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“Is Sara coming with us?” I asked my friend as we planned to celebrate the start of 2020 with a few of our colleagues. Sara had been my classmate for a few years and lived close by, but it wasn’t until a few weeks earlier, when I saw her Nintendo Switch and SpongeBob refrigerator magnets, that I started to see her in a different light. One day, when I felt the butterflies in my stomach after she responded to a text I had sent her days ago, I recognized that this was a crush. With New Year’s Eve around the corner, there was only one person I wanted to celebrate with. If Sara wasn’t going to be there, it was going to be a boring night. But Sara came, wearing a beautiful maroon dress. Once we got to the party, I decided to “play it cool,” waiting a whole ten minutes before approaching her. My hopes grew dim, though, once she tapped into her passion for poetry, a subject that I knew little about. My last-ditch effort was to talk about the closest thing I knew something about: Hip-hop. Preparing for her to walk away, she instead wanted to learn more. We kept talking and, soon enough, midnight approached. Uncertain of how forward to be, I leaned in to give her a hug. She kissed me on the cheek, and I kissed back. Later that night, we were at my place, talking until 5 AM, as if we were in college. We didn’t start dating that night. It would take another month of having butterflies in my stomach and painstakingly waiting a whole day for her to respond to my text before she invited me over to watch a horror TV show. Ten months later, I conspicuously put a note on that same maroon dress Sara was wearing on New Year’s Eve. That night, I asked her to spend the rest of her life with me. It was worth the wait.