Score.

I have always been the sort of person that remembers the fine details of far-gone events; what shirt was worn, who ate what, or what time it happened. It isn’t just that I write those things down (I do) or even that it was a particularly significant event (it sometimes isn’t), there is just something about those fine details that make a memory all that more delicious. So it’s funny that if you asked me when the moment was that I fell in love with him, I couldn’t even begin to guess.

I’d always imagined falling in love being much like getting hit by a bus, only more romantic. It would happen and knock you on your ass, steal your breath, and there would never be a doubt that it happened at that precise moment; but it wasn’t like that for me. Sure, I was knocked onto my ass and there were countless moments that my breath somehow managed to get lost in my throat, but there was never that precise moment of knowing.

What was more of the case for me was the fact that I always knew I would fall in love with him. I don’t fancy myself a psychic; I can’t tell you when it’s going to rain (only when it is raining) and I don’t communicate on different levels of consciousness (I have a hard enough time communicating on this one). But for some reason, I always knew I would.

Months after the slightly awkward (mostly on my part) albeit breath-taking declarations of love I came across a journal entry I had scrawled down into one of my school notebooks, dated a mere three months after meeting him. I had long forgotten about this entry and a random itch to organize my room was the only reason I had stumbled across the treasure. There in the middle of the page, after paragraphs about how difficult he was, how weird he was, how painfully hilarious he was, written in my unmistakably flirty, chaotic cursive were the words, “I could see myself falling in love with him.” And so far, that is the only time I have ever correctly forecasted my love life.

As I read through the entry I smiled and laughed and by the end of the two pages of psychic scribblings my face hurt. I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember writing it but I no doubt did; I couldn’t have denied it if I had wanted to.

It caused a swarm of butterflies to take over my stomach and I felt weightless; as if just one more butterfly would have caused me to float above the ground in a majestic dance with them. What made me feel this so early on in our friendship? How on earth could I have known? And why did I feel it so strongly as to actually write it down?

There’s a part of me that likes to think all of us has a touch of psychic ability in us. I don’t really fancy it something so fantastical as actual psychic ability or magic; I see it as something more biological, more earthly. I call it instinct. Those gut feelings you have all the time for a million different reasons that we often ignore, but more often turn off. I find those far more interesting than ESP or Miss Cleo.

And my gut knew. It knew that the way I laughed with him echoed off the wall far more powerfully than any other laugh. It knew that the comfort I took in the silent moments of our conversations was as a result of those silences speaking far more amazing things than our words did. It knew that it didn’t matter how long we spent talking on the phone today that I would look forward to talking to him even more tomorrow. It just knew. And in my forgotten moment of pure and honest listening to myself I turned a “gut feeling” into an actualized thought. I could fall in love with him.

And I did.

It’s amazing the things you know without actually knowing you know it.

So while there is no precise time for me to mark in my calendar and emblazon into my memory, I have something just as memorable…

A gut that knew before everyone, without any real clues or hints, that he would have my heart, and that I would have his.