Maria

She doesn't know how to be in a relationship. She doesn't know how to be in love. But she will, oh god, she will. This was what she knew at the time. Even if it wasn't as deep as it could be, the love story she hemmed into every chapter is the backbone of what she'll write in the years to come. If you can scrape off the patina of old habits and the borrowed beliefs, you can see a comfortable, profound love. People who want to be in love so much, they'll navigate the entropy that makes them strangers. People who doubt and break, but never quite leave one another's lives because they fit so well. One without the other might function, but wouldn't work quite right.

She's always been a sucker for a reunion.

There will be more to this story, but I have work to do first. I wish I had the whole thing packaged up to share with you, but I wanted to at least mark this day. There's something self-loving in being able to look back at the writer I was twenty years ago and see the shape of the person I was without too much judgment. I don't remember much about writing this fic, but I remember hours with my Discman plugged into my car stereo, talking plot points with myself on the way to and from college. Evenings hunched over a notebook in my library, drafting in pencil to transcribe later. The ever-present Footloose CD and an mp3 player stuffed with Richard Marx.

I only know about this anniversary because of a kind reader. Someone left a comment on the fic a couple of weeks ago, and in the process touched off a chain of events that reminded me how much I loved writing these two idiots. It's worth repeating - thanks, @lia404. Your kindness and generosity sparked me to feel like writing again, and reintroduced me to the show and the characters at a time in my life when I have new perspectives and new questions. I lived and breathed this world for years, but somehow it feels fresh again.