Lucky.

Sometimes, the best things happen to you when you least expect it.

Last year, a couple of us got together and decided we wanted to go to the Warped Tour. None of us wanted to take a day off of work, so we decided to pile into a car and drive the seven hours to Montreal. One of the people who was going to come with us backed out and our driver filled that seat with some girl he knew. “Metalface”, he called her. Because she had piercings, you see.

I made fun of her the entire way. She laughed and smiled and covered her mouth when she was smiling or laughing too much.

The trip itself, objectively, was something of a disaster. The car was much too small for people of our size. The hotel we booked “forgot” to save a room for us, instead preferring the man who had to keep going back to the ATM for more cash and the woman who escorted him back and forth, making sure he didn’t run with her money.

We left that hotel and scrambled to find another. We did, and it wasn’t as bad as the first hotel, but it was still only marginally bigger than the car, and the driver decided to go for a shirtless run through Montreal at 4 in the morning. The five of us may have gotten eight hours of sleep between us.

We got up and lathered ourselves in sunscreen and navigated a subway system that operated in a language most of us hadn’t spoken in nearly a decade. We made it to the Warped Tour. Every Time I Die played yet another set that was better than the previous time I saw them. I felt like the world was about to end every time Whitechapel used a bass drop. Sum 41 was cool to see because they were popular when I was 13.

I made fun of the girl the entire time. She still laughed and smiled and covered her mouth.

Despite our lack of sleep and our exhaustion from standing around in the sun all day, we drove back that same night. The driver cranked the air conditioning so he wouldn’t fall asleep and talked to me about fuel efficiency. I wasn’t really listening. I kissed the girl instead.

We made it “Facebook official” a month later and a few months after that, she dropped her entire life to move away with me while I chased something of a dream. I still think that was an incredible leap of faith, but God am I ever glad she made it. How do you repay someone for that?

But that’s the thing about Erin. She would never expect me to do that. All she wants is for me to be hers. In return, I get to hang out with the coolest girl in the world, someone who loves Mortal Kombat and gets excited for video games, someone who loves Breaking Bad just as much as the X-Men cartoon, someone who’ll hop on a plane with me and go on whatever adventure I talk her into. Today is our anniversary and God help me, I know it’s presumptuous but I can’t fathom not sitting here one year from today, waiting for her to come home so we can read comic books together.

I’m so fucking lucky.