The first time I ever saw Kayla was when she walked through the door of our EMT classroom on the first day of senior year. All I can remember was being completely speechless and thinking that she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. I actually think I remember more about her than the actual class itself that day. Even though I remember trying to focus on the orientation lecture I quite literally felt my eyes getting pulled back to look at her. I did my best to pay attention as well as not stare at her as much as possible. I thought I did pretty well until I later found out that her first thought when she saw me was “Why is that guy staring at me.”

I’ll never forget when Jack asked me out, mainly because of the situation he chose to ask me in. It was about a month or two after school had started, and I found myself in the parking lot of our technical school with John and one of our EMT instructors. I don’t even remember how we got there or why this was happening, but the EMT instructor was showing John how to (poorly) stick an IV. John was also being used as a teaching aid. Even though John had said that he was fine and that he didn’t care about needles, he was as white as a sheet the entire time and looked like he might faint. To this day, I don’t know why, but for whatever reason he decided that right then would be the perfect time to ask what I was doing that weekend. I told him that I didn’t have anything planned out and he asked if I wanted to go out on a date with him that weekend. If it wasn’t obvious, I said yes.

Jack and I have a tradition that started on our first date. We go to the Silver Lake and carve our initials as well as the year into the same tree year after year. I was under the impression we would be going to add the year 2022 onto our tree. I was a bit confused since he had actually taken me up there a few days before then (“Scouting out the hike.” in his words). We got there and he pulled out snowshoes from seemingly nowhere and strapped me in and dragged me all the way out to our tree. I was already mad at him since we usually did this in the fall, so we wouldn’t have to hike off-trail, in the middle of winter, so I really thought I was going to kill him. We got there and he gave me the knife so I could carve our date into the tree, when I finished he was on one knee. Which was impressive in snow shoes.