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The law of universal gravitation says that all particles attract each other directly proportional to their mass and distance. Well, Jessie and I like to think we're both larger than life. We each carry a lot of mass, metaphorically that is. And each in our own unique way, much as Earth and Mars are so similar yet so different.  For most of our lives we existed in the same universe yet had so much distance between us our gravitational pulls never interacted strongly. During more recent years we had close flybys, a sort of gravitation slingshot that left us wondering what amazing object we had just flown past. Then, one fateful night our random paths through the universe happened on a course for near direct impact. At a proximity this close there was an immediate, unbreakable pull from our larger than life masses. We were drawn directly to one another and impacted stronger than either of us could have thought possible. We were sent careening off into space together, our combined energy sending us to corners of the universe we were unable to explore alone.

Many meetings, one meaningful Summer of 2009. I was an Orientation Leader at Northeastern and Jeffrey’s roommate was in my charge (yes - this means I am the older woman in this story). We did not interact much, but Jeffrey did Facebook friend me, so we were off to a start of sorts. 2009-2016. We continued to see each other over the next few years, whether it be around campus, at parties, or during a very memorable Halloween while I was dressed as a tiger and he as a power ranger. Well, it was apparently more memorable for Jeffrey than for me, but there are two good reasons for that. One - Jeffrey was wearing a Power ranger mask, so I could not even see him. Two - I was absolutely adorable as a tiger! Though we remember noticing one another, we never had any deep moments of interaction. Our eyes never locked and we never experienced a slow-motion scene, while the rest of the world faded away and Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" started to play in the background (acoustic, obviously). UNTIL November 2016. The real meeting of eyes and minds happens. It was Northeastern's Homecoming and we met by accident, or so I thought. In reality Jeffrey showed up to a bar because he heard I was there. But, we'll go with “accident”. Seeing each other throughout the course of seven years seems to have accumulated subconsciously because we felt like old friends instantly. We knew in that moment that something powerful was happening and within a few weeks we knew this was it - the real thing - forever. We like to believe that we were only supposed to meet when we did. We could have met any of the numerous times we were in the same room together throughout the prior seven years, but we waited to meet until it was right.