Co-worker/person at the gym who notices my ring/new acquaintance: "You're engaged! That's awesome! How did you guys meet?"
Zac/Me: "Oh, it's a long story..."
How Zac and I found ourselves four and a half months away from our wedding day is a story that's about 17 years long (I told you it was long).
Back in 1993, my family picked up from Eagan, MN and transplanted to Joplin, MO - a big small town in Southwest Missouri. This move meant that, at the ripe old age of eight years old, I'd be joining the third grade in my third elementary school, St. Mary's.
In thinking back, I'm a little fuzzy on how the story progresses from here (what came first, the chicken or the egg?) but all I know is that right around the same time I fell in love with a fifth grader with blonde hair in the lunch room (Zac), my mom also made friends with a lady named Sheila (Zac's mom) at the gym - good ol' Olympic Fitness Center. Apparently the ladies had more in common than just looking like sisters and eventually they got their husbands together to hang out (there's a story about a cooler here that I'm sure we'll bring up next weekend while we're all in St. Louis).
In the next two years that we lived in Joplin, John, Sheila, Brittany (Zac's sister, who's a year younger than me) and Zac became our family. Whether we banged pots and pans at midnight on New Year's Eve, carved pumpkins at Halloween, lounged at the pool for long weekend holidays or just enjoyed random evenings of watching our parents drink too many Rum Runners (sorry, Mom and Dad), we had a blast.
And the entire time, beginning with that St. Mary's lunch room longing to the day we moved to Atlanta (and the one time we went back to visit Joplin), I had the BIGGEST crush on Zac. "Oh, Kristin. You're beautiful and talented and witty and senstive and just wonderful. He must've had a crush on you, too!" you think as you read this.
WRONG. I was shy - with bangs, new glasses that were too big on my face (it was the style at the time, I swear!), stretch pants that hiked up beyond my belly button with matching turtlenecks and slip-on shoes (thanks, Mom) and my nose perpetually in a book. I've come a long way, ladies and gentleman, and the woman who fifteen years later would kiss Zac first couldn't even make eye contact with him the first time we lived in the same city. Alas, Zac never knew of my feelings (I also don't think he realized that I could talk, as I probably said three words to him in my entire life).
Fast forward 12 years, after we'd moved again (and again and again...), throughout that time I cherished when my dad would casually mention talking to John and would offer up little delicious tidbits about Zac. (After he mentioned Zac deciding on the journalism school at Mizzou for college, I suddenly was very interested in the development of my amateur school newspaper skills.) The next time I had contact with Zac was the day I dared to "friend him" on Facebook.
Finally, in my last year at SLU (Saint Louis University), I longed to move from the Midwest and shake things up a bit. Los Angeles sounded good, but I didn't know the first thing about what I'd need to do to actually move there. By this time, Zac had already lived in L.A. for two years so I messaged him on Facebook asking for his phone number and his permission to call and "pick his brain" about life in California. He obliged and we ended up talking for over an hour about life and catching up. I remember mentioning to my dad after the fact that Zac talked SO fast and relentlessly that he MUST be on some sort of drugs or something (ed note: I quickly learned that Zac needs no drugs to talk. He's VERY talented in that arena).
Right after college I found a job in St. Louis and although I didn't get a chance to move to Los Angeles, I did have the opportunity to travel a lot. Finally my travels brought me to Orange County. Oh a whim, I called Zac and told him I was down in Costa Mesa, was that close enough to L.A. to come down and visit for a drink? Costa Mesa is not close enough to pop down for a drink (it can easily be an hour+ drive with minimal traffic), but Zac told me it was and drove down to meet me.
It's nerve-wracking stuff, waiting for your childhood crush to come visit you when you're all grown up. But from the first minute I saw him and hugged him, it just felt RIGHT. I just knew that I had found It.
Right now I'm at a loss for how to explain it, because anyone who's felt it knows what I'm talking about, but if you haven't felt it there's no way I'll ever be able to articulate it in a way that will make you understand.
We're making our life together now and we get to bring our families together to REALLY become family - we get to share a history of memories (again, there are stories here of Drew peeing in Zac's bed when he was 8, Zac scaring Meghan to death with a Chuckie doll, weekends filled with swim meets and movies and Crown video and on and on...) and we have set our family up to fill the future with even more magic and memories.
Zac was It when I was 8, he was It that night he lied about how long it took to drive to Costa Mesa and he is It now (AND he's the only one whose made me brave enough to watch the movie It).
And that's that.
