything was great. Except for the looming "she's about to leave" part.
By the time her move date arrives we'd kinda completely 180'd into the deep end of "OK FUCK IT WE'RE GONNA GET MARRIED AS SOON AS YOU GET BACK, I'LL COME VISIT YOU, WE'LL DO THE LONG DISTANCE IN THE MEANTIME" and it was VERY emotionally charged. I look at it in retrospect and I'm like. Damn. You kids crazy. (Complimentary)
I drove her to the airport; we were both living in San José at this point but her flight was out of SFO, so we had the somber hourish-drive up 101 to the airport. I parked, I walked her to the terminal, we cried a lot, we said our goodbyes as she went through security...and then I spent AN HOUR trying to find the goddamn car because I forgot which motherfucking level we'd parked on and I was a despondent mess.
When I finally tracked down the car and exited the parking structure, I turned to get back on 101 south when I got a phone call from a 650 area code number I didn't recognize. I pulled over to answer, confused.
It was her. She got off the plane at the last second.
Once I confirmed she wasn't fucking with me, I raced the hell back to the airport (remembering which floor of the parking structure this time). She thought I'd have effectively been all the way home at that point given how long it'd been but thanks to my idiocy, I was less than 5 minutes away.
Now I know realistically there WASN'T slow motion running and music swelling but that's how the airport employees told us it looked as we ran to each other from across the terminal. Several airline employees laughed "Aww young love" as we were crying and hugging it out.
When she decided to get off the plane there was a bit of a problem because of this thing called "The air travel in a post-9/11 world"; luggage on the plane without a passenger as you can imagine is QUITE a no-no to the point where the captain of the goddamn plane had to come talk to her to confirm she wasn't some kind of terrorist as she cried and said she needed to go get married. (Note to terrorists I guess, crying white girls get the job done)
This meant, of course, that all of her luggage went to London without her.
She had her carry-on bag which consisted of like, her passport, wallet, camera and that was like it. Once we make sure to file the return luggage claim we decide "Let's go get married right now" and raced back to the car, high-tailing it to San Francisco city hall, rushing into the clerk's office, declaring our situation loudly that we are going to elope right the fuck here and now and the music screeches to a halt as the incredibly polite county clerk says "Ok you're all set. The next available appointment is next week though. Does August 1st work for you?"
August 1st was her 21st birthday.
So we went back to our lives for a few days. Confusion from both our families; my mom offered her a sandwich when we stopped by my house; she joked "We thought you ran off to get married or something" and we kept our fucking mouths shut because yea, we had, but we had to wait a few days lmao
I love this photo of us taken a few days later at my sister's beach birthday party where we conspicuously hadn't told anyone we were married yet lmao
On August 1st, her (wearing a $10 dress she picked up at target since ALL of her clothes were currently being inspected and repacked by airport security in England) and me (in my most formal clothes - Starbucks work outfit lol) went to San Francisco city hall with three witnesses; the wait was so long that two of them were feeding their parking meters when the Judge was ready.
He mispronounced our names, he demanded we pose for a photo with him, and on the rotunda of SF City Hall, Della and I traded bottlecap necklaces we'd made when we were 16 as 'rings', becoming legally entwined as we high fived about it, proclaiming to all in the building "oh hey we're hella married"
The rest, as they say, is history.
I don't want to undersell the romanticism of the moment but the 'oh honey don't put your life on hold for a MAN' needs to be commented on; the program in Denmark was temporary and she WAS going to be moving back eventually, but also it was an extraneous credit she didn't need to graduate. She was mainly doing it to stall graduation and get away from her family. Us getting back together and eventually getting to the 'we are going to get married after' made it feel less pressing. Us going to Denmark together is on the list someday when it's financially feasible lmao