My wife loves telling the story of how we met, I actually find it embarrassing. She spills the beans sometimes at dinner parties and I just sit there feeling my face burn up and bury my shamed expression in a glass of …whatever it is I’m drinking. So now in a sad attempt to allay future embarrassment, I’m actually going to confess the story myself in the most public forum possible – the internet.
It all started when I was getting some pictures taken at a photobooth. Melbourne city has some good booths where you can get passport photos taken and I needed one for an application of some sort. When I arrived at the booth, I had to wait for the person who was in before me to get out. When I finally got in there and took the photo, I was surprised to find two sets of photos come out of the machine, one of them a reprint of the person who’d been in before me. I looked at the photo in astonishment. She was beautiful.
I must have been overcome with emotion or hormones or something, because what I did next was utterly mad. I rushed out of the photobooth (leaving my own photos behind), swept my gaze down both sides of the street and took a stab by dashing down a random direction. By a stroke of chance or fate, I actually caught up with her. She was a bit amused at the strange guy who’d chased after her. I made some excuse about how she’d left her picture behind and I thought she’d needed it. She accepted the story, I asked her out, and the rest is history.
Now that our anniversary is coming up, I’m thinking about organising a party and getting photobooth hire. Melbourne companies actually loan photobooths for party occasion and apparently they’re a lot of fun. I hope my wife appreciates the sentiment – and I hope she doesn’t make me tell this tale again!