Ryan’s looking for a mention of him, well today’s entry isn’t going to feature him much at all - tough luck kid, deal with it.
This Friday is our 5th anniversary,
that’s right - Jessica has (just about) tolerated me for 5 years - some
may say brave, some may say foolish but you should all congratulate her
on this achievement!
So to get to here, what happened? You
know, way back, before multiple moves, hurricanes, derecho’s, flooding,
plane crashes & vandalism in the neighborhood, jobs we like, jobs
we hate(d), redundancy, before Ryan, before a tank masquerading as a car
its only saving grace being the best goddamn license plate ever (FACT!)
Before Nathan and all that entailed, before Jake, before Nuggy &
even before Swine Flu.... that’s right, we’ll go back to the beginning.
It was a typical grim & cold
January night, a Thursday so I had the joys of soccer training to look
forward to, an activity that while fun & social was becoming more
& more of a hardship to recover from. I had time to spare so loaded
up the PC and found a soccer site I’d recently begun surfing, on this
site you can create a profile and I happened to see 1 with a grainy
poor-res photo.... SoccerGirl was the member name... aha, a Yank, and a
woman (probably - it’s the internet after all). A quick profile browse
and all I knew was a rough age range, approx location of DC and a fan of
DC United, who I’d heard of, but only on the basis they’d won a few
things.
I moved on, only for my personal
message notifier to sound an ominous warning - You have 1 new message!..
from SoccerGirl titled “Caught you peeking!”
Ah, this site allows members to view
who’s looked at their profile... oh well, could be rude & ignore but
what the hell, we obviously have something in common and she’s clearly
got confidence & is cheeky. I can buy into that. So I reply.
PM’s go back & forward, time flies
and suddenly I realize I have to run. Well, it’s been nice, but I have
to go and so long. Maybe we’ll speak again, but probably not.
I go training, virtually die...
honest, I got trampled by a Hippo.. and come home, shower &
impulsively switch the PC back on. SoccerGirl is offline, shame, but a
quick PM to say thanks for the chat, good to know someone in USA has a
bit of an idea, hope to catch up again for more chats is quickly sent.
As I shut down the PC, I hear the message signal... Damn... it’s nearly
midnight. Oh well, load it back up. Chat more. Then realize it’s not a
small chat, it’s still midnight, just it’s midnight in DC, and that
means without having had any sleep yet, I’m due at work in 2 hours or
so. Bloody woman!
Our next chat is shared as we watch
from opposite sides of the atlantic Man City smash the scum, over time
we share more emails and drift away from the site to more direct
communication. Still separated by 3500 miles, it’s not going anywhere
is it?
18 months later Jessica told me she
was coming to London. A meet-up was arranged only for me to get food
poisoning, like a soldier I manned up and met up 48 hours after we
originally planned. The rest as they say is history.....
I have to mention my family &
friends. I guess I was probably a bit hard to cope with over the
previous 5 years or so, I know I didn’t handle the whole “marriage 1”
well, because well, when you’re 28 and divorced after 18 months,
somethings got to crack to allow steam & stress to creak out.
Perhaps that’s why people were happy for me to leave UK! - In hindsight
who I am today & where I am is all because of that, but it’s also
because I had support & understanding when I needed it. There’s too
many to mention, but if you read this, you know who you are and how
important to me you are. You enabled me to be happy and I’ll always be
indebted to you all.
Obviously the biggest shout-out goes
to Jessica, she initiated all of this, sure I stuck around for a while
hoping for her to see the blatantly clear fact we should be together to
sink in, but in reality the amount of work she put in to get me here,
the patience when I couldn’t get a job and the strength to cope with all
the baby related ills astounds me. I’m amazed at the shit sandwich
life has often thrown her way, and proud of how she stands up to it
all. Ryan is a lucky boy, and he’ll know his Dad is a lucky man.
Ironically given the midnight references, it’s almost that time again, and it seems appropriate to leave this there.
With lots of love & gratitude to my very own “Warmonger”!
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