plantains

In mid-to-late August 2007, I was in an interesting place in my life. I was 12-years-old, going on 13 come November, and I was what one could call an emo preteen. I felt that the world was against me and like I didn’t have many friends or anyone to lean on or look to. One of my older brothers, Kaz, was away in Colorado attending the United States Air Force Academy and the other, Toby, was going into his senior year of high school. Knowing that he wouldn’t be around in a year to help me through the difficult time I was going through, he decided to bring me to youth group at a church that was not ours and not even Catholic.

I’d fought going for a few weeks, also believing that God had turned his back on me, but eventually caved. Since it was still summer, the “class” part of youth group hadn’t started yet so the activities for that night were to play soccer in the big field behind the church. This was a great way to ease me in because I didn’t know anyone and would have felt awkward in the class if I had just been thrown in.

I don’t remember much else from that night except that I had fun and I’d met a boy. That boy was Luke.

Fast forward through the next ten years and here we are, celebrating ten years of knowing each other and me putting up with him through all of that time. It is not ten years of friendship and definitely not ten years of being together. We have not even hit one year yet there.

I’m not going to go into the all of the details of those ten years because I think he and I would both agree that there were some times that we’d like to leave in the past. It’s all gotten us to where we are now though- living together in Austin, happy as clams… most of the time.

To go into the details would also be to invade the privacy of someone else and put her on blast, something I do not want to do. The past is the past and I am looking to the future.

What I can say about where we are now is that it is partially thanks to Rooster Teeth and RTX, and we are happy. We’ve both learned from our past experiences and are willing to continue learning. To paraphrase something Luke has expressed to me before, if we’d started this relationship back when we were so young, one of us probably would have messed it up by now and we’d be lacking our best friend, something that we’d already been through a few times and don’t want to do again.

To celebrate the past ten years, on Saturday, the first day we’d been together for dinner since we started working, Luke decided we’d have ribeyes, my favorite steak. Yes, steak is expensive. No, we didn’t buy it just for this. Steak is surprisingly cheap in Austin and as of yesterday, we’d gotten four meals out of the two steaks we made on Saturday night.

To accompany the steak, we also made garlic parmesan mashed potatoes, kale chips, and fried plantains. It was a good dinner and a good night watching Descendants 2 for the second time.

Below is a bit of a photo representation of how far we’ve come. We were babies. Now, we are toddlers.