I'd Go the Whole Wide World Just to Find Her

I mean, I practically DID. If you think you’ve found your person, first congratulations (most of us never do). Second, do you ever think about just how low the odds are of you finding someone truly perfect for you in a world of more than eight billion people? Because I think about that all the time.

I may not have dated anybody other than Kellie as an adult, but I’ve interacted with at least thousands of unattached women across the last thirty years. None of them had anything like the emotional attraction to me that Kellie has for all this time. I have a ton of female-identifying friends, and have always felt far more comfortable around women than men due to not being a stereotypically guy-ish guy. But Kellie has always been one of a kind for me, and that means there was a potential future where she and I never met and I never found someone I fit with as well as I have with her.

As most of you know, I grew up many thousands of miles away in the Philippines. Kellie and I would literally have never found one another if not for the power of the internet to bridge the geographical distances between us all. It’s pretty mind-blowing, if you stop and think about it.

I had never visited Ohio before I came to see her. She may have gone to Kentucky at some point, but never when I was there at the same time. There were so, so many opportunities for us to never find each other.

And listen: if you feel that you don’t have just one person you’re meant for, that’s okay. If you feel that there might be several out there, or even that there are zero out there, that’s okay. I’m not the boss of you, and I don’t get to decide that for you. But for me, there’s one person, and that’s her.

Ivy needed a trip to the vet today for her allergies—it turned out that the reason her allergy medicine wasn’t helping was because she has a yeast infection and maybe a bacterial one as well. She got an antibiotic shot and also needs a specialty compounded prescription because she’s so small that there’s no oral dose little enough for her. Holding steady at 6.4 pounds! She was very good at the vet, even though she was very nervous, and so she got two Wendy’s chicken nuggets as a special reward.

One of our friends shared a really special card with me that Kellie had sent her a few years ago. She commented that Kellie was so encouraging all the time, and always saw the best in a person, which is true. It made me consider just how much I miss that encouragement now that she’s gone. When you hear it all the time, every single day, it doesn’t fade into the background. It still means a lot. But it’s normal, right? And now that I don’t have that constant encouragement from one source, I need to get it from a whole lot of friends and family who have all given me pieces of that love and support over these past seven weeks. The friend went on to say that that part of Kellie lives on in my heart and in hers, and so it’s up to all of us to keep being Kellie to other folks. Which was deeply touching to me, and made me cry for a bit. But she’s right, so please go and do that.

The single thing I feel the most gratitude for, looking over the totality of my life so far, is that I found Kellie and she found me. Even in my worst moments, I will always have that.

XOXO,

Matt