I’ve decided to jump a few years ahead of myself here and tell you how Tim and I met. It’s much easier than telling you about my depression and suicidal tendencies.

Wow. It turns out this is hard to write too. Not because it’s a hard subject but because I want it to be prefect!

On a dark and stormy night, way back in August of 2002, I got lost and was running low on fuel.

Except I wasn’t really lost. I just didn’t know the name of the street I was on. I knew where it lead and I knew I was on the right track. I just need to put that in here because my Mum would read it and say “same old Boo” meaning that I could get lost in a paper bag. Which is true, but another story for another day.

I pulled in to the last petrol station before the freeway. I put my petrol in and went inside.

There I paid my $10 and the guy behind the counter asked me how I was. Well, I was ok. So I told him that. I told him that except  for the raining drive I had to get home, I was all good.

He pointed behind me to a motor bike and asked me how I thought he felt having to drive to the other side of town on his bike.

So if you’d known me all those years ago you’d probably know that I don’t like motor bikes. It might have something to do with my Dad always telling my brother and I that if we ever got a motor bike or tattoo then he would kick us out. I don’t know…but we both have tattoo’s!

So I told him just how against motor bikes I was. I didn’t count on him arguing with me though.

“Ahh, but have you ever been on a bike?” he asked. Well no. I haven’t I said. But…

“Ahhh-ha!! Then you don’t know what you’re missing out on”

Yes, but they’re so dangerous! And back and forth and back and forth…until three minutes later he’d told me to come back at that time the following week and he would take me for a ride. For a full week I didn’t think about him again.

The following week, by pure chance of course, I ended up back at his petrol station. Seriously, that things happen for a reason bull shit I keep telling you I believe so much in??? Well it was never more true of this night.

It wasn’t like I was lost or anything. Really. I knew exactly where I was and where I needed to go to get home. As I drove down that same street I hadn’t thought about for a week and all of a sudden over the hill comes that petrol station I made a split second decision to go on in and see if he’d remembered.

He had. He had a helmet for me. He had a jacket for me. Luckily I’d lost some weight so I actually fit in to that jacket!

Just before we left, I wrote my ex-boyfriend (whom I am still very good friends with) a text message saying “I’m just about to do something stupid with someone who claims his name is Tim. I don’t know him from a bar of soap. If I don’t call you tomorrow by lunch time, my car is at this petrol station and my will is in the bottom drawer”

So we jumped on the bike and set off at one am in the morning.

WOW.

I think I loved Tim before that first part of the ride was over. Obviously he couldn’t have said anything to me that would make that happen. But he could and did put his hand across mine on his tummy. He just kept it there and kept patting my hand to make sure I was ok.

I had never been better. I was loving the ride.

We stopped at the Crown Casino for a coffee. Or a coke in my case since I don’t drink coffee. It was three am by then and we sat there talking for hours and hours. It was freezing cold, yet we sat there by the river under the sporadic bursts of warm flames by the river chatting about nothing and everything all night long.

At eight am we rode back in to the petrol station and we parted ways. When I got home that morning I told my house mate that I had met the man I was going to marry. She laughed at me, but I don’t think she is laughing now.

Seven days later I went and spent the weekend with Tim. It was nearly a two hour drive between our houses so it was easier that way. I don’t think I ever really left. Three weeks later we made it official with all of my stuff (cat included) making the journey across town as well.

There are just a few silly things I’d like to put here. Because recently I had a chat with a very old school friend who was unsure if the man she is with is THE one. And there are things that happened in those first few weeks that were so different to any other relationship that I just KNEW Tim was it. I could stop looking because what I was looking for was standing right in front of me.

I think we’d been going out for about two weeks. I’d only just moved in. Tim went up to the back of the house and when he returned I gave him a hug in the hall way. I hadn’t planned on saying anything. I don’t know why it came out or where it came from. But I put my arms around his neck and I told him that he was the one. Keeping in mind that we’d only known each other for 2 weeks so Tim really should have run a mile. But he didn’t. He looked right back at me and he let me know that he felt that way too.

Then, not too long after that Tim was in the shower. I’m pretty sure that we’d just had sex for the first or second time (yes, I made him wait three or four weeks) because I was getting dried off as well. But the steam had fogged up the screen and I wrote in the steam…I love you. I wasn’t scared to say it. It didn’t feel like it was too soon and I should just wait until he said it or if I should ask my girl friends if they thought it was too soon and blah blah blah. I wanted to say it because I felt it. So I said it. And he immediately wrote it back to me.

Now, I’ve had a few serious relationships but the one that went by the way a year or two before I met Tim? If I had said anything like that to that man (who is gay by the way…hi Chris) in the first year he would have started crying because it was just all too soon!

We’ve never ever looked back. A few months later, watching a movie, one of us (and I really do forget now who it was, because it was a mutual question) took the pull ring off the coke can we were holding and asked “If I gave you this ring would you marry me?”

We got married one day before our one year anniversary. I never did get a proper engagement ring, but that pull ring is still in a safe spot.

This isn’t perfect. I will rewrite it one day.

This is Tim and I not long after we met. In the petrol station that we met in.

You probably don’t want to see the other photo’s we took with this camera