Mike and I meet in Chemistry lab. The first day he turned to me and asked if I wanted to be his partner. I couldn’t figure out how he knew my name. I figured it was due to the fact that I was a senior and in a small school like Goshen most people are at least aware of everyone else. We just happened to be standing next to each other, otherwise it would have never happened that way. I don’t think a choice of where to stand has ever affected me so much. I will always be awed by how our getting to know each other was due to freakish chance. But I guess alot of people come into our lives that way. Just not usually with me. I tend to know people through predetermined connections.
What this post is really about though is the fact that Mike and I had a number of chances to meet before this point, but we never did and I think our relationship is largely due to that fact. I wouldn’t have seen his value if I had met him any earlier.
When we were very young, ages 4-8 (me) and 2-6 (him) we went to the same fourth of July fireworks display in the same park in Syracuse. Now this park isn’t very big. A pavilion, one play set, some lawn and a very small beach. Most likely we would have been playing on the play set together. What if we had met then? What if our parents had met and become friends. It wouldn’t have been unlikely with the way my dad likes to meet new people, and there would have been plenty of connections. There was the Mennonite connections, and I think by that point my parents might have been renting our old house to Mike’s aunt, although that may have come a few years later. Regardless, if I had gotten to know him at all at that stage I’m sure I would have remembered him a little. I have a great memory for faces. I’ve been able to recognize a few old elementary classmates around town that I haven’t seen since we were 8 or 9. So I probably would have noticed him around campus when he first started at Goshen. I might have even introduced myself and asked him if he remembered me. But he would have been a freshman and I would have been dating Jesse and I just wouldn’t have seen him that way.
Or nine years later. When I was a senior in high school, I almost moved back to Goshen with my parents and I would have gone to Mike’s high school. In a school of several hundred I would have at least known who he was. But he would have been a freshman and I would have been a senior and he would have been way too young for me. And he would have always been little Mikey to me. We probably would have been in a play or musical together. That would have been fun, but he would never really grow up in my eyes.
Mike is friends with Abby’s little brother, and Abby recently came across some picture from our sophomore year of Mike hanging out at her house. What if I had been over that day? Jess was. I could very well have been too. Again with the young thing. He was only a senior in High School.
Around that time we were attending the same church. Not a large church mind you, give or take 100 people on any given Sunday so it’s kind of surprising that we never meet there. After we started dating, Mike remembered that he had noticed me there once when I went up to make an announcement. I had recently shorn my hair off and must have been wearing ambiguous clothes because at first he wasn’t quite sure of my sex. Once he determined that I was a girl, he figured I was a lesbian (My home church is openly welcoming of homosexuals so that’s not a huge leap to make, although a bit stereotypical) Talk about your first impressions.
Life is a tricky thing. Change one strand and everything could be different. Yes, Heroes got me thinking, but this has been on my mind for a while. Thank God for Chemistry.
Lady In Green 
Hi Stephanie, this is a very romantic story.
… at least chem pracs are good for something!
I do think about things like this — how two people have crossed paths several times before, until they finally meet. SERENDIPITY! Then you begin to ask yourself, was it really meant to be, or just purely coincidental.