Love at Second Sight

I had merely turned six when I stumbled into love. My mother had just picked me up from school, when she met an old friend who was also picking her own son from school.

My mother's friend had nothing particularly striking, but her son's eyes mesmerized me. The child's eyes reminded me of my aunt's aquamarine ring, and of that particular hue the sky has on bright summer days. He was kind yet fun, and had a smile that made me feel happy and jittery at the same time.

At that age you are too young to put a name to your emotions but I was totally love-struck. Can you fall in love on your way home from elementary school? Was it fate, a mere coincidence or was I just a six year old looking for prince charming?

While our mothers chatted on, I remember playing chase with this awesome boy before we parted at the intersection on St Michael's Street a few blocks away from my childhood home. The blue eyed boy and I lived ten blocks away from each other for decades. We went to the same schools. Our mothers were good friends, but we never met again, and I archived the day I met the kid with the awesome blue eyes for a very long time. Then one hot summer day in the middle of July, I see this gorgeous guy with the most incredible blue eyes at the college canteen...

I was nineteen years old back then and he was twenty. He was doing a bachelor in science, loved sports and formula one racing. I had a sort- of- steady boyfriend and was totally focused on my studies.

We clicked right away.

We would argue about soccer and music, dream about traveling and discuss what we wanted to do with the rest of our lives, but I never recognized my husband as the kid I had met years before.

My sort-of-steady boyfriend soon became history, but I still didn't date the guy I would marry in a few years time. I was terrified that if we started dating and it didn't work out, I would lose the best friend I ever had.

Then a common friend pushed my husband to ask me out nearly seventeen years ago...

That common friend is still very much part of our lives.

He has been invited to our wedding eleven years ago, and the baptism and the birthdays of our two boys. My husband and I traveled to Asia for our honey moon and then set off to discover the world together.

I didn't realize who my husband was until I was collecting his childhood pictures for our wedding video, and what's more it was then I also realized that we had bought our first house on that same street we had met when we were kids.