Renee and I met inside a psychiatric hospital. Surprisingly, we were both there working - Not as patients. It was 2017, and I had been working at the hospital for about a year when Renee started in the intake center. On a routine round, I walked into her work area where she was beginning her first day at her new job. The person training her introduced us, and Renee glanced up and smiled at me. That was it. I was done for. My life was forever changed. I knew in that moment I was never going to forget her smile or her icy blue eyes. Our first meeting was brief, but through luck and horrendous scheduling practices, Renee and I both ended up on night shift together. Being that she was restricted to her desk and I had run of the campus, I would bring her coffee and the occasional snack. We would talk, spend time together, and focus entirely on work, and definitely NOT watch Shameless or listen to music together. Our connection was undeniable. Eventually, I got enough courage to ask this beautiful, funny, smart woman out, and she agreed. We met for drinks at Uccello's, which turned into a quick kiss in the parking lot. This is where I'd write "and they lived happily ever after," but unfortunately, more often than not, life doesn't quite work that way. With both of us being fiercely independent people, we each insisted on having our own journey, and hesitated to let the other person be a part of it. We would go our separate ways multiple times over the next two years, but every time we did, there was something that always brought us back to each other. We both knew there was something special between us; that we had never had with anyone else, and each time we reconnected, we learned how to love each other a little better. In 2019, though, we distanced ourselves from each other entirely. And finally, the day came in 2022, where circumstances aligned so perfectly they were impossible to ignore: I was working security at a different hospital in downtown Grand Rapids, working an overtime shift I had come in for on a whim. I had just finished dealing with a particularly volatile situation in the emergency department and had gone to wash the sweat off my face in a bathroom. When I finished, I opened the door, and was face-to-face with Renee for the first time in 3 years. And in that moment, we both felt like a lifetime and no time at all had passed. Our connection reignited immediately. We met again for coffee, discussed our lives, what went wrong, what went right, the milestones we experienced, how much we had grown, life lessons we had learned, and we both realized that what we wanted the most out of the last 3 years we spent apart was to be with each other. We've been together ever since, and love each other more each day.