We found ourselves by coincidence, working at the same place as one another for our summer jobs. Our jobs were mostly indicative of everything we wanted to be in the future. She was working as a day camp counselor and I was working as a professional golf cart driver/concessions supervisor. Thankfully, as time went on, I found a new path in life, but hers stayed more or less the same. We met that day at orientation without any clue as to who the other was or the kind of impact the other would make on us. By chance, we saw each other again. I convinced her to see the Amazing Spider-man 2 with me by tricking her into thinking that Spider-man was my favorite superhero, which is something that still plagues my conscious on a daily basis. From that day forward, we were both changed in ways that we didn't expect to change. I never knew the joy of listening to someone explain their work at a day camp with such passion. She never knew the joy of listening to someone drone on about what they had learned in college that day. We both learned what it was like to have someone to build us up, encourage us, support us, and guide us through unknown space. I would not have discovered my drive to teach without her. I like the think that she already had everything she needed without me, but maybe I was just that extra voice telling her how capable she was and how powerful she would be. We will never stop being that voice for one another.

Some day soon, I will be a high school teacher and she will be a kindergarten teacher. We will teach with the kind of warmth and care that we have been surrounded with by one another. We will raise a family with a penchant for eating ice cream, listening to stories, painting pictures, and laying on blankets beneath the stars and surrounded by any beauty with which God has graced us. We will be new people than those figures we were the first day we met. We will be new people than those in that memory under our tree in the park with a ring between them. We will be new tomorrow and we will be new a lifetime from now. But we will love each other with an old love. A love that changes but will never change.