The Last Chapter

For quite some time now, I’ve been “single and searching”, a spare looking for a pair, a Jenny waiting on her Forrest, a Cinderella seeking her Prince Charming. I tried everything I could think of… twice. Internet- check. Speed dating- check, check. Meeting friends of friends- check, check, and check. And nothing worked.

That ‘nothing’ was working so well that I contemplated writing a book about it. It would have to be filed under Fiction because no one would really believe that all the craziness I’ve seen could actually happen to one person. If not yet on paper, the book was written in my head… with just one teeny, tiny little problem. I had absolutely no idea how it was supposed to end. I didn’t have a knight on a white horse to sweep me off my feet. I didn’t have a Prince Charming asking me to try on glass slippers. (I did have a guy asking to borrow some articles of clothing but we won’t get into that today.) I didn’t have a Happily Ever After; I didn’t know if a Happily Ever After was even possible so I couldn’t very well write a love story without knowing who and what the last chapter would be.

And so the book remained just a figment of my imagination… until recently.

And then, out of nowhere, when I least expected, in the last place on Earth I thought I’d meet someone, on a day when I’d given way less than my best effort to look cute, I crossed paths with someone I hope will walk with me a while… a very, very long while.

And in the midst of this whirlwind romance, I’ve learned that sometimes even if “when you least expect it” isn’t a specific date marked on YOUR calendar, it has always been in bright red letters in permanent ink on God’s calendar, you just have to have some patience and a little faith.

Sometimes, the reason behind “everything happens for a reason” becomes clear when you start to piece together how many twists and turns life had to take for the two of you to end up in the same parking lot on the same day at the same time.

Sometimes, “when you stop looking” really comes down to a day when you have a million other things on your mind and you stop trying and you stop thinking about trying and you just show up in your least favorite pair of jeans to the thing you didn’t really have time to show up for in the first place.

Sometimes, “Mr. Right” does have a first name and he’ll introduce himself but you have to get off your cell phone to give him a chance to walk over.

And, in time, maybe on a day when you’re sharing ice cream on a park bench, you realize that all the times you were stood up, all the times a first date didn’t lead to a second date, all the times you cried because another effort failed, all the times you ignored a red warning flag, all the times you thought the world had ended, and all the times you thought you didn’t have another ounce of try left in you… all of those times are worth it to get you to the one moment when you know you’re in the right place, with the right person, and the only thing that matters is that all the time in the world will never be enough. Sometimes you write an entire book knowing that going through every chapter is the only way to get to the last chapter, the one chapter you could never grow tired of reading.