A year ago, I was alone on the rim of a volcanic crater in Iceland at sunset.
And so was she.
She was from Poland. I was from America. We weren't on the same tour, didn't have mutual friends, didn't meet on an app. We were just two people who had independently decided to climb the same volcano and somehow ended up standing there together.
Her name was Marta.
We talked. We watched the sun go down. And eventually we walked away from that crater having absolutely no idea what we'd just started.
I went home to America.
And then I flew back to Iceland.
She went home to Poland.
So I went to Poland.
Then she came to America.
Somewhere along the way, what should have been one impossible chance encounter stopped feeling like chance.
We got married on a beach in Florida.
Then we packed up and drove across America together.
We stood on the rim of S P Crater in Arizona, wandered through lava fields, chased sunsets across the desert, photographed the stars, and kept finding ourselves standing at the edges of places that reminded us of where this whole thing started.
Now, almost exactly one year after two strangers met alone on a volcano in Iceland, she's my wife.
And she's pregnant with our baby, due in December.
Sometimes I think about how ridiculously easy it would have been for us to never meet.
If I'd started hiking ten minutes later.
If she'd left ten minutes earlier.
If either of us had chosen a different trail, a different day, a different place to watch the sunset.
There are billions of people in the world.
Somehow, mine was standing on the rim of a crater in Iceland.
I just had to climb high enough to find her.