365 Days Later

This last weekend marked my one year anniversary of graduating from college and moving to Colorado. In the grand scheme of things, maybe a year isn’t a huge milestone, but it definitely triggered something in my head that made me think wow, an entire year has already gone by, how ‘bout that?

I’ve already done the generic “year in review” post, so I won’t bother updating, besides this blog’s done that on its own, anyway. However, something did happen this weekend that is undoubtedly worth noting.

As you all are very aware, I’m dating someone (he’d be the guy I tend to reference a lot). P and I started dating a little over eight months ago and we were friends for a year before that. Because P and I worked together (in the time before we were dating) we had a rather large mutual group of friends; my younger sister A has even known him for almost as long as I have. However, P had a whole other life before we met. No, he isn’t in the witness protection program or lived some secretive life before coming back to school. But the fact of the matter is, before P and I met, it would have been very unlikely that our social circles would have crossed.

Circumstances, and life in general, being what it is, up until this last weekend I hadn’t met anybody from P’s past. Several attempts to meet up with friends had not worked (damn the weather and appendixes!), and most of his family lives several states away. Not to say I was a total stranger to the people in P’s life I hadn’t met. I had been helping plan a party to celebrate P’s completion of school with his mother, aunt and sister for several months that included emails and phone conversations; I traded emails and stories with his best friend from high school, experienced multiple cases of the whole “six degrees of separation” phenomena (but in Wyoming, it’s more like a one degree of separation) with the aforementioned best friend’s wife, played online Risk games with other friends and became addicted to everyone’s blogs (funny how that works).

So, on Friday and Saturday of last week, at P’s Not-Really-A-Graduation Party, I actually got to meet everyone. I made up for the last eight months in about 36 hours. I met P’s Mom, Aunt, Sister, best friend from high school (including his wife and their two absolutely adorable boys), two other friends from high school and a friend P met through his stepbrother. I even met his stepdad, brother-in-law, nephew, and stepsister via webcam. To top it all off, my family (my parents, former landlords, and A) were all there, so they got to meet everyone too. Looking back, it was almost a surreal experience. People whose pictures I’d seen or whose words I had read for the past eight (or more) months were suddenly tangible people. I could finally connect real faces to stories and voices to words. P’s family and friends are, without a doubt, some of both the nicest and funniest people I have never met. I don’t remember the last time I hugged so many people and laughed so hard in such a short amount of time.

As I crammed the last of my possessions into my car that weekend in May, I would have never guessed where I would be a year later. Whether or not I could have predicted this outcome, I wouldn’t change it for the world. Thanks for a great party, everyone. We’ll have to do it again sometime.