Three thousand, six hundred, and fifty-three days

2000

It was 6:15pm on the 15th July 2000 and one of my parents called me to dinner, I hung up the phone and almost skipped downstairs, thinking to myself I have a boyfriend ... I have a boyfriend.

It had been a strange conversation. I had received a rushed call from Petra telling me to call this boy who had kissed me two weeks earlier, because he wanted to ask me out. She told me his number and I memorised it instantly (565 1406 I think) and called him with shaking fingers. He didn't ask me out. I danced around the subject, he seemed happy to hear from me but He Didn't Ask Me Out. That is all I can remember, it was probably all I could hear, until finally it came about that he thought we were already going out. That his friend Brent had asked him out for me. Oh teenage romances, they are the stuff a plotline hates.
I made him ask me. It was only right. And then it was dinner time and I had no idea what had begun.

As a reticent older child I didn't tell anyone, of course, and it was two weeks before he asked me to go to his 6th form formal (prom) with him and I knew I needed a dress. And to get the dress I needed money. And to get the money I would have to tell my mother.
I remember standing in front of the heater and telling her I needed a dress, that I was going to a formal, and that it was with a boyfriend type boy.

That photo up there is a from that dance. My hair too formal, too tight, pearl studs in my ears and something akin to trepidation in my eyes. Craig looks like a baby, and the gap in his teeth was still there then. He brought me an Iris and he was so very very tall.

Still is, really.

Did you do the math? 2000 to 2010.
Today Craig and I have been Craig and I for a decade.
I had no idea all those nights ago. No idea at all.


2005



2010