I grew up in the south, mostly in South Carolina, but spent most of the first 5 years of my life in Georgia. I started kindergarten in Augusta, GA, and then we moved to Greenwood, SC where I had the second half of kindergarten. I barely remember either. After that, we moved to Ninety Six, SC where I continued grade school.
Sami and I were in the same 2nd grade class, but I don’t remember her at all from then😅. She has told me the story before about how I came in and stole her initials since I don’t have a middle name. I got to be SB, and she had to add her middle initial. I continued through part of my 4th grade year, and then I swapped to homeschooling for a while. I do not remember Sami at all at this point.
I ended up coming back to public school for the 8th grade, which is when I met Sami. I knew some kids from the pre-homeschool days, but meeting people and fitting in was kind of weird. I ended up meeting Sami and her friends and would hang out with them during lunch. At the end of the year, she wrote her number in my yearbook and told me to call her, which I eventually did.
I don’t recall when during the summer I finally called, but we ended up getting each others AOL Instant Messenger screennames and started chatting a lot. We started hanging out more during the first year of high school and decided to go on a date September 5. We went to see The Medallion, starring Jackie Chan, as our first real date at the movie theater in the mall. I remember getting cheers from one or maybe both of our parents, mainly to make us feel awkward, and then Sami’s sister running in the the theater lobby to awkwardly take a Polaroid of us. Once we got to the movie, I waited until the perfect moment to put my arm around Sami. Right when someone started repeatedly stabbing Jackie Chan’s character with a knife, which made Sami curl up and look away from the screen right into my arm. Smooth…
I don’t recall much else of the night, other than the movie being super mediocre. I’m sure we chatted again that night on AIM, and that might have been the night I asked her to by my girlfriend. If not, it was sometime around then.
We continued to date throughout most of high school, breaking up and getting back together, as high schoolers do. We both ended up applying to different colleges in Columbia, SC, and we both got into them. I broke up with Sami sometime in the first year of college. I don’t really even know why; I think I was just trying to “find myself” or something.
Turns out, I didn’t really find myself and just missed Sami a bunch over the summer. Early in second year, some mutual friends invited us to something together (maybe a concert?) and we ended up talking again. We ended up watching Requiem for a Dream together that night. That was a suggestion from the friends who invited us out. Fucking terrible date movie, I don’t know what they were thinking. I don’t recall exactly when we were officially dating again, but I remember going to a park by a river in Columbia to talk and I cried a lot.
We ended up staying together through the rest of our college years and then ended up moving to Wisconsin afterwards. That is less of How I Met Sami, and more of the rest of our lives.
