"Well, it was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up,
they meant we were supposed to be together... and I knew it. I knew it the very
first time I touched her. It was like coming home... the only real home I'd ever
known. I was just taking her hand to help her out of a car. It was like...
magic."
- Sleepless in Seattle
Falling in love is exactly that. Falling. You don't have much control over it.
"We started out as a full circle and when we starved to be like the gods, they
punished us and struck us right down dead center in half. Since then, we spend
the rest of our lives wandering and searching the earth for our other half. When
we find our other half, the circle is complete again and we are whole."
-Plato's
Love Theory
Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery
| ...In the Beginning |
The first thing I remember about Larry was that I didn't want to give him a ride home.
Back at Bear Creek High School in Stockton, my friends would occasionally mention some guy named "Larry Lau," whom I had never met before. One day after school during the end of my sophomore year, I finally met the famous Larry Lau standing with a group of friends near where the Spanish buildings were. I think it was a pretty quick introduction, because then Melanie asked me if I could ask my Mom if she could take him home because he didn't have a ride. All I remember thinking was, "I still don't know who the heck this guy is..." and that I didn't want to take home someone I had never met before that day. I guess it was a pretty mean thing for me to think, but it all turned out well because I later found out that he wasn't such a bad guy after all. :)
When our junior year started, it turned out that we had both signed up to be in the yearbook (see picture to the left) class, since Melanie Ann had told us all about how fun it was. I think what she really meant was how fun it would be to try to set Larry and I up and get us to go out, only I didn't realize it yet. :) So the first couple of months of class consisted of me and her trying to hook each other up: she kept trying to convince me that Larry liked me and that we should be together, and I kept trying to convince her that her and Braddie should be together. I remember that we even wrote lists of each guy's qualities so that we could state our cases for why the match should be made. (It's just something that we do :) )
Melanie Ann didn't know, but eventually I was actually starting to like him through all of this. We were both about to take our test for the next belt level in our karate class, and I was pretty nervous about taking it and doubtful that I would pass (things never change I guess). Anyway, I told her that I was so sure that I wouldn't pass, that if I did really pass my test, I would start to like Larry...as if I could just start to suddenly like him just like that. Haha, I was so retarded, but I had to make up some way to show her that I was starting to like him, without giving in to all of the teasing she did about how we should be together.
Well, I passed. We started to talk more both online and on the phone and our conversations always flowed so easily and were always a lot of fun. (He could even put up with my weirdness and my brother from Mars.) I remember always going on AOL before there were buddy lists and crazily typing in "Chinoxs" into the "locate a member" box every 2 minutes that I was on. Then I would make up polls and quizzes for my friends to fill out; my friends thought I did them just for fun, but one of the main reasons was so that I could get a chance to call him and ask him for his answers.
Unfortunately, when we would talk on the phone, he would ask me for advice about how he could ask out this other girl--he kept talking about how she was hella fine (haha, remember how we used to use words like that back then) and about how he could approach her. I gave him advice to be nice, but inside I was really wishing that he liked me instead of her. I kind of gave up on liking him for awhile because I thought it was a lost cause.
Then one day Melanie Ann called me and told me about the conversation she had with him on the phone when she was trying to get information out of him. She asked him who he liked and then listed a bunch of our friends' names: "Do you like Kristina?" No. "Frances?" No. "Stephanie?" No. "Rosemarie?" Uhhh... I don't know. Haha, poor Larry isn't great at keeping his own secrets.
I guess he was scared to ask me in person, but on November 1, 1997, he first asked me out in an email that is still saved on my wonderful great super Macintosh computer. However, I told him that I wanted to wait and think about it a little bit because I wanted to make sure that I was ready to get into another relationship. He gave me about a week to think about it, and on November 6, 1997 we were talking on the phone pretty late doing our homework (we always talked on the phone while doing our homework) and he told me to hold on. I said ok, and continued to write my yearbook article, when he suddenly came back a few seconds later and said "Will you go out with me!?" super duper fast! hehe, he was nervous. It really surprised me because it came out of nowhere, but of course I said yes. It was 10:28 PM (and 14 seconds!).
A picture of the walkway where we first held hands at Bear Creek HS. (11/17/97)