There were dorms, 40s, police sirens, Facebook, spray painted row homes, broken high heels, discarded weaves, cheesesteaks, and perfume. There were bass lines vibrating windows, fake IDs, gun shots, slurred speeches, slurred laughter, and sticky stairs. There were 40,000 students which makes 40,000 lives going in 40,000 different directions. Intersecting, diverging, caroming, and colliding. And yet from this maelstrom of chance or fate or perhaps a combination of the two because who honestly can say how these things work—emerged Megan Sozio and Max Wasserman. Together.

They moved in to a four-room apartment set on a hill in Manayunk, Philadelphia. Max worked at a law firm and Megan worked as a waitress and then a teacher's aide. They made the transition into the world together—replete with laughter, yelling, stress, hugs, headaches, kisses, and sore feet laid across laps. They adopted a red nosed pitbull name Remy and loved an insufferable cat named Scrappy. They had their first real home together and their first real family together.

And then they moved to an apartment at the top of the hill and got a driveway and a yard. They got into graduate schools and spent nights studying and writing and falling asleep sitting up, animals in their laps, snow falling outside. They'd wake up groggy at two in the morning and move into the bedroom, collapsing into a bed by the window. A cold draft; they would huddle together. And in the morning they would wake up next to one another. They began to suspect that was all they really needed.

So on a cold February night, after a dinner celebrating five years together, Megan Sozio searched this apartment on the top of the hill for a series of clues that Max Wasserman had scattered, all leading to her anniversary gift. Small notecards folded up, placed strategically in favorite board games, dvd cases, and books. A seemingly circuitous journey with a structure that would only reveal itself upon reaching the final destination ever since it began seven years ago in a maelstrom of 40,000 other lives. A ring and five words and now these two become one.