Seven Years Later
I met a guy on a cruise ship when I was 13. Long story short, we spent a few days talking and hanging out and I basically fell head over heels. On the last night, we never got a chance to say goodbye or exchange numbers, and I only knew his first name. It should’ve been nothing more than a forgotten childhood fling, but for some reason, I could never quite forget about him. I guess you could say he was my first love, in a naive sort of way. I went on to have a few long-term relationships but I always found myself “missing” this guy I’d met so many years ago, and I left those future relationships feeling a kind of emptiness I can’t explain. By a weird string of unlikely events that would take paragraphs to explain, I reconnected with this mystery cruise guy from my childhood 7 years later, at 20 years old.
It took a few weeks for him to confirm with his family whether his cruise had been the exact same week as mine, but we confirmed they were the same length of time, both traveled to the same places and happened around approximately the same time frame. Most significantly though, the guy I reconnected with randomly told me a very specific story about something that happened at a band concert in 6th grade, and as he told it I realized it was the EXACT same story the guy on the cruise had told me. He even told it the same way.
We were still waiting for confirmation but honestly, at this point, I was convinced this was the guy I met years ago. All the details kept lining up perfectly and things just felt right somehow. We got really close over those next few weeks, talking for hours and hours on end and just really hitting it off. Then he hears back from his sister, and he finds out his cruise was a completely different year than mine, and there’s no logical way we could’ve met before.
We’re still dating a year and a half later, though. Guess he was the one I was searching for after all.