It's all thanks to two bags of shrooms

Aaron Will be 34  tomorrow.   I met him one week after his 23rd Birthday. 

I’d like to believe that I loved Aaron on the spot. All it took was a glance in his direction from across busy 19th street to know he was the one.

The events of our meting were absurd. I had stepped outside onto my doll sized porch to get some much needed space. My apartment was occupied by more than a handful of nineteen year-old girls who had ingested two bags of shrooms. It was the last day of K.U.’s spring semester. It was their way of celebrating the fact that they had made it through their first year at college. Half of them were convinced that they were melting into my floral sofa. As they giggled loudly about the bizarre tribal patterns forming over my dully painted white walls, I thumbed through my CD collection looking for something to tune them out.

My friend Kylie had brought them over. She was crashing at my apartment until the first of June. “They just need some place mellow to hang out for the day,” she reassured me. Kylie and I had unwittingly become their babysitters.

Kylie sat down next to me on the porch.

“Sorry about them,” she offered while tilting her head in the direction of the mushroom girls.

I shrugged. “At least they are entertaining.”

We both laughed.

We sat out there together escaping the madness for a good 15 minutes before Aaron made his entrance into my life. Kylie spotted him first; she had seen his signature blonde bowl cut from across the road. She squinted her eyes and said, “That’s my friend Aaron!” She waved madly until his gaze fell on the two of us. He smiled his dimpled smile and crossed the street. He gave Kylie a hug and sat on the wooden stairs at our feet. I can still picture the tan and brown stripped shirt he wore and the blood encrusted scab that was running up his left shin from a recnt mountain biking accident.

From the second he sat on my rickety, weather-worn steps he seemed familiar. Aaron felt like home. From the moment I meet him I felt more at ease then I ever had before. He stayed over most of the day and into the early evening. By 9’oclock I asked Kylie what his story was.

“Ohhhhh, “She said in a long drawn out way “My friend Star is super into him. She has liked him for months now. He’s kind of off limits. Besides, he’s kind of crazy and weirdly smart. He’s not your type at all.”

I didn’t care. I liked him.

Maybe if Kylie had not brought over a house full of her tripped out friends, or perhaps if I had sat on my front porch as opposed to my back one, or if Kylie had not been so adamant in making it clear that I was not to date Aaron, my life would have turned out all wrong. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if the chain of events from that day were different. I wonder if my life would be drastically altered. I have a feeling that  Aaron and I still would have meet, maybe in line at the grocery store, or at a random party filling up our keg cups at the very same moment. I am certain that Aaron is the person I was supposed to be with. Despite everything, despite how different we are and all the things that we have gone through, I wouldn't change a thing. I love Aaron today just as much as the nineteen year old me did sitting on the porch of my tiny yellow apartment. I am so glad he is my husband.