Our last year of high school, I distinctly remember Blair telling me that once we graduated, that was it. It was nice being friends, but we would go our separate ways, and she would never see or talk to me again. After all, we were only friends, and nothing had ever happened between us. No reason to continue a friendship on opposite coasts. A year later, the summer after our Freshman year of college, she changed her mind when I took her to Miller Outdoor Theater to see the Houston Symphony on our first date. I had only been asking her for three years to go on a date with me, so this was not that big of a deal. Though we had a great deal of fun that summer, it could not last. She went West and I went East, all the way to France. It was then that we began writing letters back and forth to each other, agreeing to meet back up in Texas when the year was done. That time came and went, "like fireworks," as she described it, but off again she went, this time to Singapore. When she returned, I quit my job that very day, raced to pick her up in Houston and brought her back to Austin, where I was currently living, to spend the last couple weeks of summer together, at which point she agreed that maybe it was time to actually become exclusive. Half a year more of long distance went by before the true test of our endurance came, when she went to study abroad in Thailand for half a year. Though the waiting was tough, I went on the greatest adventure of my life to reunite with her, travel throughout Southeast Asia, and fly all the way around the world, before spending another unforgettable summer together. Just like we always did. It was during this summer that I asked her to marry me in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, in a true Charles Van Tassel morbidly-romantic style. From there it was only one short year until we moved into our New York City apartment together, where the two of us and our cat now live happily together.