Believe it or not, we met in an AOL chat room back in July '96. Back then I lived in Greenville, SC and she lived in Miami, FL. My brother-in-law had been telling me for months to try out one of those free America Online trials that bombarded our mailbox. One night I decided to give it a shot. I browsed the web that night till late. The next day, I went back online but found out about the so-called chat rooms. I headed there and started BS'ing people like everyone else. Then I came across a "Latin Chat room" where I started talking to a bunch of people. One of them was Susy. We kept on chatting that day and I wrote down her screen name on a peace of paper because AOL 2.6 didn't have a buddy list or anything. The thing is that we kept on chatting every day. We would come home and run to the computer. After a while, we decided to start making appointments because AOL didn't have unlimited access yet. We would make those cyber-dates and meet online every night. One time, we even had wine together!

We kept on talking/chatting online from July to December. I lived with my sister and brother-in-law and one day my sister decided that we were moving back to Florida. I was sad to know I was going to leave the mountains behind but at the same time I was happy because I was going to be near Susy.

We moved to Fort Lauderdale on Thanksgiving's weekend 1996. I spent a week putting the house together and I finally arranged with Susy to meet her at church the next Sunday.

The day came when I was finally going to meet her. I got dressed up, got on my '82 Falling-apart Ford Escort and took off. When I was driving on the Palmetto Expressway (826) my car all of a sudden turned off in the middle of the road. I was going to die. I had blown the engine to hell. The old car finally gave up. I called my brother-in-law to go pick me up since I was stranded. An hour later, he finally arrived. We towed my car with his truck to a near by parking lot and we left it there. He asked me if I wanted to go to Susy's anyway but I said no. I didn't want her to see me for the first time with my hands all greased up and as sweaty as I was. So I went back home, extremely sad of course. By the time I got home Susy had called me there and spoken to my sister, so she knew about my little incident.

Fortunately, I knew that she went back to church around 7pm so I decided to borrow my sister's car and give it another try. When I got to church, there was nobody there yet. So I looked for a payphone and called her. She told me that she hadn't planed on going to church that night but she obviously changed her mind.

I was waiting on the dark parking lot when her car pulled in. A lady (her mom) got out of the car and asked me if I was waiting for somebody and I said yes. Then Susy got out of the car and we looked at each other for the very first time. I have to confess that it was not as thrilling as I thought. I guess that since her mom was there, that kind of blocked the mood a little. However, when we sat on that bench next to each other, it began to happen. We would just stare at each other like if we were some kind of weirdoes.

After that, we started seeing each other more and more often. I still remember the first time we held hands and don't even mention the first time we kissed. That was a major adrenaline right there!

So, time went by. We got closer and closer. We talked on the phone till vary late hours every night and spent as much time together as we could.

Since very early in our relationship, we had talked about getting married some day. Then I started talking to her about it more often because I figured I really wanted to marry her. At first she thought I was crazy since it was too early. However, there came a time when I had convinced her to marry me and she had convinced me not to marry her yet. It was quite a swap. Valentines Day 1998 came around and she was totally convinced I was going to propose to her that night. I didn't and she almost died. Time kept on passing by and on December 1998, she went on a trip to Cuba for 10 days. Before she left, I was already back in that "marriage frequency". While she was gone, I decided to get her the ring and I had planed on giving it to her for Christmas. Hey, I figured it would be a nice present, wouldn't you agree? The day after she came back, I was sitting on the sofa and she was laying down with her feet over my lap. She was complaining about her feet. She said they hurt from standing up and walking so much that day. I took her shoes and her socks off and started to give her a foot massage. There was a moment when she was complaining again about the pain on her feet and I told her that I had something that could alleviate her pain. It was then when I pulled the ring out of my pocket and put it on her toe (Ring toe?).

At first she didn't know what I was doing, then she could not believe her eyes. While she had that shine on her eyes, almost saying that she was about to cry, I popped the question "Would you marry me?" You can guess what she said right?