September

Some stuff happened in early September and it seemed noteworthy at the time* but who am I kidding let's just jump to the 16th when I got an email from Lana saying "Mary, meet Josh. Josh is in town this weekend and you guys should hang."

I thought it was a friend date so I had no stress or fancy outfit going into dinner; I was actually wearing pants a size too big for me because over the last two months I'd started losing weight. So in walks this sharp-looking, handsome, bespectacled guy who looks way too cool for Houston and I'm like, hi, I'm Mary, and we get to talking and it's like HUH, you are also smart, and well read too, and sincere, with interesting life pursuits and you are so so easy to talk to. None of this was surprising given the mutual friend connection but it did make me sigh a little and think "my chances of finding true love would be SO MUCH BETTER in San Francisco, seriously."

After, on the phone with my friend, I asked, Lana, why am I settling? This is the type of person I want to be with. If not this person exactly then someone very very close to him. And her response was, "Really? Because he thinks you're a dreambabe."

Armed with this "he likes you oh she likes you too" knowledge we arranged to meet up the next day and spent the next twelve hours together until he had to get on a plane back to San Francisco. In parting, we agreed on three things: 1) This was really special. 2) A long distance relationship probably doesn't make sense. 3) Yeah, about #2....

So it began that over the next two weeks my cell phone was constantly running on low battery due to the calls and the texts and the tweets and the emails. As we approached the big dinner my coworkers reiterated, "No, really Mary, it's two weeks away, you're not stressed?" and I was like, we've done all we can, we're all competent professionals, it will be fine... does anyone have a charger I can borrow?

And when Josh said "there is a chance I could be back in Houston in October; is that something you would be interested in?" I said YES.


*I met Michael Ondaatje! I saw the Weepies! I went tubing in the middle of a drought! I am sorry you got eclipsed, September stuff... but not all that sorry.