Along Came E.

SHE found me at a time when I was still clinging to a fading dream, when I was still hanging on to something that I knew had already slipped my grasp for quite some time now—only there was still a part of me that wasn’t ready to totally let go.

All of that changed when she came along, starting with a friend request in a social networking site that led to two pivotal things: a schoolboy crush on her gorgeous pics on my part and a brief chat session that somehow connected on a level that both of us can’t still fully explain. Perhaps it’s the similarity of our circumstances. Perhaps it's just about being at the right place at the right time. Or perhaps it was something else. Whatever it was, the only thing she could say about it now was that I made sense.

I don’t know if I ever made sense at all in my entire life. What I do know is that the succeeding days were a much happier one for me as we continued to communicate online or otherwise. Before we knew it, we’re already having lenghtier chat sessions that led to countless SMS exchanges to even lenghtier phone conversations in our homes and offices that lasted for God knows how many minutes or hours.

We talked about everything, everything. The things we like and don’t like, the people in our lives from our friends and families and everyone and everything else in between. We even laughed and made fun of our own personal tragedies as well as come up with private jokes that are now too many to count. We pretty much knew each other (and yes, our surrounding cast of mostly wacky characters) fairly well even before we actually laid eyes on each other.

She was such a constant presence all day and all night long that she became a life-changing equation for me. What was looming to be a miserable yuletide season suddenly became a truly Merry Christmas. Not a day passed by when she wouldn’t put a smile on my face with all the things we were able to connect with, from our favorite things to our twisted sense of humor to everything else we could or could not make sense out of. In such a brief period, we established the kind of rapport that would otherwise take years for most people to achieve.

Having come from my own share of setbacks, there’s a part of me that naturally remained skeptical about all of it, though. What have I done to deserve this strange yet wonderful situation? What was really going on? Where was this going? What’s the catch? Could it all be just a dream? And will it end just as fast as it started?

Well, it has yet to end. Far from it. Turns out we are, yes, just getting started. To cut a long story short, we’re now taking our relationship to a higher level. What began as a pleasant distraction has developed into someone more special, something more meaningful. What we have right now is far from perfect and is certainly not without its own share of quirks, questions and challenges. But in learning so many things about her, I learned a few more things about myself as well.

E taught me not just to move on but to actually move forward. She taught me how to appreciate life the way she bravely faces it—with a grain of salt, with a mischievous wink and with a crackling laugh to boot. And more importantly, she taught me how to have faith again, in Him, in myself and yes, in her.

(Daisies are E's favorite flowers, hence the picture.)