The first time that I had met Marco was at a dinner party being hosted at the Arlington house. My highschool friends had started a weekly boardgame/potluck tradition to make sure that we were still able to make time for each other, despite our growing adult responsibilities. Our mutual friend Daniel asked if he could bring a plus one to the evening's potluck. It was our first time meeting Daniel's boyfriend, so he asked if his boyfriend could bring a friend to make the introduction less scary. I was more than happy to accommodate, especially when he showed me a picture of his handsome friend. I was charmed the whole evening. He was funny, kind, and a great strategist (which is very important in my book!). When the night came to an end, I jumped on my phone to see if he had any sort of dating profile but there wasn’t anything to be found.

It wasn’t until the following week when I was heading out to the airport for my cousin's wedding that I realized that I wasn’t seeing his profile because he was living in D.C.! I spent the whole trip messaging with him nonstop until I finally convinced him to come visit without our friend groups. We ate fried rice, watched a ghibli movie, and said our goodbyes. It quickly became another weekly tradition. But this weekly tradition slowly became more frequent, turning into a twice a week tradition. Twice a week became three times a week. When it became more than three times a week, we decided it would be easier for him to just move in. Then our weekly tradition became a daily tradition.

Clearly, I still can't get enough time with him. So proposing simply seemed like the obvious thing to do.

The day I met Mitchell, I had reluctantly agreed to tag along as a last-minute third wheel to a dinner party. My friend Reuben had been invited by his boyfriend, Daniel, to a dinner party to meet his friends. Since Reuben was nervous about meeting Daniel's friends for the first time, I was invited along so there would be a familiar face so Reuben wouldn't feel too awkward about not knowing anyone else there. And so, there I was, some random guy who wasn't really invited, with a dirty shirt one, trying not to get caught checking out the cute guy who just handed him a hard cider.

Afterward, Reuben commented that he could tell that I was checking out this cute guy who had handed me the hard cider, but I just brushed it off. I remember thinking "...what are the odds that I"ll even see this white kid from Arlington, Virginia again?" as I made my trek back to Anacostia in D.C. that night. But as luck would have it I found myself back in Virginia for a job fair later that week, and that placed me close enough geographically for that total cutie who gave me an Angry Orchard Crisp to see me listed as "nearby" on a dating app.

Very few people, if any, can get me to reply to a text as fast, or as often as I did when I was texting Mitchell after I had met him, and it never took much to get me to make the trip out to see him as much as I could.

The next thing I knew, he's on one knee, and my name is on a banner in the sky.