Making the first post is always hardest, you know, and it took me a while to figure out where to start.  What do I want people reading this to know about me, to learn, and what's going to make them care about my life, my writing, my opinions?

First off, what made people on MySpace last year interested enough in me to get me 1,600 views?  I guess it was just me being myself, but I think it's rather hard just to pick up in the middle of a story like this, throwing my posts out indiscriminately and describing things some of you may have no clue about.  It's like flipping on the television and watching a show you've never seen before that's been running for four seasons.  Which is why I've decided to start at the beginning.

We've all had milestones in our lives where it feels like, "Wow, a new era has begun."  I guess I'm lucky my milestone was recent, that way I don't have to bore you regaling my bittersweet life starting at the tender age of 2.  Yes, good thing I don't have to do that, because my milestone was Christmas of last year.  Sometimes it's hard to believe that time has flown so quickly.  It feels like I got swept up in something surreal and magical, like a perfect dream where I keep expecting to wake up but never, never do.  Christmas of last year was the day I began seeing the love of my life, Mike, someone who had drifted to the back of my mind but found his way back just in time, a miracle I'd been waiting all too long for.

The first time we dated was in middle school, and no matter how lame it may sound, we were long-distance and communicated mostly online.  Granted, because we were 14 and fought a lot because of hormones and whatnot, we ended up going our separate ways, but there was always something about him I could never forget.  I kept a Valentine's Day card he gave me on my bookshelf until a high school boyfriend got angry with me for keeping that memento when I was with him.  Likewise, it seems he never forgot me.  We'd broken each other's hearts, but when fate brought us together again, we knew what was right.  We knew that the two of us were simply meant to be.

At the time, I was in an unhappy relationship, but I've never been good with breakups.  We lived together, and I'd been sitting on the thought of breaking up with him for half a year before Mike came along and pushed the words out of my mouth.  There was a lot of drama involved in our meeting again, but it was worth the effort to move through it so that we could be happy.

We missed our first kiss on Christmas Eve (we're both very shy when it comes to things like that), and he got on a bus to go back to his family after his visit.  The moment we became a couple, we were 4 hours apart.  However, by the time the New Year rolled around, we knew we had something special.  He's in the Army and was about to go back to Germany, and I had just succeeded in getting my ex out the door.  We knew we had to take a little time to actually be together, to share some moments before he was gone, overseas and completely out of my reach.

We made up for our missed kiss on January 4th and went on to spend the rest of the week together, right up until he had to leave and I had to return to work, but we continued our romance on the internet.  We kept our web-cams on all day long, even when we weren't home, just to be connected.  Even though I was swamped with school work and he was busy preparing for his imminent deployment to Afghanistan at the beginning of April, we both made hours and hours of time for each other.  We'd talk for ages on the phone or online if I was at work.  At one point before I changed my cell phone plan, we ran up a $1600 phone bill!  It was a good thing my cell phone company is run by saints; they called before sending the bill and said they'd go ahead and switch the plan right away and forgive all the charges.

It was terrible being apart, but we made arrangements to spend some time together before he deployed.  He talked them into giving him some extra leave days, and he came home to me.  It was one of the most magical times in my life, but I guess I'll have to leave it a little veiled because anyone could be reading this!  Then immediately after that time together, I got on the plane with him to return to Germany and spend a week with him there.  The weather was awful, and I had terrible jet-lag... but I didn't care at all.  It was perfect, right up until we had such a rushed goodbye at the airport.

I sulked for days after I got home.  Things were tense, we were upset and stressed, and despite the fact that it wasn't really in our best interests financially, I hopped on the plane once more to see him off properly.  I stayed with him as long as I could, right up until they were about to leave, at which point we shared a tearful goodbye while a random drunk guy helped me get my bags into the taxi while profusely thanking Mike for protecting his freedom.

We talked on German cell phones right up until we both got on our separate planes and flew toward opposite corners of the globe, him 10 hours ahead of my miserable Alabama timezone.  It's not as terrible as we thought; he has an Afghan cell phone and can call me often.  We've pretty much been able to talk every single day since he left in one way or another.  Despite that, I've been faithfully writing to him, and when I'm not writing to him, I'm busy working on little surprises to brighten his day, like an envelope full of hearts that list all the reasons I love him so much.

He came home for R&R in August, and we had an amazing time together.  We got upgraded to the presidential suite at "our special place," the Columbus Marriott; we won $57 playing Keno in a bar with his mom and step-dad, and we ate food cooked by a former contestant on Iron Chef America.  Overall, it was magic.  The goodbye was hard, but not nearly as hard as the first time, because that goodbye just meant that the deployment was halfway over.

Now here we are, 153 days away from seeing each other.  That's about 5 months, you know, and as far as we know now, he might come home even sooner than that.  The date is really tentative, but we're counting down nonetheless.  It's nice to have that solid number there to mark off on the calendar, and it's good to know that if anything changes, it's only going to get smaller.

I feel like I've experienced so much this year, and I'm on the cusp of even greater, more noteworthy things in the year to come.  I can see all these amazing adventures right before me, and so it only makes sense to start now before my story gets away from me.  How fast this will pick up, I don't know, but all of you should know that big things are on the way. <3