Our Next Chapter

I'll try to keep this incredibly long story as short as possible. In 2017, we had the luxury of meeting through mutual friends and after a bunch of times hanging out in groups, we eventually became close. One time in the middle of the night in March of 2018, I called Brendan because I needed a friend and didn't know who else would be awake. He immediately came to pick me up so I wasn't alone. We spent 6 hours driving aimlessly around NJ, in the Prelude no less, talking about everything and nothing (i.e- discovering our shared excess love for peanut butter, specifically eating it straight out of the jar with nothing but a spoon). Did I ever imagine back then that we would get to this point? Well, funnily enough, before Brendan & I started dating, I went to a bar with an old friend. She had looked me in the eyes and asked, "Is he who you'll be happy with? Is he right for you?" and I said back to her, "Honestly, this will sound crazy, but I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to marry this man." We weren't even officially dating at that point, so that was quite a hunch to go off of. One day, Brendan, being a young age of 20, needed someone 21+ to book a hotel for him to be able to go to Honda Day in Maryland. He asked me, I said why not. We spent the weekend together, along with a few friends. A month later, after seeing each other nearly every day since then, and a little influence from Brendan's best man, Ray, we started dating. From there it was history. I was managing the front end of a pharmacy, and he went from being a fire fighter to getting his CDL, went over the road, and I got really tired of not seeing him. The irony there was that whenever he would attend a fire call, I'd have a heart attack worrying about if he would get home safely. Little did I know that him being on the road 24/7 would feel so much worse. He said to me, "If you're so tired of not seeing me, why don't you get your CDL and we go over the road together?". So I did, and yes, we were ALL shocked. We drove over the road together, cramped up in a tractor trailer for nearly three years. Every day was a new adventure, never knowing where we would go next, what time zone we would wake up in when it was time to switch shifts, or when we would get home. We got to travel the world and see 42 out of the 50 states. It wasn't until 2023 that we decided to stop driving together, spend some time at home with our family and friends, and plan to move out. But after traveling though 84% of the USA, how were we to choose where to move? Well, logically, of course. We couldn't just pick some random state then up and move there..... right? We decided on our top five favorite states that we would love to live in, researched them, and tossed them into a randomizer wheel on google. We couldn't narrow it down any further, and yes, we know, that's an absolutely insane way to decide where to live, and yet, we didn't question the outcome. Regardless of what the wheel told us, we would be together and that's all that mattered. It landed on Maine, so we booked a vacation that same week, checked out a few rentals in different areas, applied, and got accepted. Once we got there, it took a little while to get into the groove of things. We adjusted, adopted our precious fur babies Mac and Poe, then decided it was time (finally) to get married. After a year+ of living here, we love it. We've made friends that are more like family at this point, have made memories that we'll be talking about for the rest of our lives, and are both enjoying every day we get to live here. So that's it, in a nut shell. Our story, jumbled into a bunch of words. & yet, through all the ups and all the downs, we wouldn't have it any other way. That's our story, for now at least. If you made it this far, congratulations! I promise I tried to sum it up quickly LOL. *& yes, I decided I wanted to be with this man after simply finding out we both enjoy eating peanut butter out of the jar with nothing but a spoon.