Our love story began with a chance encounter at a high school party in 2009. Mario noticed me across the room and recognized me from middle school where we both attended. He came over to me and struck up a conversation. That night, we danced, laughed, and exchanged numbers, not knowing how many chapters were yet to come. Throughout high school, we shared mutual friends and spent time together, sometimes trying to turn our friendship into something more, only for it to fizzle out. Still, we always found our way back to each other. At my high school graduation in 2013, the first face I saw as I walked out of the stadium was Mario's--another sweet reminder that he always seemed to appear at life's milestones. As the years went on, our paths continued to cross in unexpected ways. In college, we even asked our friends about each other at the same time without knowing it, which we learned a lot later. After graduation, fate kept weaving us together, with run-ins at bars in Dallas and moments that felt almost too coincidental to ignore. One night, Mario called me out of the blue, and what was supposed to be a quick hello turned into a two-hour conversation--one of those moments that reminded us how natural it felt to be in each other's lives. Then, in the fall of 2019, everything changed. At Cowboys Red River, Mario spotted me once again--but this time, he knew he didn't want to let me go. That night marked the beginning of forever, the start of a love story that had been years in the making.