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How I Met Your Mother

First, I have one item of back story.  About six or seven years ago, I got a tattoo on my right forearm of a quartered circle.  This has been a symbol I've used since I was young, drawing it on tests in high school, and even getting a domain name that later became my email address.

A few years after even the domain name was set up, I attended the Heartland Pagan Festival, a spirituality festival held about twelve hours from my home in Pittsburgh, PA.  A friend had set up a little island of tents and was providing a meal plan for this little clique.  There was a campfire in the middle of this area, surrounded by about a dozen camp chairs in which the campers would float in and out, have conversations, and generally hang out before eventually retiring to a tent for the evening, their own or a new friend's.

One night I was sitting around the camp fire when two women, themselves from five hours away in Oklahoma City, came back to the campfire, having a loud, wonderful time.  Being new, I had stayed at the campfire and did my best to make conversation with anyone who sat down.  I noticed that one of these women had a tattoo of a quartered circle (rotated forty-five degrees from mine) on her left hand.  I tried to engage her in conversation, but her and her friend were much to busy shouting "I KNOW!" at each other and finishing their drinks to talk to the new guy.  I never did manage to get a conversation started, and the night ended with her wandering off.

The next day, we were all standing in line for the our lunch.  I was having an in depth conversation about either Doctor Who or Comic Books with a teenager in line behind me, when the same woman from the night before saw my tattoo matching hers.  "We have the same tattoo!" she shouted, clearly excited by this discovery.

"I know," I dismissively responded, "I saw it last night," I said before returning to the teenager and our burning discussion.  She was annoyed at being blown off, and that conversation ended right there.

Of course, over the course of the festival we did end up speaking more, eventually exchanging contact information for the social network of the time.  We stayed in touch, got to know each other a bit, and about two years and three festivals later, we were back at the same camp ground, except this time we'd made plans to spend a bit more time together.  We ended up spending our first night together hiding from the torrential downpour and talking about what political power and rights the undead would hold until the sun came up.  While she hadn't expected to form any sort of relationship that would last past that one festival, we had enjoyed talking so much that we did keep up with online chat and even phone calls.  When I moved to Kansas City a few months later, she decided she would move there with me.  After those few months of non-stop calls, the plan altered slightly so that she was moving in with me.  A year after that festival, I proposed at that camp ground and we were married that winter.

Five years into our marriage, we live in Pittsburgh with our three kids.  She has her own email address now, on my quartered circle domain name.  I tell people that we were obviously destined to be together, it just took us a few years to realize that the tattoo wasn't just a coincidence, but it was some sort of "sign."

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