Jeffrey took these photos of us to put in a locket I had recently purchased. These are the two versions he couldn’t choose between. I like both.

We also celebrated our four years of officially dating on the 18th. Woo-hoo! Can we please get married already, already?

I had to ask Longbrake to help me figure out how long Jeff and I have been together because as I write this Jeff is trying to sleep if not sleeping already (he wouldn’t know anyway) and the polaroid that I took on our first date that has the actual date and year written on it is in my blue lunch pale in Roanoke. I do have a horribly scanned copy of it though:

It was the first really nice day of spring when we were IM’ing eachother from our respective dorms about how lovely the weather was. I think he mentioned something about kites and I told him I had never flown a kite before, and baffled, he asked if I wanted to go to the park to fly one. He picked me up and The Postal Service’s “Clark Gable” song was playing in his car. I remember that because that’s when I started to really listen to them and was kind of amazed that he listened to them too since they were still kinda new…and my favorite song on the album at the time was track #6, “Clark Gable.” Once we got to the park there was really no wind at all but somehow we got the kite going and it was flying high for a good two hours leaving us time on the ground to talk. We started to get hungry and decided to go to Ruby Tuesdays for dinner. He paid which is how I knew it was a date. I don’t remember if it was before or after dinner that we scaled the tallest building in downtown Lynchburg but we ended up roaming around and I saw him staring at a fire escape. I knew he wanted to climb it so I said “let’s do it.” We climbed, my legs were burning from the workout of climbing all those stories and then sat and watched as cars passed by from below. Now that I think of it, I think we did this before dinner because I remember him wanting to wait up there until it was darker to take some long exposure night shots which turned out really neat. I think he was just saying that he wanted to wait it out so that we could spend more time together but he really did get some lovely shots. Ironically it was about six months later on that same roof that we officially decided we were a couple when we were star gazing and he so smoothly asked “so…what are we?” Because the next day was his birthday and it’d be the first time I was to meet his family and he wasn’t sure how to introduce me to them.

And that’s pretty much the story of our first date.

[Illustration by Jeff]