Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Nine years

I moved to Chicago a little over nine  years ago with my best friend from college. Within a month of moving here, my college boyfriend dumped me. I was 22 and convinced I would be single forever.
My roommate and I lived in a family/residential neighborhood that was nice but not a lot of fun for two young girls. We usually spent our weekends younger,  hipper neighborhoods like Lakeview or Lincoln Park.
On the weekends that we were short on cash,  we would go to the neighborhood bar down the street - the drinks were cheaper and we didn't have to pay for cabs. Of course, we were less likely to meet new friends/a new boyfriend for me.
One weekend in March (9 years ago today), we decided to hang around the neighborhood. We had thought we had seen some cute new guys moving into our building that afternoon so we made a toast on a shot of Malibu that we would meet our new neighbors (we were watching a lot of Friends at the time and we were looking for our Joey & Chandler). On a whim, we also made a toast that I would meet the love of my life that night.
We sat at the bar and after a little while two guys started talking to us.  It turned out that they actually lived downstairs from us. (The cute guys we thought we saw moving in were never seen again but these guys were really funny and were always willing to lend us their laundry room key when we lost ours.)
We laughed about how we had talked about meeting our neighbors and probably would have left it at that but then two more guys walked in and started talking to us. One of the guys told me had just moved back from Florida. We started talking and then it was closing time. I wrote my number on a piece of paper and told him to call twice because I probably wouldn't answer the first time.  He called me the next day and we've been together ever since.